Chalk Radio

Teaching Teachers with Dr. Summer Morrill

Mar 22, 2023

18:37

Nobody comes into this world already knowing how to teach—and most students arrive at undergraduate or graduate programs without any teaching experience at all. For those who are selected to be teaching assistants, the prospect of facing a classroom of students for the first time can be terrifying. To assuage those fears and provide pedagogical skills, the Biology department at MIT runs a training program for new TAs; our guest Dr. Summer Morrill helped develop the curriculum for that program, as well as serving as an instructor in it. In this episode, Dr. Morrill describes how she designed the content of the training program to reflect the specific challenges Biology TAs typically face in their first semester. Among the topics she discusses are the importance of empathy and inclusiveness in classroom teaching, how the same habits of thought that make effective biologists can also make especially effective teachers, and ways in which the course materials from the training program (which she is sharing in a forthcoming supplemental resource on OCW), would lend themselves to being usefully adapted for training TAs in other disciplines and at other institutions.

Relevant Resources:

MIT OpenCourseWare

The OCW Educator Portal

RES.7-005 Biology Teaching Assistant (TA) Training on OCW

Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions

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