My teaching training experience started when I became an apprentice in the Principle of Biology II lab starting grad school. I had the pleasure to meet my current mentor, Dr. Gutzler, who since day one, showed me her willingness to help graduate students become excellent educators. After our first meeting, I was excited to have found a mentor in her and an opportunity to grow professionally. During my apprenticeship semester, I became more aware of my personal strengths: I realized that I was always excited to share my knowledge with the students and that I was eager to learn how my Teaching Assistant (TA) could run a smooth lab section.
During this semester, I also became aware of my weaknesses: Part of this was the barrier language and the insecurity that this issue brings. I would feel scared of public speaking and not confident when delivering a talk. As part of my apprenticeship, I had to do a presentation demo to my students and mentor. From this experience, I learned so much about my presentation skills, subject content, delivery, and student engagement. In other words, it was not perfect, but my mentor saw potential in my work and I made sure I applied the feedback she gave me to improve my future presentations.
After this period, I got the TA position, and I continued to work on my personal weaknesses by preparing my material weeks before, so I had more time to go over it, come up with potential student’s questions, and practice. I also continued receiving my mentor’s support and feedback through the semesters. Friday meetings for our group are very important and one of the things I enjoyed was when Dr. Gutzler made us reflect on our work. For example: Dr. Gutzler used to do an exercise with us at the beginning of the semester, where we had to write a weakness or a new teaching technique we wanted to try with our students for the semester. We had to write a simple plan on how we would tackle it and by the middle of the semester she would have us revisit our notes and check the status of this plan. By the end of the semester, if we achieved it, it was a great learning experience but even if we didn’t, we had a new opportunity the following semester. Dr. Gutzler also used to hold small workshops for her TAs, some included reading articles to discuss different subjects that helped us grow professionally. Besides her own workshops, Dr. Gutzler also suggested us to attend to the CETL workshops and that is how I learned about this center.
Dr. Gutzler’s workshops included:
Validity, Reliability, Objectivity…How to Create a Fair Assessment?
CV and Resume workshop
Emergency school situations and how to handle them
Grad school after grad school? The application processHow to secure post-doctoral positions
Developing Oral Presentations
Using Alternative Assessments to Evaluate Students
Student engagement- Open-ended vs. close-ended questions
Construction of an exam – Article: “Best practices for designing and grading exams”
How lecture material impacts student learning – Article: “The Development of a Learning Gap Between Students with Strong Prerequisite Skills and Students with Weak Prerequisite Skills”
Pedagogical content knowledge – Articles: “Those Who Understand: Knowledge Growth in Teaching and Knowledge” and “Teaching: Foundation of the new reform”
Designing a graphing rubric – Article: “Development of a framework for graph choice and construction”
After teaching the regular sections of Principles of Biology II lab for 4 semesters, an opportunity for me to teach the Honor section was given. Teaching an Honors section means that you have will have the freedom to pick a semester topic and design your own experiments for the semester. I knew it was going to be challenging but I was ready to take the next step in this team. This gave me the opportunity to come up with my own materials and kind of dive more into the logistics of teaching a course. The topic chosen was “The molecular biology of cancer” because it is a topic close to my field of research and it was something I wanted to share with my young students. I chose the subtopics I was going to cover, designed the syllabus, exercises schedule, basic experiments, slides, protocols, pre-lab assignments, in class-activities, quizzes, exams, rubrics, etc. Through this process I would go to my mentor for feedback and she helped me optimize my content and kept me focus on the course objectives.
Later, an opportunity for teaching an inquiry-based lab came and I also jumped right into it because the application of this model aligned with what I wanted my students to take from a class. “To connect the topic to their day to day life and to be more independent”. I co-taught this course with my mentor and it was truly a learning experience for both of us. This model focused on a student-centered lab experiments rather than an instructor centered lab experiments. This also gave our students the opportunity to explore any topic in climate change of their desire and helped them own their experiments while experiencing a true research lab experiment. Because I liked this model so much and because I saw progress in our students, I decided to run this model again with a cancer topic and a few changes. I brought up the idea to my mentor and she supported me. The results from this semester were positive, I am glad my students were able to learn basic concepts about cancer through this model.
Another aspect of being a TA was my role as a mentor. I was promoted to be the lead TA of this team in 2017 and with this opportunity I was able to help mentor TAs and aspiring TAs. I was also able to be more hands on with the material logistics of all of the lab sections. I really enjoy having this role because it gives me the opportunity to advise my peers. Last semester, during a TA meeting, I shared my journey as a TA and this was a good opportunity to remind them to take advantage of all the resources and opportunities we have in this team. Even if they are not into teaching, the skills learned in this job could apply to any other job. Now that this journey is coming to an end, I am grateful for all the support and the learning experiences I have had with this team.
