How One Graduate Teaching Assistant Restructured a Course on Teaching Undergraduate Research

Joseph Starr 1 Lori Adams1

1The University of Iowa

Preparing undergraduate researchers for graduate school by developing their instruction.

The course

The course, ISA:4040 Teaching Your Undergraduate Research is based on the prior work of Hoffmann and Lenoch (Hoffmann & Lenoch, 2013) but reimagined for undergraduates engaged in undergraduate research. The course’s established goal is to provide experience in instructional design and implementation to undergraduates whose intention is to continue to graduate school. The course has been offered for approximately five years by The Iowa Sciences Academy a division of The University of Iowa, whose mission is to support the success of undergraduate students interested in research and scientific communication. In that time the design of the course has primarily been that of a traditional course, relying on lecture and written/oral assignments taking the form of a term project. The term project asked students to produce a teaching unit for a general audience lesson on the student’s own research work. This teaching unit design and execution were graded against a common rubric.

The Redesign

The redesigned course adopts modern instructional techniques such as a gradual release of responsibility model (Fisher & Frey, 2013) and ungraded assessments (Stommel, 2023).

The Design Goals

The following goals were established to drive the redesign of the course:

  1. Students can engage in teaching as a structured activity.
  2. Students are confident to “go rogue” in their own learning.
  3. Students acknowledge that failure breeds success.

The Plan: Gradual Release

The course began with a model lesson presented by the instructor, based on the instructor’s own research. This was followed by a group discussion where the design of the model lesson was unpacked giving a practical example for backward design in the wild. This was supplemented with specific readings from Understanding by Design (Wiggins & McTighe, 2008). Students were given more agency as the course moved to discussion of assessment. In this section of the course, students were given specific sources and empowered to select their own specific readings. The readings were discussed in a structured jigsaw activity where students were guided in sharing their learning from their selected readings. Students were then asked to prepare and present a five-minute lighting version of their lesson. The final section of instructional content was a peer review of drafts of their lesson. Students were asked to structure their own review requests where they prompted peers for specific feedback relevant to their particular needs. Following the main instructional portion of the course each student took fifty minutes each to give their lesson including prompting feedback from their peers. After all students have completed their lesson, each student conducted a qualitative analysis of their peer given feedback. This modeled a complete life cycle for course creation for each student.

The Plan: Ungrading

The redesigned course has four deliverables for students combined into a portfolio. First, students were still expected to create the teaching unit. Second is a collection of the students’ design documentation detailing the evolution of the goals and design of their lesson throughout the semester. Students are presented with a backward design and encouraged to utilize it in their design process. As they moved through the course activities they were invited to change their minds, “go rogue”, and retain the artifacts of their evolving work. Third, is a collection of reflections on supplemental work. These supplemental assignments were designed and selected by the student. These included but was not limited to; literature reviews of teaching research, substantive extensions of their teaching unit, or self-determined mini-projects impacting their development in teaching. The final item in the portfolio is a collection of peer observation prompts and responses written and analyzed by the student. The redesigned course moves away from a unified rubric and adopts a concept of ungrading built from the ideas of Jesse Stommel (Stommel, 2023) as well as discussions with practitioners who have implemented similar methods. The ISA:4040 upgrading strategy fits closely the professional one-to-one and performance review paradigm. Students were required to attend office hour one-to-ones with a minimum once a month plus once on the week before they teach, but were encouraged to attend office hours as frequently as desired. During these meetings the students’ personal course objectives were discussed, agreed on, and progress evaluated. The semester culminated with a performance review where the portfolio is reviewed, and a course retrospective establishes a grade against the agreed on course objectives.

The Research

As a portion of a more extensive scholarly review of the Teaching Your Undergraduate Research course paradigm data was collected on experience of students in this course. Data was collected from students (n=7) during interviews which were conducted during final retrospective meetings.

The Interview

The interview was structured with a standardized question set which addressed the following areas of interest:

  1. General Experience
  2. Teaching Unit Development
  3. Learning Outcomes
  4. Feedback and Revision
  5. Impact of Grading Methods
  6. Broader Benefits

Preliminary Report

Data is still being processed as such only preliminary results are presented here. Student feedback during touchpoints indicates an increase apperception for the intricacies of instruction as well as increased confidence in students' self-identification as an instructor. Ungrading, seems to have allowed for students to decouple the failure of an aspect of their preparation from the students’ failure in the course.

Overall, the gradual release and ungrading models were successful for this small group of undergraduates. Extending these ideas to other course sections would provide additional broader data that would help us disaggregate data across several subgroups of students. We will continue using these instructional strategies and look for others that will help support our three goals.

References

Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2013). Better Learning Through Structured Teaching: A Framework for the Gradual Release of Responsibility. ASCD.

Hoffmann, D., & Lenoch, S. (2013). Teaching Your Research: A Workshop to Teach Curriculum Design to Graduate Students and Post-doctoral Fellows. Medical Science Educator, 23(3), 336-345.

Stommel, J. (2023). Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop. Hybrid Pedagogy Inc..

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2008). Understanding by Design. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.