PREPARING GRADUATE STUDENTS TO BE EFFECTIVE TEACHERS

As a comprehensive university, Princeton aspires to excellence in both scholarship and teaching. Although faculty members deliver lectures and conduct seminars, graduate student Assistants in Instruction (AIs) typically teach the laboratory portions of undergraduate courses.

There are challenges in preparing graduate students to be excellent instructors: 1) effective teaching is not necessarily an instinctive skill, and needs to be developed and nurtured; 2) teaching, and working on improving teaching, is not always a high priority for AIs; 3) AIs may have language or cultural issues that inhibit interactions with undergraduates; and 4) AIs may be inexperienced in the curricula of the courses they are assigned to teach.

To meet these challenges, Princeton offers a range of programs and resources. The University’s McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning (http://www.princeton.edu/mcgraw/about/) offers orientation programs for novice AIs, pedagogical workshops, instructional consultations and classroom visits, a Teaching Transcript Program, and a library of online resources for teaching and academic work.

AIs in the Geosciences Department are mostly supervised by the department’s laboratory managers, who hold workshops on the role of labs in the Geosciences curriculum. These sessions cover responsibilities and expectations for AIs, and demonstrate inquiry-based instruction. During the semester, the laboratory managers run weekly course-specific meetings to review the previous week’s lab, to review grading standards and student concerns, and to go over the lab for the upcoming week. The latter activity is most effective when the lab is taught to the AIs as if they were students in the lab session itself. AIs are also observed and given feedback on their teaching. Finally, the Geosciences Department issues annual awards that recognize excellence in graduate student teaching.

Twenty years ago, there were practically no preparation activities or resources for graduate student AIs. Since then, preparing graduate students to be effective teachers has received increasing attention, with teaching seen not only as a condition of financial support for graduate students, but as a vital component of their professional development and of the overall teaching mission of the University.