What I wished I knew when I became a Grad Student Instructor
Before the winter semester started I was invited to be a panelist at the U-M School of Information’s Experienced GSI Panel. (GSI stands for Graduate student instructor, a.k.a Teaching Assistant.) It was fun to meet new GSIs (and see some of my previous students!), reflect on my GSI experience, and share tips I wished I had known when I started out. Below are a few pieces of thoughts, and hopefully they could also be helpful for anyone who is or will become GSI in the future.
TL;DR:
1) Don’t be shy — your role as a GSI is important
2) Communicate with the instructor often and early; leverage the team power
3) For teaching: style is nice , but first focus on the content
GSI: a layer between instructors and students
Graduate student instructors are a special group of people in universities, having both the role of instructors and the role of students.
For new GSIs who started out their first term, it’s easy to feel like an imposter since you’re also a student like those who you are going to teach in your class. However, it’s important to realize that your role and responsibility as a student instructor make you ultimately different from other students.
Many schools use the title “Teaching Assistant”, but I really think “Student Instructor” is a more accurate title of the job. Together with — sometimes even more so than — the instructor, YOU shape the experience of the course. You are not just an assistant, but an important factor contributing to the overall course experience.
In addition, GSI are the layer between the instructor and the students, which provides opportunities to bring back questions from students and provide feedback and recommendations to the instructor. My experience is that instructors would often appreciate GSI’s observation in what’s working and what‘s not working, and can make use of GSI’s perspective from interacting with students to improve the course experience.
Working with the instructor: be proactive, reach out, and make use of team resources
One thing that seems straightforward but I really hope I’d known it better, is to be more proactive and have the “owner” mindset. I don’t mean to really own the course — that’s the instructor’s job — but I mean to realize that “I” am partly responsible for what’s going to happen in the class.
With this mindset, I would reach out to the instructor more often especially at the beginning of the term. This would benefit both myself and the instructor, as well as reducing the chance of dropping the ball. Instructors are busy, and would appreciate if the GSI takes the first move (with communication, of course) instead of waiting for task assignments. Being proactive is beneficial to GSI, too— planning ahead and foreseeing what’s coming up allow better workload management and prevent last-minute chaos.
My general recommendation would be — plan for what’s going to happen for 1–2 weeks ahead, and reach out to the instructor to discuss what you and the instructor should do. Being the initiator doesn’t mean taking on extra work — eventually the tasks that need to be done will still, well, need to be done. So, plan ahead to help everyone in the instructional team, including yourself.
Another important tip is to leverage the teaching team resources. You’re not alone in this responsibility of shaping the course experience — there is the instructor, and maybe other GSIs, who are your best ally and resources for saving effort.
I remember my first day on the job, the instructor provided me a template which the previous GSI had used for tracking student grades and performance, and it saved me so much effort from rethinking and remaking one myself. Don’t shy away from reaching out to the instructional team and leveraging their knowledge or effort. In the end, not having to reinvent wheels saves the time for the instructional team as a whole.
Teaching: focus on the content; be clear and honest about answering students’ questions
Teaching is a form of public speaking, and public speaking is nerve-wrecking for many people. That plus my background as a non-native English speaker made me lack of confidence in teaching when I started out.
Looking back, one tip that helped ease my nerves was not to focus on myself or my feeling when I was speaking. I felt unconfident in teaching at first because I would imagine that the audience was judging about if I was fluent, if I sounded smart enough, etc.
Yet in real life, students don’t really care about how I sound or how I feel, but rather they care about whether the information I provide is helpful. Realizing that focus of students helped me switch my focus from worrying about students’ impression on me to delivering better content, which also helped me become a better speaker and instructor.
Another helpful tip was to be really clear about what you know and don’t know, and take time to provide answers to questions you don’t know. I often got questions from students that I can’t answer right away. I learned that it’s perfectly fine to tell students you aren’t able to answer immediately, but you will discuss with the instructional team and reply soon. It’s better to give yourself time to come up with a confident answer as opposed to giving a quick answer which might later be proven incorrect or inaccurate.
One last note — as a student instructor, it’s important to separate the role of “instructor” and “student”. Being an instructor, even a student instructor, means you need to be impartial to every student, including those you personally know, inside and even outside of the classroom to a certain extent. Friendships with students can be built after the semester ends, but while in a instructor-student relationship, it’s important to set the appropriate boundaries.
Epilogue
As someone who have just been through this journey, I can prove that starting out as a first-time GSI is a real challenge. That said, I have grown a lot in this experience being a GSI and am now more confident about myself, knowing what I am capable to do and the impact I can have to help create better learning experience at U-M. I hope the tips can be helpful for new GSI/TAs. Thanks for reading and good luck with the new semester!
