S4 E30: Everyone Should Learn to Teach

Dive into our discussion with Drs. Stephanie Bluth and Alyssa Bivins from the Graduate Division! The host, Dr. Rachel Yoho, explores how our guests developed their innovative graduate teacher training programs, the importance of strategic unit collaboration across universities, and why everyone could benefit from having teaching skills. Find out how the Graduate Division developed evidence-based solutions to a ubiquitous issue in higher education: how many college instructors do not receive any teacher training before stepping in front of a classroom. Listen in as they share their experiences in creating productive communities of practice not just for graduate instructors, but for anyone who wants to talk about and assess their teaching. 

Resources: George Mason University Graduate Division:  https://graduate.gmu.edu/, Yoho, Rachel and E. Shelley Reid. Establishing Teaching Centers as Partners in Institution-Wide Initiatives. POD Perspectives, Vol. 1, Iss. 1 (2024), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.15868/socialsector.44761  

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Rachel 0:08

Hello and welcome to the Keystone Concepts in Teaching podcast from the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning at George Mason University. I'm your host Rachel Yoho, and I'm very excited for this episode where we are joined by two guests from the Graduate Division at George Mason University. So I'll ask our guests to introduce themselves and we'll jump right into our conversation.

Stephanie 0:32

Hi. I am Dr. Stephanie Bluth and I am the Director of Graduate Student Success and Professional Development here in the Graduate Division in the Office of the Provost. And I am also affiliate faculty in Counseling and Clinical Mental Health in the College of Education and Human Development.

Alyssa 0:51

Hi. I'm Dr. Alyssa Bivins. I'm the Senior Graduate Professional Development Coordinator, also here in the Graduate Division with Stephanie. I also work as an adjunct professorial lecturer in History at George Washington University, and I've been here for a little less than a year at George Mason, but I've been loving it so far.

Rachel 1:13

Well, that's great. Thank you both so much for joining us. I'm really excited for this conversation because I think we have a lot of great resources and opportunities that we can talk about from your office. So with that, can you just get us started with a little bit about your office, a little bit about the types of work that you do and how that'll kick off our conversation today?

Stephanie 1:35

That's a great question. We get this question a lot, like what does the Graduate Division do? What are you responsible for? So let's start with kind of the overarching, so graduate career and professional development is vast, right? We have master's students, we have postdocs, we have grad certificates, and we have doc students both on the PhD, EdD. So we have all of these different types of degrees and our office serves students across the gamut at all of our regional campus locations. So that's Mason Square, SciTech, our Potomac Science Center as well as here in Fairfax. And so how we do that is we do everything from funding and resource allocation, so that's scholarships, fellowships, graduate assistantships, graduate teaching assistantships, graduate lecturers. Our services start at orientation, which we offer for university-wide, and it goes all the way until commencement as our office is also responsible for degree candidacy and eligibility and things like that. So in the long run, we like to say our office is the service office and then their academic department is their academic area. And so we are the service resource for everything in between about the student success journey at the grad level outside of the classroom is the kind of like the basics is how I like to explain it without going into too much detail.

Rachel 2:56

Yeah, that sounds great. And so one of the things obviously that with the podcast we're interested in is teaching. So maybe some of our listeners are some of the people interacting with your office. Maybe some of our listeners are faculty or instructors across other types of appointments. And so one of the things that I'd like us to talk about are some of the resources that you offer for graduate student instructors, particularly as they are getting started. Teaching is hard. What are some of the resources that you have that we can explore here?

Stephanie 3:29

Oh, I would actually have some great new stuff we want to talk about, but in the beginning, grad students go from being an undergrad to a grad and then taking responsibility in the classroom immediately. And so we see it as constant development from the first day of your master's program where you might be responsible for mentoring an undergrad researcher, or you are a postdoc and you may be responsible for running a lab or training master's level students. And so we try to see teaching development and teaching training as more of a holistic view of what teaching could look like in all different types of environments, whether that be in front of a classroom as instructor of record or a little less formal in the idea of you're a classroom coach or you're working with undergrads who are in your labs, and so we try to think about our programming in this way. What might students be doing that is considered teaching informally or formally? And then how can we help prepare them for that? That they may have either gotten a little bit of in undergrad or they may be completely new. And so we start out with what we call a graduate teaching training, and it's more like an online orientation that anyone who might be in any type of teaching environment could use. And so we tried to build something that talked about classroom management, talked about the type of what we like to call our COVID generation of student and what that could mean across the classroom environments, whether that be labs, online classrooms, again, outdoor research classrooms that we have here, like at our Smithsonian Science Center, or just in a regular lecture classroom of 300 students, right? That is a wide array of what students could possibly be doing, so we kind of built our graduate teaching training to provide just what we call a base level to provide a uniform access to graduate teacher training for every individual. And this was something the Provost just really wanted to keystone as a push just in the last two years. So we were allowing colleges to kind of host their own graduate teaching trainings. But there was no idea of the quality, or there was no control over who was being taught what and in what capacity. So when we did our graduate student experience survey two years ago, what we asked is what type of training do you feel like you missed before you were put in front of a class? What type of training would've helped you in your first semester, and as a student, what could your TA have known or done better for you as an undergrad? And then we used that to build and answer those questions, and that's how we developed our SkillCraft training. And so SkillCraft is a continual once a month, we call it a community of practice. So you don't have to be a graduate teaching assistant or a graduate lecturer, but it's anyone who's in that lab environment who would like to come to a community of practice and ask other students, how are you handling these type of environments? Because we feel like students were needing to ask other students that peer mentorship. So the SkillCraft monthly sessions that we host with the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning, um, allow us to cross collaborate, right? That is a hundred percent partnership. We are not experts in anything that we do, so we try to make sure that we collaborate with some of the great stakeholders on campus already so that we're not saying that we know teaching. We don't know teaching, we know students, but we know the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning knows teaching. So to get right- right!

Rachel 7:10

Well, that's good. Hopefully! Just kidding.

Stephanie 7:11

We, we wanna make sure that everyone knows that we understand who the experts are. Our job as the Graduate Division is to bring the students to the experts and the experts to the students.

Alyssa 7:21

I wanna jump in, Stephanie, on something you've mentioned about collaboration. So all of the projects mentioned so far, like SkillCraft, even the graduate teaching training are a product of collaboration. The graduate teaching training is developed by our office in partnership with information from all the other offices, and so we're introducing these teachers to the resources that exist around the wider George Mason campus. So they get information about graduate student life, disability services, ways they can help their students so that they're not going into the classroom lacking support. And so that's another example of how we've helped create this with the help of others, similar with SkillCraft, right? So Stephanie talked about how we worked on that with the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning. The nitty gritty of that is really helping students in the classroom while they're teaching. So there's two different options. Stephanie was talking about how it's throughout the semester, there's also a bootcamp offered during the summer. So say a student finds out they're going to be a graduate teacher a little late in the game and they need a little bit of extra support, we help support the Stearns Center with our SkillCraft Bootcamp to help get them prepared to enter the classroom with the basics of assignment design, syllabus design, classroom climate management, right? The basics of teaching that are so fundamental to making sure it all works. We've worked with partners to kind of make these things happen.

Stephanie 8:42

And so we've been really trying to make sure that as new programming gets developed for our adjunct faculty, for our clinical faculty, that we're that voice that says, Hey, what about our student teaching faculty? What about our student lecturers? How could they use this service? And so we've been slowly, at the Provost's behest, adding little bits of student teaching experience to all of the services the university already has to offer so that we're not recreating the wheel, right? So we're really about opening opportunities. I think that's what something Alyssa and I really focus on, is how can we open up opportunities? Because we are a small staff, we can't develop a whole bunch of stuff, right? And I think every university could really use that mindset. I think we should do more together. We are always talking about doing more with less. And I did a whole LinkedIn post about doing more together. And I think that if we did that as these individual academic units, we could prepare students to be anywhere. They could teach anywhere. They could train corporate, they could become nonprofit developers.

