Graduate Teaching Fellowships in
Physics
- In response to requests from
graduate students for more opportunities
to acquire meaningful teaching experience, the department has
authorized the establishment of Teaching Fellowships in Physics.
These will allow the students to whom they are awarded to take part in
the teaching mission of the department, beyond the involvement as TAs.
Depending upon departmental priorities, this involvement might
include:
- Teaching a recitation section for
one of the introductory courses.
- Serving as ``Senior TA'' in one
of the introductory courses, providing a role model and mentor to new
TAs and assisting course coordinators and the lab director in managing
the TA pool.
- Teaching a course. This cannot be
a core class or one of the principal distribution classes in the
department, but might be more typically a course in a student's area of
specialization, or a class not usually offered. In this case a faculty
member will work with the student and supervise the teaching.
- Students selected for the awards
will receive temporary teaching
appointments from the Chair. Compensation from the departmental
teaching budget will be part of the arrangement, but research advisors
will typically deduct this from students' research support in
recognition that time spent on teaching is not devoted to research.
This is not a way for students to earn extra money, nor is it a
mechanism for securing support in the absence of research funds.
A small (of order 2) number of these awards will be awarded on a
competitive basis, depending on the availability of funds, to advanced
students (post-prelim) who are making good progress in their research
and who demonstrate a real interest in teaching, upon approval of
their intent to teach by their advisor.
- Students interested in a Teaching
Fellowship in the 2006-07 academic
year may apply by providing the Associate Chair for Teaching, by May 31 of
each year, a proposal
describing the type of teaching in which they are interested and which
term they would like to teach. In addition, all applications should
include a statement describing previous teaching experience and
describing the student's approach to teaching in the relevant context.
- Those interested in teaching a
course should provide a proposed
synopsis (see http://www.aas.duke.edu/reg/synopsis/view.cgi for what
this means at Duke). In addition, a note from the student's advisor
should be included (or sent directly to me) stating her or his consent
to the student's teaching, and assessment that this will not stand in
the way of satisfactorily completing degree requirements on schedule.