The role of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) varies across institutions. For some, completing a teaching
assistantship (TAship) may be a requirement of their graduate program. For others, TAships provide income,
teaching opportunities, and experience for their future academic career. While not all graduate students have
the opportunity to teach, those who do can make a lasting impact on their students? learning and experience.
GTAs teach most lab sections of undergraduate courses in STEM disciplines. To prepare GTAs for their role,
laboratory coordinators typically organize weekly training sessions focused on reviewing content and
demonstrations. GTAs are often hired because of their disciplinary content knowledge rather than their capacity
to teach the content effectively. We hypothesized that one way to bolster effective teaching by GTAs would be
to institute weekly Community of Practice (CoP) meetings. These meetings were attended by GTAs for first-year
biology labs on a voluntary basis. Three faculty members worked together to host the meetings. Our initial data
indicates that the CoP did, in fact, increase the pedagogical development of GTAs. Intended for senior ?
graduate college levels, biology majors.
Keywords:
University of Maryland (2024)
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