MSU’s Graduate Employee Union is looking for volunteers from HALE to work alongside Dr. McDaniels in the Graduate School to develop TA training opportunities to better prepare new TAs for teaching. These training opportunities will make TAs more effective teachers in their classrooms, as well as help, ensure TAs are able to stay within their appointment hours. Often times, new TAs with no experience or training spend so much time preparing for their course that they work beyond what they are compensated for. By organizing around this issue, GEU’s Pedagogy Committee strives to create better teaching methods for new TAs while making MSU a fair workplace for graduate employees. Because HALE explores the challenges and opportunities confronting higher education in today’s world, GEU’s Pedagogy Committee needs HALE student’s ideas and expertise to develop successful training methods for new TAs. GEU’s Pedagogy Committee is currently planning to work as decentralized project teams next semester on 2 main projects.
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Information gathering around what further TA trainings are needed ? Using this to develop a proposal with the graduate school for Fall 2018.
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Information gathering about TA mentoring- what is currently working & what is not? Using this information to draft guidelines for students to use with their mentor in order to facilitate hard conversations and/or conversations students may not feel comfortable otherwise having, and also to develop a training module for faculty that are mentoring TAs to be launched in Fall 2018.
Pedagogy Committee meets every other Friday at 1 PM. If interested, please email geu@geuatmsu.org.