Alyssa 9:49

I wanna jump in, Stephanie, I'm sure can say a little bit more about thinking about the job market and teaching, we've also started to roll out digital badges to try to really support people who have invested in teaching and show that this is a valued credential and a valued piece.

Stephanie 10:05

Well, the digital badges are huge and they kind of go along with the idea of everybody should be trained to teach, right? In my opinion, everybody should be trained to teach. It makes you a better employer, employee across the board, makes you a better teammate and collaborator. Teaching skills allow you to do so many different types of jobs in so many different environments. And I think that we sometimes miss out. We're like, oh, if I'm not gonna be in a classroom, I don't need teaching. Everybody could stand to learn how to be a better teacher. But we've created these digital badges. And we've built them around the idea that you have absolutely no teaching experience, but you're looking at training or opening up possibilities for yourself, especially in this current job market where people are finding even more often that they're having to return to the work world or having to change careers and they're looking for something that opens up a skillset on their own time. Maybe they don't have the time to get an entire teaching degree. So we offer these digital badges that get them started, that offer a Credly credential that they can add to their CVs or their resumes or their LinkedIn, they're virtual, and they can be done on their own time. And so again, that's another partnership with the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning. I'm starting to feel like this is us selling the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning.

Rachel 11:20

Oh, that's okay! Totally!

Alyssa 11:22

It's also a partnership with the Continuing and Professional Education Office, right? The Continuing Professional Education, they offer a lot of these digital badges, so it's got lots of partners, but we do love our Stearns Center. We gotta say.

Rachel 11:35

Well, and I think that you both make such a good point, especially about different types of campus-wide offices, whether we're talking about your work with the grad division, whether we're talking about us in the Stearns Center, these are all small offices relative to thousands of faculty and tens and tens of thousands of students. And so scale is so important. The partnerships are so important. You know, how do we make things that can have the reach that can roll out over whatever time period? Dr. Shelley Reid from the Stearns Center and I wrote a paper about a year ago about some of the partnerships and having strategic partnerships as a teaching and learning center and what you can do there. The same thing can be said for your office as well. What does this look like? How do we scale? How do we have that impact as well? But I think this is such a great point, especially when we're thinking about bringing new people into community, especially community around teaching 'cause we don't have that opportunity very often, right? The work that you all do, is so revolutionary as well in that even the people hired in to teach often do not have teaching training. You might have the disciplinary training, you might have all the things and maybe the knowledge to go up there and replicate maybe what you saw as a student that might just be talking at people. And so taking that into these other spaces, graduate students of all these different appointment types, different degree types, bringing teaching training to them through partnerships or through some of these other opportunities is even that much more impactful when the whole profession maybe does not always have that expectation of teaching training, right? So I think here, you know, one of the things that maybe we can dig a little bit more into is where are some of the areas of particular importance for current faculty in working with, in mentoring maybe some of these earlier career instructors? So any graduate students, different degree types, postdocs, you know, anything in that "I'm kind of newer to teaching." So where are some of the areas of particular importance that they can be partners and supportive as well?

Stephanie 13:45

I think that's actually a great question. I always try to remind faculty to help students realize that teaching is iterative.

