Hi, I would like to introduce myself and our collaborative project.  I’m Mike Jacobson and have been a university faculty member in mathematics for over 40 years.  Approximately two months after my first Ph.D. student started in an Assistant Professor position, I received a call from the student about how to create a syllabus for a new class.  Quickly, I realized that our program was not really preparing our PhD students for academia – albeit, research is one component, there is more to the professorate.  In preparing the next generation of college faculty, we began adding (non-research related) components to the preparation for our doctoral students.  This has led to the development and implementation of program as indicated in our project’s video…

You might have questions about

• actual time commitment,
• impact on the undergraduate students,
• impact on the doctoral students
• preparation for the job market

 My colleagues and I would be more than happy to answer all your queries and hear about your thoughts about our program.

Hi Michael-

This is such a worthwhile project and values the idea that teaching well is not something that just happens but can certainly be learned.  Just because someone is knowledgeable in a field does not mean they are great at teaching it.  I'm curious if the mentors are education specialists or math professors or math education practitioners.  Also, have you surveyed the participants to see if the program has impacted graduate student interest in teaching?   

Laura, as we developed this “program” we tried very hard to piece this together so that the time demand would not overwhelm the GTA’s need to complete their mathematics training.  With the help of a small stipend, we found it was best to have mentors be a mix of department faculty and “senior” graduate students.  In addition, a “canvas course” for mentors and mentees was developed, which includes periodic “scripts” for the mentee-mentor pair to follow – assuring helpful discussions, as the semester progresses.  Anecdotally, the "gains" by the mentors, may be more substantial that the impact on the mentee.  We have surveyed participants about interest in teaching, but because of the disruption of the last two years, have not completed analysis of the responses.  Thanks for your  query!

Laura, thanks for watching our video and inquiring about our project.
In addition to Michael’s response, I want to point out that in general, we have received positive feedback from mentees regarding their graduate student mentors. They often mention that having a peer-mentor allows them to feel more comfortable discussing their struggles, and reaching out at any time (many have each other’s cellphone numbers), especially since they see them more often than they would a faculty/staff mentor. 
A key aspect of our program is the multifaceted training process. Mentees receive support from experienced faculty and/or coaches, especially on dealing with difficult teaching or behavior situations, but also peer mentor support on everyday teaching issues. Hence, increasing their available resources.

Michael and team, I love the focus of this work on and have to agree with Laura- teaching a subject at any level is a whole new ball game, and even in many K-12 teacher preparation programs the day-to-day skills needed are often overlooked. I think it took me 4 years before I finally had a decent syllabus!  

You mentioned a "canvas course" above for your mentors and mentees and I'm curious, especially with the ongoing challenges of the pandemic, if you've given any consideration into evolving this into a self-sustaining ongoing community of practice?

My 2nd year of teaching I transferred to an entirely different school and setting and I needed to "relearn" a number of things, so I can definitely imagine something like that being well-received.

Very interesting.  I wish I had math courses in my undergrad and grad days which were a product of this.  Maybe I missed it but I was wondering if the GTA also collaborate/debrief across those in a topic and from year to year?  One thing that I am noticing is that often the variation in experiences between teachers or instructors, teaching the same course in a location – say 4^th grade math in a school or in this case pre-calc at the university – is often significant.  I’m not advocating for a fully prescribed approach but if we find that something works, then shouldn’t we all be doing it?