This year (2015-16) I was honored to be part of the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) Graduate Teaching Assistant Fellows program, where I was able to hone my teaching skills. Through teaching other graduate students through workshops, I have gained a greater appreciation for different teaching environments and techniques.I hope that I continue to find these spaces in the future for me to continue to think about teaching critically, and find a community of people to share that experience with.
As part of the fellowship I was enrolled in ALS 6015 Teaching in Higher Education for fall 2015. Through this course I was forced (happily!) to think deliberately and critically about my perceptions of higher education teaching in general, and about the specific skills and practice of teaching at this level. I was surprised to find I had strong feelings about certain things, such as how to assess class participation, and was able to flesh them out through developing a rubric. Though I’ve generally felt comfortable conversing and thinking about teaching, this course provided me with a foundation of terminology, theory and concepts that I feel have prepared me to have more substantive discussions about teaching in HE. I look forward more opportunities such as this where I can build on this foundation going forward in my career.