POENB Teaching Philosophy...
Most beginning faculty members at universities and four-year liberal arts colleges typically have little or no formal training or even experience in teaching. Nevertheless, many of these new faculty members spend 50% or more of their time and effort on formal classroom instruction, a responsibility for which they are usually inadequately prepared. Thus, there is a pressing need for a more formal approach to preparing future faculty members for the challenges of classroom teaching. Job applicants who have traditional research training combined with the teaching skills needed to be a successful faculty member are the ones most likely to succeed in securing an academic position. The Neuroscience and Behavior program will help prepare new faculty members for careers in these fields by giving post-doctoral Scholar-Educators formal training in college-level teaching, and providing them with carefully monitored teaching experience in the classroom. Each Scholar-Educator will develop and teach one course per year in an advanced undergraduate course or graduate course in his or her specialty. We anticipate that the small class size normally attendant to such a course, coupled with the Scholar-Educator’s expertise in the material, will provide the kind of comfortable, relaxed classroom atmosphere needed to facilitate mentored teaching. Moreover, such a course will provide advanced training and instruction to students in a field of behavior and neuroscience not normally available in the typical curriculum of a general biology department. The Scholar-Educator will be assigned a teaching mentor by the Education Director (see Program Administration), who will assist the Scholar-Educator in course development and oversee classroom instruction.