Members of the Graduate Teaching Community reflected on the following prompt at the conclusion of the Fall 2022 quarter:  How has reading and discussing Teaching Matters by Aeron Haynie and Stephanie Spong shaped your current or future teaching practices?
 

Amelia Bennett, Microbiology

As a first generation black woman navigating a graduate program in STEM, I am constantly looking for ways to ensure my success as a graduate student. As a result of joining the Graduate Teaching Community I learned that teaching skills are necessary to achieve that success. We use teaching skills not only in a traditional classroom setting but also when teaching students in lab, when taking on mentoring roles, when communicating our subject of study at a conference and even when we are assessed during our qualifying exams. Throughout this course we were able to talk in depth about the variety of teaching methods that the book, Teaching Matters, discusses and we were also  given an opportunity to practice these techniques as we presented chapters throughout the quarter. I learned to approach teaching with a growth mindset, responsibilities of an instructor, and the importance of building community in and outside of teaching roles. 

We began the quarter stressing the importance of course design over knowledge of the subject matter. There are many times that graduate students have to teach a student a subject matter or a concept that they themselves are not fully familiar with. Teaching just like anything else, can be broken down to a method. The first and most important step is course design. Teaching Matters highlights focusing on the learning outcomes of students and then working backwards to design your lesson plans accordingly. Our discussions in class helped me when mentoring undergraduate students in and outside of my lab this quarter. Thinking of teaching from the lens of what you want your students to gain rather than focusing on your prior knowledge of the subject matter results in more effective teaching and helps you and your students. 

I am quite familiar with the power dynamics that often present in higher education. Many individuals (including myself prior to this class) believe that if you shy away from the power that comes with a teaching role, it will aid the dynamics of the learning environment. However, Teaching Matters states, “ Like water without a container, power will just find another well- worn course.” The book explains that when an instructor does not acknowledge the power and responsibilities that they have, marginalized students will continue to feel marginalized under your guidance as well. When you focus more on making sure that each of your students learn as much as they can under your instruction you are doing your part in making sure that equity and inclusion are a central part of your teaching practice. In order to do this, you must fully step into your role as an instructor.  

Lastly, we ended the quarter emphasizing the importance of building connection. Learning outcomes are best when students feel connected to the work and other students. The book discusses multiple techniques to aid in that connection.Teaching Matters also highlights that  graduate students can be better teachers when they focus on building a community that supports their well being. 

 

Arielle Yoo, Biomedical Engineering

Reading and discussing Teaching Matters has helped me learn more about active learning and how to structure my future teaching experiences to improve long-term memory of class concepts. In my undergraduate, I did not think much about how my classes were structured and simply accepted the lecture style of teaching as one of the only ways to teach. Now, I understand that getting students to directly interact with the course material by asking questions that are applicable to their lives while also incorporating course concepts can help students remember course material more easily. If we start with the most important concepts we want students to understand, it is easier to explain to students why the coursework assigned is important and can help improve motivation.

I also learned about how important it is to ask for feedback on your teaching. Not only can this help students feel like they are part of a learning community and have more agency in their learning, but it helps me adjust my methods to what will work best for the students. I am so used to only receiving feedback at the end of the quarter through TA assessments that I did not question that structure.

Also, while there is a strong emphasis on grades to determine class success, I hope to offer more ungraded opportunities for low-stakes assessment and improvement opportunities. I know I benefited a lot from ungraded practice problems when studying to see where my own deficiencies are. If I add these to the structure of the class, it can help students digest the information from class without the pressure and stress of trying to achieve a perfect score.

It was also lovely to hear from other graduate students about their learning and teaching experiences. From sharing learning experiences, both positive and negative, we were able to hear strategies that they experienced from previous teachers that were successful and unsuccessful. We also heard about teaching experiences that made it difficult for encouraging students to form learning communities, and how they have facilitated that in the past since learning together increases our potential more than learning alone. I think it’s also especially hard to get advice on how to respond to criticism that can sometimes feel more based on who we are than how we can improve the class. There is a lot from our discussions that I am still mulling over, but I am very grateful for the opportunity to discuss these teaching challenges together. I am excited about my next teaching experience because I have a lot more tools at my disposal than I did during my last teaching experience, and I hope to have the opportunity to see how applying these tools improves the overall quality of student learning.

 

Hannah O’Toole, Biomedical Engineering

Participation in the Fall Quarter 2022 cohort of the Graduate Teaching Community has been a wonderful experience and a highlight of my graduate school experience. I initially joined the GTC because I aspire to stay in academia and shape how professors teach for the best student outcomes. Teaching Matters was an easily digestible book that offered a lot to think about and discuss, and it was straightforward to have student-led discussions about each section. While the book was not super in-depth, it gave real examples of graduate student experience with teaching, including triumphs and hardships. It helped me to realize that across disciplines and backgrounds, the graduate student teaching communities have similar challenges and characteristics, but some students are better prepared for success in leading courses, discussions, or office hours than others. While the book placed a lot of emphasis and responsibility on graduate students to address these challenges and come up with solutions to enable effective teaching, many of the challenges the book brought up were systemic issues. While I appreciate the solutions and advice that Teaching Matters posited, I felt that the most effective practices and solutions came from our personal discussions each week. I appreciated hearing the different perspectives of my cohort and their experiences teaching courses both in the STEM and non-STEM fields here at UC Davis. Utilizing the book chapters and their recommendations, I have cultivated a toolbox for teaching students in the future. I appreciated the adaptability of the GTC to having a hybrid option, which made participation more accessible and allowed us to practice active learning techniques both in-person and online over Zoom when we hosted our own GTC meetings covering a selected chapter. In the future, I wish to utilize some of the techniques we covered while discussing Teaching Matters, such as setting expectations for the class with the students and making myself (the instructor) seem approachable so students do not feel an extra barrier to getting assistance. We talked about reframing office hours to a different nomenclature, like support hours, so they seem less daunting, as well as how to change our teaching strategies to tailor them to each cohort of students, as every student is different and exceptional in their own ways. At the end of our quarter, we discussed how we would like the GTC to continue and the different ways we can investigate forming a stronger graduate teaching community.  I think a takeaway is systemically making teaching communities more standard, like hosting a more formal course on how to be a successful teaching assistant like they do for the Physics department. Reading Teaching Matters and participating in the GTC has caused me to pay more attention and reflect on the better instructors I’ve had in the past, and how their pedagogy helped me to succeed. I think it will be beneficial to continue the discourse on teaching methods that I can then implement in the future. Because, even as an instructor, we are always learning. 

 

Hussein Aldandan, Chemical Engineering 

My experience as instructor is limited to short five days course which already has a well define objective and flexible add on material based on the participant’s needs. The participants of the course are professional engineers, who want to expand their horizon of expertise, and fresh engineers, who are so excited to have hand on experience. All these factors shake my confidence as an inexperienced instructor and make me put a lot of preparation without real plan about the material of the course and the participant’s needs.

Although the teaching matters discussion and the selected book are more oriented to those in Graduate school, they encourage me to revise my style in teaching and consider re-designing my courses to better level and structure. These discussions highlight several concerns, which all instructors face during any teaching events, help instructors to better understand the situations and prepare them to act with plan. Part of these discussion are the basic steps to design the course and setting the main objectives and how to deliver these objectives to audiences with different styles to meet their needs and abilities. 

There are many takeaway messages from the discussion and one important message that catch my attention from the beginning is “Teaching with compassion and flexibility means believing that, given the right conditions, all students can learn”, and from that believe, instructors should shift their focus to the students and what the final outcomes they need to take from the course.

Another important aspect of teaching which I totally get it through the discussion is knowing your available resources which provided by the school or the company in my case. The importance of that usually not directly recognized if nothing goes wrong but even at that stage it gives a boost of confidence knowing that you are not alone and there are several resources to help you and help your student to bring the best version of them.

Finally, the understanding of diversity and culture differences during is a great add on to my experience as my courses participants are from various places and cultures where the way of communications are different. Although it is difficult to understand all these differences, the awareness of the existence of these differences is capstone to response with these behaviors and keep a room for possibility of misunderstanding. 

In overall, the discussion enriches my knowledge and experience and changes my focus in the teaching method to be more oriented toward the learner and the process of learning. Now, I have a clear plan which I can follow to design the course or at least identify the takeaway messages and emphasis their important. 

 

Jeff Nichols, Applied Mathematics

This quarter, the Graduate Teaching Community read and discussed Teaching Matters, by Aeron Haynie and Stephanie Spong.  This is the first book I’ve read with the GTC that is specifically written for graduate students, and as such, I’d definitely recommend it for any grad student as a place to start learning about teaching.

As we explored this book together, I found myself developing a new kind of confidence in my approach to teaching.  Not from learning facts and figures about how brains work (though we did learn some!), but rather from examining stories of other grad students, and seeing how all of us can and should improve our teaching abilities.  The book, together with our discussions, seemed to both humanize and individualize teaching for me.  It helped me identify large themes in what high quality and effective teaching looks like while also understanding that everyone can carry out those themes in their own way.  I gained a greater appreciation for how long of a process it is to develop our own unique teaching practice, and that it’s perfectly fine to make mistakes in that process. 

Another important idea in Teaching Matters is just that:  teaching matters, even as a grad student.  The book begins by presenting many ways in which we have a greater impact on our students than most of us imagine, and how teaching can become the most fulfilling part of many college and university careers.  This idea complements the atmosphere of GTC extremely well.  Our meetings have always been a welcome opportunity to put research aside for a bit, and enjoy the company of peers who also enjoy and value teaching.  It’s a very motivating combination!

To get a little more detailed, one of the ideas that really stuck with me as the quarter wrapped up was backwards course design.  Backwards design is an incredibly useful idea for teaching, but could apply to nearly any context.  With backwards design, we begin designing a course by thinking carefully about the end goals.  What should students walk away with?  What new abilities do we want to give them?  How should they be able to think after this course?  We also think about how we will measure students' success, what assessments will look like, and what assignments and activities will help them learn along the way.  Only after taking all this into consideration do we actually start to plan how the teaching itself will go.  

Overall, this was an enjoyable and valuable quarter with the GTC for me.  I’m looking forward to working towards the themes outlined in Teaching Matters and learning from my mistakes along the way. 

 

Jean Ji,  Energy Systems

For this quarter’s Graduate Teaching Community (GTC), I read Teaching Matters written by Stephanie Spong and Aeron Haynie who were graduate students with teaching experience as either a Teaching Assistant (TA) or an Associate Instructor (AI). Along with reading the book, I also met around 10 graduate students from multiple disciplines who are passionate about teaching. Discussing the lessons from the book with my fellow GTC students is the highlight of my experience, because it helps create a sense of community and foster active learning via engaging with the materials from the book. Since this was my first time participating in GTC, I kept an open mind on what my experience could be. Having a structured activity: reading one chapter of the book each week, gave me a sense of direction because I can prepare for each session by completing the assigned reading. The book is also structured in a way such that each chapter builds upon the previous one in order to equip its readers with the tools and skills to be a successful TA or AI. For example, Chapter 2 focuses on structuring a course by starting with a learning objective and then creating lessons and assignments to accomplish the objective. For someone who has never taught a course before, I appreciated starting with this chapter because it not only demonstrates the important aspects of designing a course, but it gave all the students participating in the GTC something shared to discuss. Having a common set of knowledge among students participating in the GTC is crucial because it helps facilitate an equitable and inclusive learning environment.

Following Chapter 2 on designing a course, Chapter 3 honed in on creating a welcoming classroom environment which is an extremely important aspect that I feel is not emphasized in the classroom settings that I was a part of. On that front, I really appreciate how the facilitators of this quarter’s GTC have been extremely intentional in creating a welcoming environment for all of us. From the small actions like including our name and pronoun on our name tags to actively including discussions on this matter, Ian and Jeff have done an excellent job on making me feel welcome in the GTC. To that end, I also very much appreciate my fellow students for being open-minded and genuine in our discussions. Each of us has exemplified what an inclusive and supportive learning environment looks like, and I am glad that we could put what we learned from the book about creating a welcoming classroom environment into practice. As part of the GTC curriculum, I led one of the weekly discussions on Chapter 4 which focused on putting into practice the skills that we learned from Chapter 2 and 3. Leading my fellow students through the chapter and learning from them via our discussions have been an extremely important experience to my early teaching career as a graduate student. I will certainly take this experience with me in my upcoming TA job. Overall, I am grateful for the opportunity to be part of the GTC this quarter and I look forward to continuing learning from my facilitators and fellow students.

 

Meredith Carlson, Anthropology

I take my role as an educator very seriously. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes take it for granted. Because our roles as TAs often come along automatically with our roles as graduate students and researchers, we can be prone to approaching teaching as an “automatic” job. That is, because graduate students are experts in our fields, and because we have plenty of experience with being students, we may jump straight into teaching, based on those two things alone.

Discussions with the Graduate Teaching Community this quarter have, for me, emphasized that good teaching requires its own particular set of skills and practices, which go far beyond merely knowing a whole lot about the subject you teach. These skills and practices encompass many things, and we can – and perhaps should – spend a lifetime honing them. But the common thread throughout much of what we have discussed in the GTC is that having specific goals and intentions will make our courses better and lead to improved outcomes for our students.

Turning off our teaching auto-pilot begins at the broadest level. What is the purpose of my course? What do I hope students will walk away understanding or being able to do? These may seem like obvious questions, and yet in our GTC discussions we realized that nearly all of us had either taken or taught classes in which the learning outcomes were not made explicit. As a result of our discussions, I plan to focus on making the learning outcomes of my courses explicit both to myself and to my students, in order to help with engagement and success.

The importance of an intentional approach also applies to the assignments we give. We can once again fall into “automatic” teaching, by assigning the types of papers and projects that we completed as students, without pausing to think about what skills these assignments should be helping our students to build. One strategy for making the most of assignments, mentioned in Teaching Matters, is to give opportunities for students to practice “authentic assignments” that resemble tasks and projects they might be faced with after graduation. These might include anything from debates, to blog posts, to case studies. These kinds of assignments may be completely unlike anything we as TAs were asked to do when were undergraduates, but they can be very effective. The key here is to tailor assignments to the course and the discipline, so that they are useful both for student learning and for teacher assessment.

My time being part of the Graduate Teaching Community has motivated me to move away from automatic course design and teaching, and to approach all aspects of teaching by having a specific rationale for the material, and a specific vision for student outcomes.

 

Rubia Lopes, Animal Science

In the book, Teaching Matters, where the target audience consists of graduate students, the authors Aeron Haynie and Stephanie Sponge state the importance of teaching and providing evidence-based techniques for instructors-in-training to develop their own teaching practices. For me, the book explained and summarized tools that I was not familiar with, and some that I have applied intuitively in my oral presentations. 

The book covers a wide range of themes such as course and assignment designs, classroom learning community, active learning and common challenges faced in the teaching environment and by new instructors and how to handle them. From all the topics discussed by Hayne and Sponge, the concept of immediacy and course co-construction really excited me. Immediacy can be defined as invitation to student-professor interaction that can be verbal or non-verbal. It intrigued me that I have been applying this concept in the classroom by moving around the class, making eye contact, and calling students by name; however, I did not know that this communication behavior can increase student motivation. Additionally, I learned new techniques that can enhance immediacy such as learning students’ pronouns, engaging in small talk with students before or after class and for online classes, as well as trying to keep a weekly communication with the students.

As learning is inherently a social process, course co-construction is another effective strategy to develop a classroom community. Students that co-construct their courses with peers and the teacher are more academically motivated, more engaged, and understand their responsibility in their own learning process. There are different forms that it can be applied in class, for example, ask for students’ inputs regarding the assignment formats or request suggestions about guest speakers that the students have interest in, and include their suggestions as much as possible into the syllabus. This collaboration between students and teacher promotes an inclusive and student-centered learning environment, which is imperative for me. Differently, from immediacy, I have not applied this before, and I plan to use this in the future as I would like students to be empowered and capable of contributing ideas.

To establish a strong and effective teaching or educational philosophy, I consider it fundamental to understand how pedagogical techniques may shape students’ beliefs and behaviors and how they can leverage individuals’ learning. Therefore, the reading and discussion of Teaching Matters caused me to reflect about the more appropriate and effective teaching strategies that I can use in educational environments, especially immediacy and course co-construction.