The laboratory is a cornerstone in developing undergraduates’ chemistry learning and engagement in scientific inquiry. But what undergraduates actually do belies faculty and curricula intentions, necessitating further investigation of learning situated within the laboratory. Researchers have consequently shifted their focus towards the graduate teaching assistant (GTA) and identified problematic factors such as teacher-centric approaches and the lack of pedagogical chemistry knowledge. To address these issues, new GTA training models have been developed and evaluated in various ways. However, training programs still transmit pre-packaged teaching practices that neglect the nuances of authentic settings, are infrequent and limited in duration, and are assessed by researchers which prevent GTAs the opportunities to reflect and learn about their own pedagogy.<br/>In response to these limitations, we incorporate Video Club (VC) and Design-Based Research (DBR) as a semester-long professional development (PD) course to establish a practice-based learning community of general chemistry GTAs. We leverage the practice of noticing, legitimization, and critical colleagueship as the conceptual underpinnings that support communal formation. The first year pilot includes six GTAs participating in VC by viewing excerpts of their laboratory video recordings, offering various interpretations of undergraduate sensemaking, and making sense of their experiences through reflection. In the second year, the course will be scaled up to include 24 participants with GTAs from the first iteration serving as VC facilitators. We will analyze video recordings of the VC discussions, participant interviews, GTA artifacts, field notes, and focus group interviews of participants’ undergraduate students to assess the PD’s fidelity and success.<br/>We use VC as a pragmatically grounded solution such that GTAs can collaboratively transform their teaching practices as a function of their learners’ sensemaking. Because VC has never been deployed in the context of general chemistry GTAs, our findings will broaden current understanding of this model for future adaptations. Our usage of DBR provides not only a framework to reiteratively revise VC but also an avenue to involve GTAs as co-participants in design and analysis. Furthermore, we use DBR to produce a learning theory of GTAs’ own pedagogy that currently remains unaddressed throughout the literature.

Establishing a practice-based learning community of general chemistry GTAs through video club and design-based research

2019 Spring National Meeting

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