14: Leading Graduate Seminars for Your First Time

Prior to starting your first job, how many of you were trained to lead an effective graduate seminar? Was your first experience with facilitating a graduate seminar during your first year on the tenure track? And do you remember how that went?

In this episode of the Rise with Clarity Podcast, I’ll be talking about some of the challenges with leading graduate seminars for your first time. And I want to offer you some strategies on how to avoid over-preparing and stressing out about teaching your first graduate seminars.

Find the full transcript for this episode at RisewithClarity.com/14, as well as other resources and links to other podcast episodes for women of color faculty in higher education.

Dr. Katherine Lee is a Higher Ed Coach and Career Strategist and a former tenured professor at an R1 university. She helps women of color faculty to manage the tenure track, navigate politics, and take the next steps to advance their careers. To find more resources or to work with Katherine, check out her website at: Rise with Clarity.

Transcript

Leading Graduate Seminars for Your First Time

Hi Professors!

Prior to starting your first job, how many of you were trained to lead an effective graduate seminar? Was your first experience with facilitating a graduate seminar during your first year on the tenure track? And do you remember how that went?

I wonder how commonplace it is for graduate programs to offer in-depth training and practice on leading seminars for graduate students in the humanities or the social sciences. When I was a PhD student, I was fortunate to have received a fair amount of training and guidance on how to be an effective teacher in the undergraduate classroom. 

But that training did not include learning how to be a good leader of a graduate seminar, at least when I was in my graduate program.

So, when I ended up teaching my very first graduate seminar as an Assistant Professor, it was an incredibly time-consuming experience that entailed a lot of uncertainty and over-compensation on my part. 

After several years of teaching though, it did become a lot easier and even enjoyable for me to lead graduate seminars. But this is something that came with time and a fair amount of experimentation. 

In this episode of the Rise with Clarity Podcast, I’ll be talking about some of the challenges with leading graduate seminars for your first time. And I want to offer you with some strategies for how to avoid over-preparing and stressing out about teaching your first graduate seminars.

Find the full transcript for this episode at RisewithClarity.com/14, as well as other resources and links to other podcast episodes for women of color faculty in higher education.

Now, it seems like it should be easy enough, right? It’s a lot less work than managing all of the moving parts of the large undergraduate survey course that you have to teach.

For instance, you’ve created a syllabus for a graduate seminar on a topic that is totally in your wheelhouse. You spent several hours on JSTOR looking for the most compelling and provocative articles, and you gave careful thought to the arch of the seminar over the semester. 

You’re pretty pleased with yourself for having designed a fantastic syllabus.

But after the first two or three sessions, you start to realize that leading graduate seminars is actually not as easy as it looks. What works for you in the undergraduate classroom does not translate so well in the small seminar room with the oblong table. 

You did not expect so much…silence. 

Like, a lot of it.

Over the years, I’ve come to refer to this as the moment of prayer and reflection. It’s usually prompted after a question is posed and it’s accompanied by the bowing of heads. 

When this first happened to me, I found it pretty startling. And I decided in the moment that it was somehow my fault. That I needed to clarify the phrasing of the question. Or maybe I needed to justify and contextualize the asking of the question. This led me to a lot of nervous talking that I did not really need to do.

Because sometimes, students just need to have some space to think before responding to a question. Or, other times, they just haven’t done the reading and they’re waiting for someone else to answer.

Here are some other reasons why leading your first graduate seminars can be unexpectedly challenging:

1) You haven’t really been trained in the art of facilitating a graduate seminar. Your pedagogical training is more geared towards lecturing for undergraduates, not leading discussions with graduate students. Yet, you’re expected to know how to do this when you go on the academic job market.

2) You turn to the models of graduate seminars that you took in graduate school. Some of these models may not be so helpful (like the seminar that is actually in a lecture-format) or they catered to a model that favored the loudest voices in the seminar room. 