Rachel 13:51

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Stephanie 13:53

Right? That it's an iterative process; that students have a tendency to wanna be perfect. To want to do things perfectly, to have perfect assignments, perfect discussion board posts, perfect grading rubrics. And they come out really strong with what they believed they needed to be successful. And often what we find is GTs come in with these really high expectations with how their students are going to behave, how invested their students are going to be and how prepared their students are going to be. And so all of those expectations can lead to a lot of disappointments in that first semester of teaching. A lot of struggles, a lot of, I don't think I wanna teach anymore. Um, I think I would rather be a grad research assistant than a grad teaching assistant. How do I get out of this position? I'd rather grade and not talk to students at all." And so I like to believe that higher ed and PhD students and even master's students, we're really great at our discipline. There's a reason we focus so much on it, but teaching the discipline to someone else is a completely different skillset. Learning and teaching are completely different skillsets, and so I always try to remind faculty to remember to tell your students, to tell your mentees that this is iterative. This is a growth process. Faculty who stop learning how to teach become stagnant. And so just the way they are learning theory, they're learning teaching, and so they may have needed note cards and preps and tests to help learn the material, they need to be spending just as much time training, learning, experiencing, and practicing creating a syllabi. And practicing creating an assignment and then evaluating that assignment. How do I evaluate my assignment success? How do I evaluate that quiz? How do I evaluate learning at every step of the process so that I can change my class as I go? I think students get into this, I gotta do it this way." Even if they're six weeks into the semester and they're still trudging along, they're refusing to change course, I think, that's when faculty mentors must step in and remind them, "Hey, are you assessing? I know you wanna keep moving forward, but have you stopped to assess how the first six weeks went?" And I think, Dr. Crystal Anderson is really great about this when she's leading the SkillCraft training sessions. She's always reminding students, "Okay, what happened when you practiced that? How did it go?" And I think that's why that community of practice, that SkillCraft is so important because they come back and they say, "Well, I tried that flipped classroom thing. And it didn't really work out for me." And then we can discuss as a big group what they could have tried differently. I think that's how our training in itself is innovative. If we don't just toss students into Mason LEAPs trainings, which is our training platform. But we actually say, how is the training working for you? Have you tried that? We give them case studies, we give them examples of student populations and then we say, "Okay, with this student population, how do you think that activity is gonna work? How do you think that's gonna come out?" And so I think one thing mentoring must do is remind students again this is an iterative process. Training and skill development is something you have to be comfortable with. And being uncomfortable in a classroom should be comfortable. If that makes sense. And just to remember, to learn to assess yourself and your processes and be okay with changing midstream.

Rachel 17:23

Absolutely, we're not born as a great teachers. You know, certainly just like when we see, for instance, if we compare to public speaking. You know, some people are better public speakers than others, but they also took practice to get there. And that's a hard hurdle, as is that hurdle of when you first start teaching or mentoring or tutoring that every other student isn't exactly like you. We might get certain types of students who follow those paths to become teaching assistants who might want to become instructors or might not want to. But not everyone is approaching things the same way. Not everyone has the same passion for the discipline. Not everyone's the same type of engaged student. And that's, that's a rough one right there.

Stephanie 18:08

Right. Yeah, exactly. Seeing that there are students that are different than you, and how do you teach a student who doesn't learn in the way that you're comfortable with explaining? Right? I think that's the question.

Rachel 18:21

Yeah, absolutely.

Alyssa 18:22

To address the diversity of so many of our students and just students in general, one of the things I like to always turn back to are the learning objectives and recommending to early instructors to look at the learning objectives as opposed to all of the accoutrement around it. So often you can get excited about designing an activity. You start to use all of these new tools. You get really deep into it. But are you actually meeting the learning objectives with that activity? And thinking about a student, if they're not learning in the same way, that's okay. Are they meeting the learning objective? Right? And going back to that, that main goal 'cause that can help the newer faculty or a graduate teacher to be adaptive and not only think about there's only one way to do it, but instead to really think about the learning objectives and learning outcomes.

Rachel 19:08

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a lot of this that we see even for full-time instructional faculty, all of the tools, the softwares, the plugins, the cool things you can do are not a substitute for good teaching. Or not a substitute for is my course aligned? Are we looking from the backwards design from our learning outcomes through what our students are showing that they learn through all the way back into the content there? We can do all the cool things we want, but if they're just cool things, maybe we're not spending our time wisely. But yeah, these are such great points. One of the other things that your office does is the IDP. So can you tell us about that acronym first and what that looks like?

