Creating Collaborative, TA-centered Weekly Instructional Meetings to Support Student-centered Laboratory Instruction
Tested Studies in Laboratory Teaching, 2019, Volume 40
Jonathan Horn & Erica Szeyller
Abstract
In large lab courses weekly instructional meetings are paramount to course communication and uniform lab curriculum delivery, but can become tedious and ineffectual. We identified multiple challenges in our meetings, including: poor efficiency, too much focus on negative student interactions (‘venting’), reliance on lecture-style information delivery, decreased meeting value for repeat TAs, poor meeting preparedness by new TAs, and persistent misconceptions regarding lab pedagogy. We addressed these challenges by creating more collaborative, supportive, and TA-centered meetings that focus on student learning. In this session, we shared our methods, rationale, and discoveries in redesigning our weekly instructional meetings. Participants used backward design to develop a plan for implementing TA-centric and learning goals-oriented instructional meetings at their own institutions.
