A VERTICAL MODEL FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF TEACHING SKILLS

Because the undergraduates of today will be the graduate students and faculty of tomorrow, the quality of any department’s teaching programs will be enhanced if every department were to apply teaching improvement programs at all levels of the organization, including faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. Examples include monthly teaching seminars for faculty, institution of inter-faculty programs for mentoring and peer observation of teaching skills, especially for younger faculty, required courses on teaching skill and teaching experience requirements for graduate students, training of graduate students as mentors for undergraduates, and the use of those mentoring skills to to help undergraduates develop their own classroom presentation skills. I will provide details of these and other programs associated with my efforts to develop this vertical teaching model in the psychology department of a major university in the UK.

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