3) Your first offering of a graduate seminar is overly ambitious in scope. And all of these readings that you assigned to make your seminar appear rigorous means that you have to spend several hours reading in preparation for your own seminar.

4) In graduate school, a lot of time is spent on critique—critiquing arguments, methodology,  schools of thought, and dismissing the significance of a scholarly contribution. When so much of the energy is directed towards finding flaws in other scholar’s ideas, sometimes critique can also be deployed in the seminar space, in the form of shutting down other student’s ideas. This can create tension in the seminar room, and navigating these dynamics in the seminar can be a challenging thing for you as a new professor.

I want to add in one more element here, especially if you are a minoritized faculty and/or woman of color professor leading your first graduate seminar:

You do not look the part of a professor and hence you do not command respect from your graduate students. This can apply to the undergraduate classroom, but it also manifests in the graduate seminar room as well. This could be in the form of challenging your authority or knowledge on certain topics or checking out in the seminar room—like being on a smartphone during the entire time.

Now there’s a lot that I can say on this point, and I may have to devote a future episode just to this topic. 

Returning back to those challenges…Looking younger or not professorial may mean you often try and overprepare and overcompensate for seminar meetings. And you go in with a defensive stance when you are challenged. This can lead to a lot of time spent on preparing for seminars or processing what happened in the seminar. This is time that you could have used for your own research.

I could go on with a few more examples, but I want to move forward and give you some strategies for making graduate seminars less time consuming and more fulfilling.

1.     Give yourself some grace. Know that it takes time to ease into your role as the instructor of a graduate seminar. And keep in mind that most everyone else who is leading their first graduate seminar is also learning along the way. 

2.     Try to shift your mindset from being the professor who’s supposed to know everything to being the facilitator of a focused discussion. In a graduate seminar, you do not have to be the sage on the stage. It’s more like you’re steering the ship. Sometimes the ship may veer off in different directions than you did not anticipate. That’s okay. But if it drifts too far away, then you can course correct accordingly. That’s your role.

3.     Think twice about assigning unreasonable amounts of reading for each seminar session. I know that some graduate seminars are considered “boot camp” type seminars within your program. While you may have to teach one of these core seminars, I would encourage you to assess what are the real takeaways with each reading and also assign students to do short summaries of different readings. I remember that there was nothing more frustrating than preparing for a seminar having done all of the readings, only to discuss one article.

4.     Consider building in pedagogical elements into your graduate seminar. I typically had students create their own graduate syllabi related to a topic in the course that they could then use in their teaching portfolio. One entire session could be devoted to the presentation of such syllabi. 

5.     Another related idea is to assign one class where 2 graduate students are expected to co-lead an entire seminar. I would meet with each team prior to each seminar and discuss some of the key takeaways from the readings and how they might facilitate the discussion. I actually found this one of the most rewarding aspects of my graduate seminars.

6.     Consider using the strategies put forth by Dr. Sabrina Strings, discussed in an article called “The Emergent Classroom: Activist Tools to Transform PhD Seminars for Women of Color (and All) Faculty.” Strings employed the Emergent Strategy framework developed by Adrienne Maree Brown in the graduate seminar room, and advocates for the creation of an emergent classroom that includes fractals (small group discussion) and community agreements. Here’s a quote from Strings: “…teaching under the framework of an emergent classroom enabled me to circumvent many of the maladaptive tendencies of the typical classroom. These tendencies include male domination, hierarchical and competitive behaviors, and a culture of shutting down and calling out.” I’ll go ahead and provide a link in the transcript at RisewithClarity.com/14.

So, I hope that some of this helps you, especially if this is the very first time you’ve had to lead a graduate seminar. And if you’d like to develop some more strategies like the ones I’ve just mentioned, I would love to work with you. I offer a 6-month Signature Program for Women of Color Faculty as well as a 90-minute strategy session. You can find all of that information at  www.risewithclarity.com.

That’s it for today. Thanks so much.