ABSTRACT
The graduate curriculum is the most challenging teaching assignment for the new instructor. This sounds counterintuitive. After all, the instructor lived in the graduate environment just recently. Who better to teach other graduate students? The problem is that during the several years it takes to transform a recent college graduate into an independently functioning scholar, the pedagogy must grow increasingly nondirective. Fourth-or fifth-year graduate students do not need instruction. They need guidance from scholars who have had personal experience in completing multiple research projects, not just one project. Even students at the master’s level benefit from classrooms that let them take the lead in shaping the dialogue. This means that the skills of the new instructor are in complementary distribution, as the linguists say, to the needs of the students. The new instructor is brimming with knowledge and skills, ready to give it all to students, while the graduate students need freedom from teaching to begin their journey toward independent scholarship. It simply takes time to figure out how much to build in and how much to leave out of a graduate course, how much to say and how much to avoid saying during a discussion.
