The Professional Development of Graduate Teaching Assistants

The Professional Development of Graduate Teaching Assistants
Author: Michele Marincovich
Publisher: Anker Publishing Company, Incorporated
Total Pages: 344
Release: 1998
Genre: Education
ISBN:

This comprehensive TA training handbook is an essential resource for those who prepare graduate TAs for their responsibilities in the classroom and for their overall professional development. Written by experts in the field of TA development, this book provides a clear framework for implementing and assessing an effective program.

Teach Students How to Learn

Teach Students How to Learn
Author: Saundra Yancy McGuire
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2023-07-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 100097815X

Co-published with and Miriam, a freshman Calculus student at Louisiana State University, made 37.5% on her first exam but 83% and 93% on the next two. Matt, a first year General Chemistry student at the University of Utah, scored 65% and 55% on his first two exams and 95% on his third—These are representative of thousands of students who decisively improved their grades by acting on the advice described in this book.What is preventing your students from performing according to expectations? Saundra McGuire offers a simple but profound answer: If you teach students how to learn and give them simple, straightforward strategies to use, they can significantly increase their learning and performance. For over a decade Saundra McGuire has been acclaimed for her presentations and workshops on metacognition and student learning because the tools and strategies she shares have enabled faculty to facilitate dramatic improvements in student learning and success. This book encapsulates the model and ideas she has developed in the past fifteen years, ideas that are being adopted by an increasing number of faculty with considerable effect.The methods she proposes do not require restructuring courses or an inordinate amount of time to teach. They can often be accomplished in a single session, transforming students from memorizers and regurgitators to students who begin to think critically and take responsibility for their own learning. Saundra McGuire takes the reader sequentially through the ideas and strategies that students need to understand and implement. First, she demonstrates how introducing students to metacognition and Bloom’s Taxonomy reveals to them the importance of understanding how they learn and provides the lens through which they can view learning activities and measure their intellectual growth. Next, she presents a specific study system that can quickly empower students to maximize their learning. Then, she addresses the importance of dealing with emotion, attitudes, and motivation by suggesting ways to change students’ mindsets about ability and by providing a range of strategies to boost motivation and learning; finally, she offers guidance to faculty on partnering with campus learning centers.She pays particular attention to academically unprepared students, noting that the strategies she offers for this particular population are equally beneficial for all students. While stressing that there are many ways to teach effectively, and that readers can be flexible in picking and choosing among the strategies she presents, Saundra McGuire offers the reader a step-by-step process for delivering the key messages of the book to students in as little as 50 minutes. Free online supplements provide three slide sets and a sample video lecture.This book is written primarily for faculty but will be equally useful for TAs, tutors, and learning center professionals. For readers with no background in education or cognitive psychology, the book avoids jargon and esoteric theory.

Strategies for Teaching Assistant and International Teaching Assistant Development

Strategies for Teaching Assistant and International Teaching Assistant Development
Author: Catherine Ross
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2007-10-12
Genre: Education
ISBN: 047018082X

Written for anyone who works with graduate students to support their teaching efforts in American research universities, this book draws on the extensive experience of professional educators who represent a variety of programs throughout the United States. They understand the common constraints of many TA development classes, workshops, and programs, as well as the need for motivating and sophisticated techniques that are, at the same time, practical and focused. Their contributions to this book have proven to be effective in developing the sophisticated communication skills required by TAs across the disciplines.

First Day to Final Grade

First Day to Final Grade
Author: Anne Curzan
Publisher: University of Michigan Press ELT
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2011
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0472034510

The third edition of First Day to Final Grade: A Graduate Student’s Guide to Teaching is designed to help new graduate student teaching assistants navigate the challenges of teaching undergraduates. Both a quick reference tool and a fluid read, the book focuses on the “how tos” of teaching, such as setting up a lesson plan, running a discussion, and grading, as well as issues specific to the teaching assistant’s unique role as both student and teacher. This new edition incorporates newer teaching and learning pedagogy. The book has been updated to reflect the role of technology both inside and outside the classroom. In addition, a new chapter has been added that discusses successfully transitioning from being a teaching assistant to being hired as a full-time instructor.

The Effective Teaching Assistant

The Effective Teaching Assistant
Author: Abigail Gray
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2020-12-29
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000316475

Aimed at teaching assistants who work closely with children with special educational needs, The Effective Teaching Assistant: A Practical Guide to Supporting Achievement for Pupils with SEND is a practical and accessible resource tailored precisely for teaching assistants’ specific needs, which explores both the opportunities and limitations presented by their role. Each chapter provides both training activities and teaching resources designed to assist TAs/HLTAs in reflecting on their own experience while enhancing current practice. The chapters address key topics including SEND and inclusive teaching Multi-sensory teaching Supporting differentiation or adaptive teaching. Supplemented with checklists and useful diagrams, this text is essential reading for teaching assistants, students and practitioners. It is particularly relevant for students working in undergraduate, post graduate and professional development programmes.