Alyssa 19:50

Yeah, so our IDPs, IDP stands for individual development plan, and IDPs are a really key part of not only graduate student development, but also postdoc development and sometimes as well in industry. And our IDP that we've provided for our graduate students actually does put teaching into the mix. And so the IDP is really meant to have students evaluate and assess their strengths and areas for improvement. Look at the resources that are out there, to reach those areas for improvement or continue to hone their strengths. Make a plan for how to then actually use those things. So don't just collect a list of all the resources you have and then set it to the side and never look at it until you graduate, but make an actual plan to use them. To talk with their mentors about their goals, and then to use that plan to really set a roadmap for development. And for some programs, teaching might be a part of the milestone of the program. So it's something that they have to do in order to graduate, and therefore, including development and preparation for that into their IDP could be crucial. In the self-assessment, there is a teaching section, and so it analyzes different areas that you could improve in your teaching. Maybe you've designed a syllabus but never actually gotten up in front of a group of students and tried it out, and so it helps you to break down what are the elements of teaching that I actually need to improve in. Maybe the student has a lot of training. And maybe they even wanna go further and want to teach at the K to 12 level when they graduate, or, you know, pursue something further. Well, what are the certifications they need for that? What are the things that they then need to pursue? So thinking about teaching as just one of the many different skill sets that you can get coming out of graduate school and developing in graduate school to help you meet your larger academic and career goals. That's what the IDP is really all about. Setting a plan, discussing it, being prepared, and being intentional about the graduate journey.

Rachel 21:43

It sounds like it has come a long way since I was a PhD student and postdoc. Um, but with that,

Stephanie 21:50

I think we can all say that IDPs have come a long way.

Rachel 21:53

Um, yeah.

Stephanie 21:54

Um, I think that ages us.

Rachel 21:55

Oops!

Stephanie 21:55

I remember my IDP process and yeah and teaching was a part of my PhD program. We had six credit hours of college teaching, and I still wasn't ready for the classroom. I admit that. It took me a long time. We were training to be clinicians, and teaching was just this thing we were required to do to meet our milestone. I think this intentional IDP process that Alyssa's being very, um, humble and she spent the entire summer designing this process. So I just wanna make sure she gets the credit for that. But it is innovative in that, again, everyone should have teaching as a skill, because I really do believe it helps across career foci, no matter what you're doing, teaching and collaboration and teamwork are all part of that. And helping people understand you is a huge part of where we are as an industry and a country right now, is helping people to be understood and understand where we're coming from. And so teaching is really great for that. But the IDP process that Alyssa has built is so iterative in the fact that it doesn't matter where a student is from humanities, business, college of engineering, they can use this IDP process. And so I'm not gonna let her downplay amazing she has built because it--

Alyssa 23:08

They can also, they can also come talk to me. So the graduate division has set up a program whereby students can make IDP individual consultations with our office. And I've held a couple of these with students who are outside of my area. So my doctorate's in History, I've met with students in Engineering, Public Policy, students in the Carter School for Peace and Conflict. And in each of these, the students really have walked away saying, "I've never just thought about what I want to do and how I'm going to do it as a part of being intentional about graduate school," right? We often go into school and we're set on a path. K to 12, we go K to 12. We graduate high school. Okay, then we're maybe hustled along to undergraduate. We know what's expected of us now we graduate, but graduate school's a whole different ball game. And so the IDP is really an opportunity for these students to chat sometimes with me, but also with their mentors and with their peers, and really be intentional about what do I want from this graduate experience, and how am I going to use the resources available to get that, so that I can walk away feeling like this was a successful graduate student experience and journey for me?"

