Description of the Program

The City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center is a unique institution, providing doctoral education in a consortial structure that draws faculty from the entire 18-unit CUNY system. While The Graduate Center, which offers 30 doctoral programs, has its own administration, campus, and students, it has few labs housed on its campus; most doctoral students in the STEM disciplines carry out much of their day-to-day work at one of the CUNY senior college campuses spread throughout the New York City metropolitan area. This dispersed structure leads to a wide variety of ventures aimed at providing doctoral students with teaching skills. In response to the CIRTL request, we describe here two CUNY-wide initiatives, one that is in development and one that has been in operation for the past four years.

Teacher Preparation Website. Given the decentralized nature of CUNY, we do not have at present a single location that describes all of the teacher-preparation programs available to our doctoral students. We are now in the process of bringing together information about these various programs into a single website, entitled “Teaching for Learning (T4L) at the CUNY Graduate Center,” http://web.gc.cuny.edu/provost/t4l.htm. This website, which is currently in draft form, will provide an overview of teacher-preparation programs for doctoral students at CUNY (in all the disciplines, not just STEM disciplines), with links to additional information. The establishment of this website is a first step in facilitating the exchange of information about best practices in preparing future faculty in the STEM disciplines.

Workshops for CUNY Graduate Teaching Fellows. The one Graduate Center-based teacher-preparation program that is open to doctoral students in all disciplines focuses on students who are awarded Graduate Teaching Fellowships. Doctoral students who will be teaching throughout CUNY as Graduate Teaching Fellows are provided a one-day orientation at the beginning of their tenure and are offered workshops each semester to provide training in an area of their choice. Because of the broad range of disciplines covered by the Graduate Teaching Fellows, the orientation program is general in nature; topics covered include preparing a syllabus, teaching a diverse student body, testing and grading, cheating and plagiarism, dealing with students with disabilities, and recognizing and responding to incidences of sexual harassment. Additional workshops offered each semester vary according to student requests. In recent years, Graduate Teaching Fellows have requested workshops that prepare them to use the course-management system Blackboard.

Implementation of the Program

T4L Website. The dispersed nature of doctoral training at the CUNY Graduate Center creates unusual challenges for the collection and sharing of information about teacher preparation in different disciplines and at different campuses. We are in the beginning phase of collecting and sharing this information. We hope that there will be a “snowball” effect when the website comes online; as the doctoral programs see what others are doing and publicizing, they will want to share their accomplishments and perhaps develop teacher-preparation programs if they do not already have them. As part of our website, we will establish a link with the site established by the CIRTL project, to expand and enrich existing teacher preparation programs and spur the initiation of professional development programs that will utilize the “teaching as research” model. The resources needed to develop this website should not be large, but obtaining the information from the various participants may provide a challenge.

GTF Preparation. The resources required for the existing training program for Graduate Teaching Fellows are also not large; at present, faculty have volunteered their time as participants in the workshops, so that the primary cost has been for refreshments. Expanding these workshops to make them available to all graduate students, however, might be costly.