by Ed Cohen
Balls of crumpled colored paper came flying toward the front of the lecture hall like an indoor meteor shower.
The puzzled murmurings of the students doing the throwing momentarily turned to chuckles when a paper airplane nose-dived onto a table two rows short of its mark and had to be relaunched the rest of the way.
At the front of the room, instructor Michelle A. Murphy stood off to one side of the accumulating projectiles looking entirely satisfied.
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You have to admit, it got you happy for a split second," she said to the 80 or so students, mostly Ph.D. candidates in engineering, filling the tiered lecture hall.A professional specialist in Notre Dame's Department of Biological Sciences who is highly regarded for her teaching abilities, Murphy admitted that the paper tossing was intended, in part, to be an ice-breaker. The class was made up of graduate teaching assistants (T.A.s), many of whom were looking nervously ahead to their first assignment in the fall. They'd enrolled in this two-day summer course to help prepare for the experience.
Murphy's first instruction had been to write your greatest fear about teaching on the sheets of color paper she'd passed out, then crumple up the paper and throw it toward the front of the room.
Uncrumpling the balls, she read aloud a few of the fears, including "not knowing the answer to a question" and "running out of things to say." Her course would offer practical suggestions for dealing with these and other fears, but the paper-pitching itself also provided a valuable lesson: Inserting a playful, unexpected activity into a normally serious endeavor like a lab or discussion group can relieve tension all around, snare the attention of students, and improve the odds of learning taking place.
Murphy's class was one of two new courses sponsored this summer by the Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning and Notre Dame's provost's office. The courses were designed to prepare teaching assistants in science and engineering. Next summer the plan is to add classes customized to the humanities and social sciences.
With the exception of those supported by certain fellowships, the overwhelming majority of the 976 Ph.D. students enrolled in the Notre Dame Graduate School serve as teaching or research assistants. Teaching assistants help supervise lab exercises, grade papers and lead discussion sections. Unlike at some universities, only a few Notre Dame T.A.s are asked to teach entire courses and even then only with extensive faculty supervision. Other graduate assistants don't get involved in teaching but help faculty conduct research.
Barbara Walvoord, director the Kaneb Center, says teaching assistants are necessary for two reasons. One is economics. It would be prohibitively expensive to hire faculty to do everything T.A.s are willing to do in return for tuition remission and a stipend. Just as important, outside of university labs and classrooms, there's nowhere for tomorrow's teaching and research faculty to get practical, college-level experience.
Walvoord says the new summer preparatory courses for T.A.s are designed to ensure not only that graduate assistants provide the quality of instruction Notre Dame students expect, but to help prepare the next generation of college and university professors.
Even Ph.D.s planning on pursuing careers in industry, not academia, can benefit from the T.A. experience, experts say. It teaches them how to explain concepts to people who may not be as knowledgeable as they are about a subject. Those people often control an organization=s research budget.
After watching a video featuring four successful University of California, Berkeley, graduate student assistants talking about their experiences, Murphy divided the class up into discussion groups.
Karinna Vernaza, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, said a common fear among new teaching assistants is that a student will ask a question they can't answer. She suggests admitting you don't know the answer and saying you will find out and e-mail the information. "Just make sure that you actually do it."
Like Vernaza, who is from Panama, many graduate students in science and engineering come from foreign countries and English is not their primary language. As T.A.s, they have the additional fear of not being able to put their ideas into words, or that students won't be able to understand their accented speech.
Alain Pelletier, an experienced T.A. who earned his Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from ND in 1998, grew up in Quebec speaking French exclusively. He said language can be less of a problem teaching science and engineering courses because you can fall back on diagrams and equations.
Pelletier says new T.A.s also should realize that even if they were presenting their first lecture or directing a lab for the first time in their own language, they would still be nervous being the center of attention.
Whatever their nationality, T.A.s are reminded to guard against assuming that students from different cultures learn the same way. For instance, in the U.S., students are often encouraged to challenge what their instructors say as a way of stimulating critical reasoning. In many foreign cultures, classes are expected to accept what their professors say as unassailable.
Here are some other suggestions to teaching assistants offered by the course: