Teaching the Teachers

Empowering the Next Generation of Instructors

Anthea Josias, Melissa Chalmers, Steven Cederquist, and Dushyanth Aluwihare share their approach to mentoring and professional development for GSIs. 

Graduate Student Instructors at the UM School of Information take on a range of instructional roles, from working in large teaching teams to smaller teams with more specialized roles. Their responsibilities include preparing for and leading weekly discussions or lab sections, offering feedback and support on semester-long projects, providing individualized support to students in office hours, grading, and beyond. Since GSIs are typically hired for their content expertise instead of their teaching and other pedagogy-related experience, we recently expanded the traditional "one-time training sessions" held before the start of each semester to include ongoing professional development and training opportunities throughout the semester. This means that, alongside orientation for new GSIs, both new and returning GSIs have access to further training beyond what can be covered at orientation.

Recent topics have included: 

• Basic and advanced Canvas use 

• Creating accessible presentations

• Active learning strategies for facilitating student engagement in lab and discussion sections 

• Instructional topics like supporting student groups and grading subjective content

• Understanding FERPA, student privacy, and reporting obligations

• Mental health and wellness resources

• Addressing ableism and microaggressions

A key goal for this work is to help GSIs feel confident as they step into their teaching and mentoring roles and to build familiarity with all things large and small that matter in the UMSI and broader UM teaching contexts. We also want to nurture a strong teaching community for GSIs to “lean on and learn from”. For this reason, we have valued holding as many sessions as we could in person. We believe these provide both a great opportunity for GSIs to develop professionally as well as the best opportunity for GSIs to grow as a community.

During the W25 semester, UMSI partnered with the U-M Library Learning and Teaching division, the Teaching and Technology Collaborative, the Disability Equity Office and PEAR program within the Equity Civil Rights & Title IX Office, and the Office of Services for Students with Disabilities to provide 12 hour-length PD sessions and 1 asynchronous Canvas-based training module across the W25 semester. In total, 41 UMSI GSIs completed 112 hours of PD during the W25 semester. 

In the 2025-26 academic year, we aim to build on our efforts by offering additional professional development opportunities aligned with the distinct needs of UMSI GSIs, and by providing more opportunities for GSI community building. If you have questions about GSI professional development or would like to propose a topic, please contact the GSI Support Team, umsi.gsi.support@umich.edu.

1 See Camarao, J., & Din, C. (2023). "A group of people to lean on and learn from": Graduate teaching assistant experiences in a pedagogy-focused community of practice. Teaching & Learning Inquiry, 11 Retrieved from https://proxy.lib.umich.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/group-people-lean-on-learn-graduate-teaching/docview/2890039614/se-2 Ibid