in Teaching
“During the time in which Ms. Lima was at [our school], she consistently fulfilled her duties with great responsibility, discipline, dedication, competence, punctuality, and team spirit. She has greatly contributed to the growth of the school.”
(Owner & Executive Director, Brazilian ESL school)
Teaching can be a very solitary profession: on a typical day, we each close our door and lead our own class. I have always sought to create opportunities to move beyond this solitude, so that teachers can learn from each other, and find support. When I directed a school, I was able to implement these interactions at a policy level. As a graduate student, I have taken advantage of the many resources offered by the University of Virginia’s Teaching Resource Center, and I have conducted and presented research on ways to make teaching more effective.
Teaching teachers
When I first began serving as Director of Studies of a language school in Brazil, one of my highest priorities was to improve the pedagogical support for the faculty. First, I initiated weekly meetings, where we discussed both practical issues and specific weekly topics in pedagogy: everything from ethics to a group strategy for teaching each book in our multi-year sequences. After each of these discussions, I wrote a summary, and later used these as the basis to write a Teacher’s Manual (and Director’s Manual). I initiated classroom observations, visiting each teacher at least once per semester, and created a protocol to record my notes, which I then discussed with the teacher after class. Additional feedback for teachers came from student evaluations that I wrote and distributed at the end of each semester. Finally, I revised and extended the training protocol for new teachers, several of whom I trained personally during my tenure. At the University of Virginia, I have also taught a workshop session for new faculty and graduate TAS, on “Teaching the First Days of Class”.
Taking advantage of university resources
The Teaching Resource Center at UVa offers a remarkably wide and rich set of resources for both faculty and graduate teaching assistants. I was selected to participate in a professional development program called “Tomorrow’s Professor Today,” in which a small group of graduate students systematically explores the resources available, and enjoys additional roundtable meetings, etc. I have both taught and attended many workshops to date, ranging from panel discussions (such as UVa alumni teaching in diverse environments) to day-long workshops (developing skills such as preparing articles for successful publication). I have also attended other university conferences, such as one offered by the instructional technology team, in which I learned useful new techniques for preparing visual teaching aids, among other topics.
Contributions to research on effective teaching
Even as a researcher, I am constantly teaching – even when I least expect it. At the University of Virginia, undergraduate students receive course credit for work in laboratories, and graduate students are often responsible for supervising them. However, graduate students do not typically receive any training before assuming this role. I collaborated with a group of colleagues in cognitive psychology to investigate how we could better support graduate student mentors, and make the undergraduate RAs’ experience more educational. As a beginning step in this line of inquiry, we conducted a survey across a sample of psychology laboratories: we asked RAs to describe what duties they performed, what kinds of instructional interactions they had, and what their expectations were. Interestingly, RAs indicated that they would like to participate more in data analysis – a stage at which graduate students typically take over research. We presented our findings at the Teaching Institute of the Association for Psychological Science’s national convention (2006), and will be presenting new findings on graduate students’ perspective of the mentoring experience at the 2008 conference of the National Institute for the Teaching of Psychology.
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