The Center for Excellence in Teaching and learning at GSU hosts a free conference on Scholarly Teaching every year. This conference is mainly focused on pedagogical methods and sharing the different ways of teaching and learning. I have attended to this conference for three years and I have presented my work in two occasions.
In the years I have attended this conference, I always get so much information and ideas to put in practice in my classroom. The first time I attended was in 2015 and it was also my first year as a graduate student. I went to support my Teaching Assistant (TA) group who presented about “Bringing out the best in students by bringing out the best in ourselves”. This panel was composed of four presentations lead by four different TAs: 1) Effective communication with students as an International TA 2) Improving TA training in classroom management and pedagogy 3) Utilizing individual strengths as a TA to foster student motivation and 4) Choosing the “right” role as a GTA.
Those four presentations and the feedback of the attendees motivated me to be part of this conference the following year, so I did. In 2016, I was part of a TA panel and our topic was about “Getting the most out of your GTA experience: The mentor/GTA relationship” where we had three presentations, again led by different TAs: 1) “Buying in”: Personal investment as a source of GTA motivation 2) Providing direction for GTAs via supervisor and peer feedback and 3) Enhancing GTA assessment methodologies to improve instructional training. I presented the last topic and talked about different assessments we can apply on TAs that will help them growth both personally and professionally in this area.
I also attended the 2017 conference and participated in a panel with the tittle of “Infusing inquiry-based teaching methods into a traditional framework to increase student engagement in an undergraduate Biology laboratory course”. There were three presentations: 1) Active-learning and assessment methods for inquiry-based undergraduate Biology laboratory courses 2) Active-learning and assessment methods for inquiry-based undergraduate Biology laboratory courses and 3) The future of an inquiry-based laboratory course on climate change. I presented the second topic where I talked about how we designed an inquiry based-curriculum based on climate change and how we applied this model in an undergraduate laboratory to increase student engagement.
I am glad I was able to be part of this conference all these years. It not only helped me bring different teaching methods into my class but it also inspired me and many of the attendees to be better educators.