Dear Beth and all,

It will be exciting to see all these resources, and I too have some syllabi and case studies to share.

I have a suggestion/request.  Could these syllabi and teaching resources be tagged or organized on a website according to the goal of the PD activity, rather like your organization of overarching goals. As your survey results showed, different institutions have different goals and functions of their GTA PD programs: e.g., some for new GTA's vs some advanced for preparing future faculty; some for lab instruction vs some for training TAs in a variety of courses in the department. (In my experience, some goals have more administrative support than others, too, so that can be a problem.) That way we could readily find things other folks are doing that help define and address our needs. 

Also, we use short case studies in a variety of ways to prepare GTA's for possible issues, handling diversity of students, and teaching sensitive topics in biology. Plus, I've assigned our TA's to write caselets that can be use to teach a biology concept to their students. The TAs are often quite good at finding cases that develop quantitative skills and also resonate with student interest.

Thanks so much for sharing!  If you have a need for someone to help with a proposal, please let me know.

Ruth Buskirk
Biological Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin


On Jan 24, 2014, at 8:36 AM, "Shawnda L. Kumro" <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> Good Morning Brenda,
> 
> I would be interested in seeing your agenda and case studies. It would be extremely helpful as we improve our biology TA training.
> Shawnda Kumro
> Lab Coordinator-Lecturer
> Department of Biological & Health Sciences
> Texas A&M University - Kingsville
> Office# BES 106
> Office Phone #: 361-593-2745
> 
> ________________________________
> 
> From: BioTAP on behalf of Leicht, Brenda M G
> Sent: Thu 1/23/2014 6:10 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [BioTAP] BioTAP call for materials to share! Ideas for grant proposal?
> 
> 
> Dear  Beth,
> 
> Last Friday morning, I arranged and co-facilitated a Teaching Workshop for Biology TAs for all intro biology TAs in my department.  The other co-facilitator was from the UI Center for Teaching.  We put together a 3 hr workshop in which we considered a variety of topics and had a number of "case studies" for TAs to discuss.  If it would be helpful, I can make our workshop agenda and case studies available as PDF file.  
> 
> 
> Brenda G. Leicht, PhD
> Lecturer and Course Supervisor in Biology
> 
> Department of Biology
> The University of Iowa
> 319-335-1330
> 
> ________________________________
> 
> From: BioTAP [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Schussler, Elisabeth Ellen [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Thursday, January 23, 2014 4:54 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: BioTAP call for materials to share! Ideas for grant proposal?
> 
> 
> 
> Greetings, again!
> 
> 
> 
> I sent my last message at the very end of the school year, and thought I would follow it up with one more e-mail at the beginning so I could catch everyone coming and going (so to speak).
> 
> 
> 
> I am attaching again the preliminary results of the on-line survey of those working to develop the teaching abilities of biology graduate students (same as I sent last year).  
> 
> 
> 
> At the end of the summary, we created a list of resources we think should be shared among institutions to help each other deliver the best GTA PD possible (e.g. teaching feedback protocols, peer mentoring program procedures, course syllabi, etc.), and we offered to use the BioTAP website to help share these ideas.  
> 
> 
> 
> I am about to start the process of posting information on the web site (http://www.bio.utk.edu/biotap/), so if you have items to share, please send them directly to me ([log in to unmask]), or you can reply to all and share with everyone on the list (there are 115 folks on the listserv!).
> 
> 
> 
> We are also planning for the submission of a full NSF research coordination grant in June, so if anyone has input or ideas for the types of activities we should include (it's for five years of networking and aligning practices across institutions), please let us know!
> 
> 
> 
> Hope everyone's year is off to a good start!
> 
> 
> 
> Beth
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Elisabeth Schussler, Ph.D.
> 
> Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
> 
> Assistant Professor and Director of Biology Teaching and Learning
> 
> University of Tennessee - Knoxville
> 
> 
> 
> e-mail: [log in to unmask]
> 
> phone: 865-974-6825
> 
> 
> 
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