About

"The only thing that scales with undergrads is undergrads."  

In academia, a variety of people are required to teach students whether or not they have a background in teaching. There are many classes in which novice TAs and undergraduate course assistants are expected to lead both classroom discussions and one-on-one interactions with students with no prior experience. Often, this results in subpar instructional results such as explanations that students do not understand or the provision of answers themselves rather than explanations that help students learn. While rigorous teaching programs exist for instructional careers, these are not required or often feasible for TAs and tutors. A more lightweight teaching intervention is therefore needed for training TAs and tutors. Many universities have created TA training courses (e.g. CSE 599 at UCSD), but there is not yet a standard for such courses and a concrete set of teaching principles that are expected to be mastered.

The need for such interventions closely mirrors a problem I encountered as an educator prior to my experience as a graduate student. As a co-founder of Transform Tutoring, a company that provides one-on-one tutoring for high school students, I led the interview process for STEM tutors. Our interviews were designed as mock tutoring sessions wherein the candidate would play a tutor and the interviewer would play a student. I noticed that almost all candidates (mostly upper undergraduate or graduate students) simply explained a topic, or even solution to a question, from start to finish without engaging the student. Many candidates were clearly knowledgeable in their domain, and I predicted that if they were guided in effective teaching, the quality of their tutoring would improve drastically. I developed a required pre-interview reading for candidates which included an explanation and example of student-driven teaching--that is, allowing students to find the next step of a problem on their own rather than providing it to them. My student-driven teaching and learning guide yielded much better interviews, and illustrated to me the promise of lightweight teaching interventions. I found this experience quite exciting and rewarding, and as a graduate student, I decided to pursue this along with my more traditional CS Education thesis work.  

As I develop and evaluate these trainings, I hope to continue iterating on them to create a course that is both feasible to teach TAs and tutors and effective for improving student learning outcomes.