Preparing for College and University Teaching

Preparing for College and University Teaching
Author: Joanna Gilmore
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2023-07-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000981622

This book is a guide for designing professional development programs for graduate students. The teaching competencies framework presented here can serve as the intended curriculum for such programs. The book will also be an excellent resource for evaluating programs, and will be an excellent resource for academics who study graduate students.This book presents the work of the Graduate Teaching Competencies Consortium to identify, organize, and clarify the competencies that graduate students need to teach effectively when they join the professoriate. To achieve this goal, the Consortium developed a framework of 10 teaching competencies organized around three overarching questions:• What do graduate students need to achieve by the end of their graduate education to be successful teacher-scholars?• What do graduate students need to understand about higher education to have successful careers as educators?• What do graduate students need to do to be successful teachers during their graduate student careers?Although much work has been done to identify the competencies of effective teachers in higher education, only a small portion of this work has been conducted with graduate student instructors. This is an important area of research given that graduate students are critical in the higher education academic pipeline. Nationally, graduate students teach between 25% and 50% of courses offered at the undergraduate level. Graduate student teaching is also critical because during early teaching experiences teachers establish a teaching style and set of teaching skills, which will endure as graduate students enter the professoriate.It is important to develop a teaching competency framework that is specific to graduate student instructors as they often have unique needs and roles as teachers. For example, graduate student instructors are in the unique position of becoming experts in their field concurrent with learning to teach. Moreover, as many professional development programs for graduate student instructors evolve based upon factors such as available resources and perceived needs of graduate students, this framework will be a useful aid for thoughtfully designing strategic, evidence-based, comprehensive professional development opportunities and programs.

How Graduate Teaching Assistants Developed Their Understandings of Various Teaching Practices as They Engaged with Professional Development

How Graduate Teaching Assistants Developed Their Understandings of Various Teaching Practices as They Engaged with Professional Development
Author: Hayley Miles-Leighton Milbourne
Publisher:
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2018
Genre:
ISBN:

Across the nation, there is increasing national interest in improving the way mathematics departments prepare their graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) because of their integral role in teaching lower division mathematics courses, particularly within the Calculus sequence (Speer, Deshler, & Ellis, 2017). While there have been several studies that look into the ways departments prepare their GTAs (Belnap & Allred, 2009; Speer, Smith, & Horvath, 2010), little is still known about how GTAs make sense of and understand the active-learning teaching practices introduced to them. In order to better support GTAs, we need to understand how GTAs are interpreting and making sense of these teaching practices. The GTAs within this study were running break-out sections twice a week for Calculus I and II, with one of the break-out sections involving the facilitation of activities and group work. GTAs engaged in a three-day pre-term seminar, a semester-long PD course on leading student-centered classes, and weekly meetings with the course coordinators. Lead TAs provided support and feedback to their fellow GTAs. Using a modified framework based on a socio-cultural learning theory, known as the Vygotsky Space (Harré, 1983), I analyzed the ways in which the discourse around the teaching practices, for both "active-learning" and "traditional" classrooms, changed over the course of a semester and the role lead TAs and others had in their publicized interpretations. Two different types of changes were recorded, elaboration and transformation, and each was tracked as they were publicized over the course of the semester. I created criteria to determine whether or not the discourse around a particular teaching practice was conventionalized within a community. Results from this study give insight into what teaching practices were challenging to understand, as well as the interpretations taken up and conventionalized by the GTAs. Approximately 20% of the practices showed evidence of some form of conventionalization; some of the conventionalized practices were transformations of the original version. The lead TAs may have influence over GTAs' instructional practice, but they did not have much influence over the interpretations publicized. These results yield insights useful to faculty involved in the professional development of GTAs.

Multidisciplinary Perspectives on International Student Experience in Canadian Higher Education

Multidisciplinary Perspectives on International Student Experience in Canadian Higher Education
Author: Tavares, Vander
Publisher: IGI Global
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2020-10-02
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1799850315

Canada has become one of the most popular destinations for international students at the higher education level. A number of complex factors and trends, both in Canada and globally, have contributed to the emergence of Canada as a destination for international higher education. However, more research is still needed to better understand the experiences of international students in Canada considering the rapid growth in numbers as well as the social, political, and linguistic singularity of Canada as a destination. Multidisciplinary Perspectives on International Student Experience in Canadian Higher Education is an essential scholarly publication that explores international students' experiences in Canadian colleges and universities. It seeks to explore the various factors, aspects, challenges, and successes that characterize the international student experience in Canadian higher education from the perspective of international students and the academic communities to which they belong. Featuring a wide range of topics such as information literacy, professional development, and experiential learning, this book is ideal for academicians, instructors, researchers, policymakers, curriculum designers, and students.

STEM in Science Education and S in STEM

STEM in Science Education and S in STEM
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2021-01-11
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9004446079

This edited volume focuses on the reform and research of STEM education from international perspectives considering the sociocultural perspectives of different educational contexts. It shows the impact of political and cultural contexts on the reform of science education.