Section 5.9 Engaging teaching assistants in new ways.
¶Graduate students who served as teaching assistants (TAs) traditionally supervised laboratory sections, conducted recitations, and/or graded homework in the introductory courses. They did not typically serve as TAs in the upper-level courses. However, a TA was assigned to each paradigm. The paradigm TAs attended classes, participated in discussions with professors about what students were thinking, conveyed to faculty what students were experiencing, and provided continuity when new faculty began teaching a course. Two graduate students who served as TAs early in the paradigms program reflected upon their experiences in the 2001 paper reporting on the new curriculum in the American Journal of Physics:
The paradigms curriculum project has provided an excellent example for how to think about teaching. It clearly emphasizes the central position of the student in the classroom. Rather than focusing exclusively on what they were going to say, the professors spent a lot of time thinking about and observing how students interact with their course materials. Through pedagogical discussions and personal example, the paradigms instructors conveyed the value of listening to, observing, and engaging students rather than merely lecturing at and testing them. While these experiences were instructive for us, the occasions when we were given the power to practice curriculum development ourselves affected us even more. The trial-and-error process of developing and teaching integrated labs and group activities convinced us of the value of actively engaging students. By observing students' behavior as they grappled with the physics and the curriculum, we developed a better understanding of how they interact with a curriculum to construct their own understanding of the material. (p. 57).
In reminiscing about experiences as a graduate teaching assistant, one of the interviewees described helping new faculty to understand the themes:
...helping them to see the themes in the material, because it wasn't always crystal clear, because a lot of time that the TAs spent with the faculty, we were really trying to understand the themes because they weren't in the traditional progression so you really had to figure it out together...
TA's also helped new faculty recognize the importance of continuing the connections among topics they were expected to be teaching in a particular course with related content and skills in paradigms courses both before and after:
every teacher wants to put their own stamp on the work that they're doing but you've got to know what you can take out and what you can't or it could really change the character of a paradigm and it couldn't be expected to do what it was designed to do so we did spend a significant amount of time talking about “why” with new faculty.
Another aspect of helping new faculty was alerting them to difficulties students were likely to encounter and ways that the courses addressed these difficulties:
I also remember spending a lot of time trying to help them understand why we did certain things to help students learn something that was difficult; I think often for teachers who have been teaching a subject for a while it's easy to lose track of what is really hard for the students. The TAs were really good at remembering that “Oh this was hard for people last year, that's why we spent so much time on it”
This former TA had experienced many differences in interactions with the faculty. With one professor, he participated collaboratively in planning, teaching, and debriefing:
I can remember...planning a day to do something, going to class and have it completely derail from what we intended, leaving to go back and debrief after that class and starting off by thinking “oh everything went terribly” and ending twenty minutes later by saying “oh we learned so much about the students! I'm so glad we did this!” to help us address the issues that they had.
Another professor, however, was less experienced with interactive teaching and “relied heavily on the graduate students to get a pulse on what the students were thinking and doing and could do.” With this professor, the TAs were constantly saying “I don't have any idea what you're talking about”, which would prompt the professor to realize “Oh I need to think about explaining it in a different way”. By being present in the class, the TAs could provide feedback to the professors as well as assist students more effectively. This interviewee emphasized the importance of listening to students:
The main thing that would be really good for faculty is a willingness to listen; really that is critically important, wanting to listen to students, to know where their students are at. Faculty often know where they want their students to be but taking the time to listen to where they're at, that's one of the roles that TA's can be really good at, they can spend a lot more time listening to the students, kind of boil that down...
There were time consequences for this increased role for both the faculty member and the TA:
What that means is that faculty members have to meet with their TA's a lot; when I say a lot, probably 15-30 minute debriefing sessions right after class with TAs. What worked for us, TAs went to all classes; they didn't only go to some of the classes they were supposed to be helping out, they went to all the classes which was a substantially higher teaching burden then just TAing in a couple of labs... Also having time before and after the paradigms start, mostly before the paradigms start, to meet with faculty members, prepare the labs, because once you get into the throws of a paradigm, they're very very fast, you spend a lot of time doing it,
In addition to participating in debriefing sessions, a TA was responsible for lab set ups, preparing computer simulations, and making sure everything is going to work:
...it might be lumped together, you might do a debrief and then talk about what you're going to do the next day so you're ready to go, or often we'd debrief and talk about what we're going to do the next day and then the TA and the professor would take some responsibility away from that meeting so that they're ready when they come to class...Certainly much more of the curriculum writing was on the shoulders of the professor, but lab set up, preparing computer simulations, and making sure everything's going to work, a lot of that fell on the shoulders of the TA.
However, he perceived the increased time commitment and level of responsibilities as worthwhile both for himself and for other TAs:
It worked for me because I was doing research on the paradigms anyway, that was my PhD project. For other people, it was coming out of some graduate students' hides but it was valuable to them because they wanted to do it and they were getting benefit from it. My recollection is that the students who TA'd the paradigms had a much easier time passing the qualifier, which also was in our best interests. You're spending a lot of time understanding the material that can be on the qualifying exam and you basically get one-on-one tutoring with professors who know the material very well so they didn't say it explicitly but it was a pretty nice perk but having dedicated TA's is really really important.
Also appreciated was the teaching seminar that the chair of the department had provided for all the graduate students to help them “to think beyond the numbers, conceptually” and to become aware of the struggles that some of their undergraduate students may be experiencing.