<p>How is the teaching approach different from that of a liberal arts college and a university?</p>
<p>Does universities teach the subject itself and liberal arts colleges teach the subject in a different way?</p>
<p>No. 10 char.</p>
<p>sorry?</p>
<p>My daughter believes there is a difference in how a LAC college teaches many classes. She was surprised by this discovery. She feels that in a LAC they truly discuss how diverse classes interrelate with each other. It’s something she heard on tours but “poo-pooed” it, but by the end of her second term Freshman year, she was amazed at how they did that. Sorry, I can’t be more clear than that. </p>
<p>thank you amtc 
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<p>It really depends on the school, the program, and the professor. The worst-case scenario is the lecture with 500 students understaffed by teaching assistants who don’t speak good English, and where the professor pretty much reads the textbook for 50 minutes. Yeah, you’ll only find that at a university. But most university classes aren’t like that.</p>
<p>The best-case scenario is a small class that emphasizes discussion. You’ll find more of those at LACs. But many universities also have classes like that, especially if you enroll in their honors program.</p>
<p>You may also find lecture classes taught at a LAC where a brilliant professor goes beyond the textbook and is keeps you so entranced with the subject that you forget you’re learning. And really, you can find professors like this at any school, big or small.</p>
<p>Sure, there are trends, but trends don’t tell the whole story. You really need to investigate your possible schools and programs carefully to get a complete answer to the question.</p>
<p>Parents and students need to understand that at least half the professors at a college are expected to do four things as part of their professional responsibilities and to do most of them well: teaching, publishing, professional development, and service to their department, college, division, university, and community. At the most prestigious universities AND LACs, all of these are very important. As you move away from the most prestigious, the demands on publishing gradually decrease and the expectations about one’s teaching and professional development gradually increase. Universities can be more tolerant of a weaker teacher if the publications remain strong because, after all, they have a lot of strong teachers. LACs tend to demand strong teaching no matter what because they have so few teachers in many departments. Another consideration, at the most prestigious institutions, professors teach fewer courses because publishing is so important: at a university of this caliber, perhaps 1+1, 2+1, or 2+2 at the most, with relief in the latter cases for teaching a graduate course. The quality of the teaching must still be very high. At the most prestigious LACs, faculty might teach 2+1, 2+2, 2+3, and quite often 3+3. So the teaching load is heavier at the LACs than the universities, generally speaking. Class size can vary widely from course to course, semester to semester, so I haven’t considered that here. As you go further down the food chain of prestige, the course loads and students/class increase. Hence, at universities you have higher faculty-student ratios than you do at LACs. A third consideration, at universities there are graduate students and they need to learn how to teach. Classes might be arranged so that a (younger) professor has 1-3 courses with 50-500 students each year, say, but she has 2 grad students aides for every 50 students, say. So she writes and delivers lectures of 3 hours each week and then mentors and monitors her grad students to make sure they’re delivering high quality instruction to her many students. The grad students break the class up into groups of 25, let’s say, and engage the students in discussion and reiteration of the material or key components of the material delivered in the lecture. Together with the grad students, the professor will grade student work so that the grad students can learn to grade and so that she retains control of student assessment. It’s a hefty amount of work to do this right and well. At a uni, you get a wider variety of instruction and instruction quality, but grad students can be some of the best teachers your child will have–but they will never know as much as the professor about the subject. That’s why the professor delivers the subject. </p>
<p>One of the harder concepts for college students to get is that the professors think that what you learn in an anthropology course can be relevant, and should be applied in, all your other courses. They see the interconnectedness of knowledge and they want the students to enrich their educations by bringing ideas from evolutionary biology not just into psychology courses but into humanities courses. The students who do this connecting of subject matter from different fields get A’s if they do it even half well. The rest of the students go on thinking all knowledge is discrete. Heck, it’s even hard to get English majors to see that what they learn in English 101 is important to what they’re learning in a course on superheroes in graphic novels and oral epics. I don’t know, OP, if it makes a bit of difference whether you’re at an LAC or a uni if you want help in overcoming this limitation in one’s learning. I think overcoming this limitation needs to start long before college, and it is something at which prep schools that are worth their salt excel.</p>
<p>These are generalizations, of course, and there are as many exceptions as there are courses in the U.S. </p>
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<p>Hmmm, that seems odd. In many cases, it is obvious that what you learn in one course has relevance or application in another course. For example, what you learn in a math course can be used in physics, economics, statistics, or engineering courses (and, of course, other math courses). What you learn in an English composition course can be used in any course where you have to write something. Even in courses where there are no formal prerequisite relationships, the techniques of research and analysis in one course may be relevant and applicable to another course.</p>
