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By encouraging the development of a community of practice, peer mentoring can be a high impact component of a teaching professional development program. However, in implementing our program for novice instructors in the mathematical sciences, we found that pairing up peers and encouraging regular meetings was insufficient to create this desired connection. This article describes our solution, a just-in-time conversation tool called Office Talks, and the impact it had in creating rich mentor-mentee relationships. We provide steps to help others in designing office talks that fit the unique needs of their peer-mentoring program. 

In this paper, we compare the types of teaching feedback that graduate student instructors provide their peers in comparison to more senior faculty at a large research-oriented university. Additionally, we consider the challenges and benefits that graduate student instructors report concerning providing teaching feedback to a peer. Our results reveal that graduate student instructors and faculty contribute distinct perspectives on teacher growth and together can form a strong support system for first-time graduate student instructors. Additionally, while observing a peer does pose real challenges, we found that graduate student instructors develop strategies to overcome these and report more benefits than difficulties. 

Abstract We address a problem of promoting instructional transformation in early undergraduate mathematics courses, via an intervention incorporating novel digital resources (“techtivities”), in conjunction with a faculty learning community (FLC). The techtivities can serve as boundary objects, in order to bridge different communities to which instructors belong. Appealing to Etienne Wenger’s Communities of Practice theory, we theorise a role of the instructor as a broker, facilitating “boundary transitions” within, across, and beyond a set of digital resources. By “boundary transition”, we mean a transition that is also a brokering move; instructors connect different communities as they draw links between items in their instruction. To ground our argument, we provide empirical evidence from an instructor, Rachel, whose boundary transitions served three functions: (1) to position the techtivities as something that count in the classroom community and connect to topics valued by the broader mathematics community; (2) to communicate to students that their reasoning matters more than whether they provide a correct answer, a practice promoted in the FLC; (3) to connect students’ responses to mathematical ideas discussed in the FLC, in which graphs represent a relationship between variables. Instructors’ boundary transitions can serve to legitimise novel digital resources within an existing course and thereby challenge thestatus quoin courses where skills and procedures may take precedence over reasoning and sense-making. 

A comprehensive graduate teaching assistant (GTA) training program in mathematical sciences designed at one institution is being adapted and replicated at two peer institutions. Using a case study approach, this paper outlines the development of the program components, which include a first-year teaching seminar, peer mentoring and support from a peer TA Coach, a Critical Issues in STEM Education seminar, and K-12 outreach to inform understanding of the pipeline. Additionally, adaptations due to institutional context and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic are described. Implications for components of the comprehensive program, based on GTA-provided feedback, are discussed. 

This poster focuses on the experiences of TA Coaches in a comprehensive graduate teaching assistant training program in mathematical sciences that was designed and refined at one institution and is being replicated at two peer institutions. During program development, TA coaches were tasked with working with GTAs teaching recitation sections of college algebra and calculus I to facilitate active learning pedagogy and were asked to free-form journal about their experience. At the two institutions replicating the program, the duties changed to support the structure and needs of each department. Recent TA coaches at the three institutions participated in interviews about their experiences. This poster summarizes the roles of the TA Coaches across the three universities and explores their perceptions of the unique benefits that the TA coach role provides to the GTAs they assist and their own instructional experiences. 

The abrupt switch from in-person instruction and tutoring to remote or online instruction and tutoring as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 was difficult for even the most experienced instructor. In this paper, we explore how graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) at three different institutions responded to and experienced this change. Data was collected from surveys and focus groups conducted with graduate teaching assistants at each institution, as part of our ongoing collaborative NSF-funded project focusing on equipping mathematical sciences GTAs to become better teachers. In their responses, the graduate teaching assistants discussed topics ranging from what they did in their remote classrooms to the challenges they faced and supports they received from their department, university, and fellow classmates and faculty.