By Chelsea Uggenti (The University of Western Ontario)
Abstract
Many graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) begin their roles with little or no prior teaching experience. Yet they play an important role in undergraduate student learning and are often a first point of contact for undergraduate students. As students often see GTAs as less intimidating figures than their professors, GTAs have great potential to both engage and inspire the future scholars from their disciplines.
We outline a training and development program geared towards helping GTAs in mathematics and statistics gain a better understanding of active learning teaching methods. The objective of this program is for GTAs to learn about and gain experience with these methods in their discipline. This is achieved by discussing tangible examples of these techniques with their peers, along with their benefits and limitations. This program will help GTAs to start thinking about different ways to implement these ideas in their own labs, tutorials, and/or courses.