<p>At LACs teaching is likely to be rewarded more for faculty, while at big research universities, teaching is considered important but not as important as doing research.</p>
<p>At LACs, classes are likely to be small and discussion oriented. At many, the professor not only knows you by name, but will call you if you miss class. At a research university, at least for the first couple of years, it’s likely to be large lectures (100-500 people) combined with smaller discussion sections (20 people) taught by a graduate assistant. For these, the primary prof could well be a worldclass researcher.</p>
<p>When I worked at a large Ivy research university, the rumor was that the worst thing a professor could do was winning a teaching award. Anecdotally, in the years I was there, anyone who had been recognized as a good teacher didn’t get tenure.</p>
<p>In my experience, ucb, what I said is the case. You are speaking very generally here, and are of course correct that english composition should be applicable to any writing you do, just as students bring what they (mis)learned in high school composition into their english composition course. But if I ask several students what they read in their Spanish lit class to apply some concept from Spanish lit to American they are too often lost. “But that was Spanish literature,” they say. If I ask them to compare something they’ve read of, say the picaro of Quevedo, to Ichabod Crane of Washington Irving, they’re at a loss as to what to say. Well, what are the qualities of the Spanish picaro I ask and to what extent does Ichabod Crane present those same qualities? Quite honestly, until you point it out to them they are not prepared to see it themselves. It’s shocking how poorly prepared these young people are as readers and thinkers. One sees it all the time in their posts, but I digress.</p>
<p>If you think I’m mistaken or exaggerating, ask students sometime to compare gesture in Shakespeare with gesture in Italian Renaissance painting, presuming of course that you’ve trained them to read gesture in one or the other. Too specific for you, ask the junior psych students then to apply Freud’s concept of the psyche to a house, any house or many kinds of houses. If your students can speak of the architecture of the house as if it were a psyche and learn to think of the psyche as something with an architecture like a house’s, I will be surprised or I will say those are better than average American students (I’m not overly impressed with the internationals but don’t know the undergrads as well).</p>
<p>Hmmm, I guess there is a difference between what should be obvious, and what actually is obvious to many college students. 
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<p>It’s weird, ucb. I was told u/g was about making connections between the disparate and graduate was about seeing the differences. Since that was my experience, I thought it was everyone else’s, too, but apparently not. As I said, the prep school students seem to get the connective more easily/are better prepared for it. I’ve also been wondering about cognitive maturity and its later arrival in this generation, but I haven’t been able to do anything with these ponderings.</p>
<p>Not surprising that students from academic prep schools (or presumably academic public magnets) do better on average, since there is likely both a selection effect (the more motivated students and parents go for such schools) and a treatment effect (able to have a more rigorous curriculum with fewer distractions from unmotivated students), though certainly there are some good students in the regular public schools.</p>
<p>having come from a prep school, I agree. someone took an interest in enough of my classes to make sure I and my interested classmates could do this. I’m sure there were boneheads at the prep school who avoided learning this or who were not yet cognitively prepared to learn it. But I also probably learned it on my mother’s knee as my son and daughter learned it during their bedtime stories, albeit in a less cognitively demanding way: how is Hamlet’s anger at his mother forced upon his girlfriend and why? All kids know you’re not allowed to get mad at your mom. She’s your mom, right?</p>
<p>I went to a regular public school which, at the time, sent about a third of graduates to four year universities (mostly state universities, most of which were not particularly selective at the time), plus a bunch more to the local community college. The difference in student populations in courses with mainly college-prep students (mainly core academic subjects that were not specifically required for high school graduation, like math beyond geometry, any foreign language course, or any honors course), and the all-students required-for-graduation courses (e.g. regular US history, 9th grade English, non-honors algebra 1 and geometry, civics, health) and electives of various types (e.g. non-core social studies courses, shop, drafting, etc.) was considerable, as it was obvious that there was a significant student population who just wanted to do the minimum amount of passing work to get the diploma. Of course, they might have been in for a shock at the expectations even at the local community college if they decided to attend.</p>
<p>Pretty sure that the student populations at the academic private schools did not have much of the latter, although there were certainly other kinds of private schools where academics were not the main point of the school (e.g. many of those focused on religion, although some of the Catholic schools were also academically focused).</p>
<p>But then I still consider it obvious that what you learn in one course or subject can be applicable to another, although one has to be careful of overdoing it (that saying about how when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail), and I would hope that at least some of those in the same college-prep courses would also make that connection.</p>
<p>Just a lot more of the public school kids in colleges now, pushed out of high school before they have been prepared for college. Everyone needs a college degree in a service economy, right? How hard can it be?</p>