Rachel 24:17

Yeah, I think that's such a great point because especially when we're thinking about, well, what's actionable here for our faculty who might be in full-time appointments or even part-time appointments who might be working with graduate TAs or graduate instructors in their teams or mentoring them or any other working relationship there? I think here, especially the opportunity with the IDP and even those conversations like you are all talking about in terms of, you know, it's not just teaching skills, it's communication skills, mentoring skills, collaboration skills, it's all these other things and probably many more that we haven't even mentioned in this conversation, that you build through classroom management, through grading, feedback. These are skills. How do I articulate those? How do I develop those? And I think these are such great points here. Anything else that you'd like to share with us? I know we've just barely scratched the surface here, but other things that you'd like to maybe leave our listeners with for this conversation?

Alyssa 25:19

So we do have a number of other resources, and I'd love to plug them as the main program designer and coordinator with a wonderful leader in Stephanie. We do have several programs that are supportive in teaching-adjacent skills, is what I would call them. So we offer support in mentorship, in communication, in research. For example, once a semester, we offer an entering mentoring training, which is a training that is led by myself and Stephanie and some of the other members of the faculty that have been CIMER trained. So those are people who received training from the Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research, CIMER, it's all long adjective, uh, at the University of Wisconsin. And this entering mentoring training can be attended by faculty and graduate students who are teachers to learn about some of the best practices for mentoring. And some of the best teaching, I think also goes hand in hand with mentorship. And it's also a way for mentors to learn to be even more supportive guides for the graduate students in their lives, whether they're graduate student researchers that they supervise, or whether they're graduate student teachers supporting their classroom. So that's one training set that we offer. We also offer our Communication Academy, which is a good opportunity for students who maybe feel a little uncomfortable getting up in front of people and speaking. And so even though Communication Academy has workshops that are dedicated towards networking, towards learning to write a little more clearly, that are about telling a story with research, it's really about being willing to open up and being comfortable communicating with different groups. And so sometimes that can be helpful for early career teachers as well. We also finally, I will say, I think the best way to learn something is to teach it. That's something that I think a lot of people agree with. For me as well, I think I learn certain concepts better once I've taught them once to my class. And so we do have our research competitions as well. I think that when students are given an opportunity to teach their research, whether it is presenting at the research poster competition that we run, or presenting at Three Minute Thesis, in getting better in their discipline, they can then feel more comfortable teaching that to other students, and it becomes a feedback loop where the better that they feel and comfortability that they feel in their field, they then can teach it, then get even stronger in their research. And it's such a wonderful, sort of collaborative, iterative way that research and teaching can go together.

Rachel 27:49

Absolutely. I think, you know, from our conversation today, we're really looking at the keystone concept that we were talking about earlier, that teaching is holistic. It's not just about the skills for the teaching itself. It's not just in the four walls or the Canvas course or that kind of space. But we're looking at skill building, at skill development. We're looking at things that transfer into many other areas, but also looking at how we have a community. We don't do things in isolation even though teaching can feel very isolating. We have a community, whether that's our resources, our collaborators, our lead teachers, other people in our department. I think even our conversation about IDPs really emphasize how we have other stakeholders, whether those are our mentors or just other people near us that we learn from sometimes that "from" is what not to do. But we learn, we communicate, and having to build community as we grow as well. So thank you both. So much for your time. I'm very glad we had a conversation about some of the great work that you all do, especially through the partnerships and the things that we can bring to students and newer instructors as they start out on their teaching journey as well. So thank you so much for your time.

Alyssa 29:04

Thank you so much, Rachel. This was great.

Stephanie 29:05

Yeah, thank you for having us. We really appreciate getting an opportunity to let people know what the grad division is doing and all the new stuff and amazing things we do every year.

Alyssa 29:13

And we love our Stearns Center partnership!

Rachel 29:17

Yeah, absolutely. All right, well, thank you. And please catch our next episodes. We're posting every two weeks on Keystone Concepts in Teaching during the fall and spring semesters, and you can find us on your favorite podcast listening platforms. So thank you and I look forward to catching you in another episode.