Teasing apart the impacts of curriculum and professional development on teaching assistants’ teaching practices

Abstract

Teaching assistants (TAs) often lead courses using curricula they did not design. Therefore, examining how curriculum and professional development (PD) interact to influence TAs’ teaching practices is critical. This study describes the effects of a curriculum and PD intervention in two contexts: when TAs are teaching curriculum that is explicitly linked to PD, and when teaching curriculum that is not linked to PD. The Intervention curriculum featured structured opportunities for reform-oriented teaching practices. The Intervention PD was situated in the context of these specific curriculum activities and modelled the desired teaching practices. TAs that participated in the intervention implemented more student-centered teaching practices than TAs that did not participate in the intervention, even when teaching curriculum that was not designed to be student-centered and was not linked to PD. A linear model of TAs’ teaching practices that included PD type, task cognitive demand and curriculum type indicates that cognitive demand has the largest relationship with teaching practices, followed by PD type. These results have implications for policy. They suggest that investment in curriculum-linked TA PD can be effective even when teaching curricula that is not linked to PD. Additionally, investment in development of higher-cognitive-demand tasks may be an effective strategy to support implementation of student-centered practices.

Improving Students’ Understanding of Biological Variation in Experimental Design and Analysis through a Short Model-Based Curricular Intervention

“…All GTAs participated in weekly course-preparation meetings facilitated by the course coordinators that supported the procedural implementation of the Traditional curriculum. Traditional GTAs also received 4 hours of professional development on student-centered pedagogy, while GTAs implementing the Intervention curriculum received four hours of curriculum-specific professional development ( Hicks et al. , Unpublished data ).…”

Graduate Student Leadership in a TA Training Program

“…Further, the development of graduate students as teachers is a critical component to their education and training in academic sciences. As this critical need is identified and addressed, more information is available about the most effective way to train future science educators during graduate education. − Unfortunately, the weight of the development and facilitation of GTA training often falls on the shoulders of a few invested individuals within departments. Because of this, instruction of GTAs is often limited by a lack of resources (including time and person-power) rather than a lack of intention or awareness of effective training strategies.…”