19 Dec
2005
19 Dec
'05
5:30 p.m.
Shandy,
d) Collecting feedback (either via evaluation forms or
student interviews) from the TA's students and reviewing it
with the TA - Open-ended response mid-term evaluations are
required from all TAs for each section they teach; 1st year
TAs review these with me (Course Coordinator), other TAs and
instructors can review them with me if they want (happens
about 25% of the time). TAs report anecdotally on their
office hour interactions with their students but the culture
in the department has a long way to go before they will apply
the math ed research theories and methods they are learning
in their graduate courses to their own teaching. Mind you, I
tend to work only with first- and second-year TAs and many
have not taken much math ed by the time I have them. For
many, the idea that teaching and learning are different
things is a major slap in the face of long-held belief. As
course coordinator I consider my work with new college
instructors a success if they have internalized the need to
attend to student learning by the end of the year. It may be
that as TAs move into teaching higher level math courses they
DO become more active investigators of their own teaching and
their students' learning. The course coordination for
calculus and higher is done by mathematicians who are NOT
researchers in math ed, though, so TAs are not encouraged by
those coordinators to investigate student learning.
I think there are two separate issues involved here that may be harder
to separate in a math ed department than in a math department. One is
summarized by Angelo & Cross' quote, "Teaching without learning is just
talking." That's the realization that if the students aren't learning
anything, then one's teaching isn't effective. This relates to course
evaluations in that one way (not the only way) of knowing if student
learning is taking place is to (surprise!) ask the students.
I'll agree with you that TAs (even those in math ed programs) don't
always get that the point of the whole teaching enterprise is student
learning. There's a great article on the development of TAs as teachers
by Jody Nyquist and Jo Sprague in "The Professional Development of
Graduate Teaching Assistants" (Anker, 1998) that puts the goal of "Are
my students getting it?" at the third of three stages of TA development.
However, if a TA gets that student learning is indeed the point of
teaching, then that adds a lot of value to the gathering and analysis of
student course evaluations.
The other issue is the idea of using math education methodologies to
answer the question, "Are my students getting it?" I would expect that
it might take a while for math ed grad students to warm up to that
idea--I don't have experience with math ed grad students, so I don't
know. However, I would expect that it would take mathematics grad
students even longer to warm up to that idea, since they don't receive
any training in educational methodologies. However, I think the
gathering and analysis of student course evaluations can be performed
and can be valuable in the absence of the use of other education
methodologies.
Derek
--
Derek Bruff, Ph.D.
Assistant Director, Vanderbilt Center for Teaching
116 Calhoun Hall / Box 351537, Station B
Nashville, TN 37235
615-322-7290 / www.vanderbilt.edu/cft/