Teaching during a PhD is an excellent way to expand your horizons as a doctoral candidate, putting your knowledge into practice in a new environment. You’ll be given plenty of training and support, and certainly won’t have to teach anyone until you’re ready.
Most PhD teaching takes place from the second year onwards, so you’ll already have a year of doctoral experience by the time you take on extra responsibilities. These duties as a PhD student teacher will largely depend on your research specialism.
If you’re within an Arts, Humanities or Social Sciences department then you can expect to:
- Lead undergraduate seminars and tutorials, helping students to analyse and discuss the reading material for that session
- Set tasks and reading for the following week’s seminar
- Provide grades and feedback for essays, exams and other assignments
If you’re working in STEM, your teaching responsibilities are more likely to be laboratory-based, demonstrating scientific methods and techniques for undergraduate and Masters students in a supervisory role.
Whatever your specialism, it’s unlikely that you’ll be expected to give any lectures.
PhD student teachers are usually employed on a semesterly basis via fixed-term contracts. However, many universities offer graduate teaching assistantships, which are normally longer term.
Do you have to teach during a PhD?
Most universities in the UK offer opportunities for PhD students to teach, but it’s unlikely that this will form a compulsory part of your doctoral programme. Instead, teaching is viewed as a useful extracurricular activity that gives doctoral candidates an extra string to their bow.
Elsewhere in the world, it’s more likely for PhDs to include a mandatory teaching element, particularly in the USA. PhD candidates are treated as university employees in some countries (the Netherlands, for example), which usually entails some teaching responsibilities.