A spotlight on graduate programs that teach Ph.D. students how to teach

Most Ph.D.s go on to teach in some way, even if they don’t want or land teaching positions: they find jobs that require them to communicate their work to the public, for example, or to colleagues within an organization. And of course many Ph.D.s do still want, and snag, part- or full-time professorships across a variety of institution types.

Yet graduate education has historically treated this fact a kind of inconvenient truth, overlooking or flat out ignoring students’ need for pedagogical training. That’s explicit pedagogical training, not the sink-or-swim method adopted by so many programs that throw their graduate student instructors into teaching undergraduates with no real preparation.