Background
On this page you will find a capstone project for the UO’s Graduate Teaching Initiative. In this project, I developed a questionnaire tool to help guide pre-term course preparation conversations between instructors of record and their GEs (Graduate Employees). The principle goals of this project were to improve communication between faculty and graduate teaching assistants, to empower graduate assistants to successfully prepare to teach each term, and to start conversations that hopefully lead to mentoring relationships between faculty and graduate students.
I first drafted this document using questions from my own experience being a first-time teaching assistant – basically, these are things I wished I had asked in my first meeting with my faculty instructor of record. My fellow students in the Engaged Pedagogy (TLC 609) seminar in Fall 2018 encouraged me to develop this guide and shared some of their own experiences of miscommunication that helped me shape some of the questions. My colleague Kaylynn Gunter tested the document and added her thoughts when she prepared to TA a course, and a faculty member, Gabriela Pérez Báez, also tested the document when she was preparing to have her own TAs for the first time. In addition, my faculty teaching mentor, Charlotte Vaughn, gave me substantive feedback on early drafts, and Spike Gildea also shared comments when I tested this guide while I prepared to TA a course for him.
I believe that it is important to use pre-term preparation not just for procedural conversations, but for mentoring conversations as well. As important as it was to be clear about the expectations for the mechanics of the course, I felt that this context could present a great opportunity to learn more about how experienced teachers think about teaching, and to open up space for on-the-job teacher-training for us as new teachers. My hope is that the specific questions in the document I have produced are a concrete way to initiate that mentorship relationship.
In November 2019 the faculty of the UO Linguistics Department unanimously voted to adopt this document as part of a more robust pre-term preparation process. The document is now available on the Linguistics website for both graduate students and faculty to download and use.
In September 2020, the UO Teaching Engagement Program adapted this document as a resource for their workshop on Coordinating Teaching Teams. Facilitating team communication has been especially important as part of adapting to remote and hybrid teaching in the era of COVID-19.