Exploring Experiences of Graduate Teaching Assistants in Teaching Professional Development Groups

摘要

Many universities rely on graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) to teach college courses or their components (e.g., laboratories, recitations, seminars). For example, for doctoral institutions, Belnap and Allred reported that 75.5% of mathematics GTAs had such duties. However, despite the wide use of GTAs, their preparation to teach remains a concern. Indeed, the amount of training GTAs receive varies greatly across universities and departments. In some cases, training is not provided to them at all; when it is provided, it can take several forms. Most commonly, GTAs receive a short-term training prior to the beginning of the semester in which they are assigned with teaching responsibilities. Sometimes these trainings are accompanied by workshops conducted throughout an academic year. Another type of GTA preparation is course-based. Here, GTAs are invited or required to complete a course on teaching basics -essentially, an expanded version of short-term trainings. One variation of a course-based preparation is a course not on teaching per se but on action research in the classes GTAs teach. In such a course, students are required to conduct an educational research project.