Earth and Ocean Sciences

Teaching Assistants Development

A primary project objective is to enable, facilitate, and support faculty and teaching assistants (TAs) to follow best practices for achieving departmental teaching and learning goals while retaining ownership of their courses. Towards that end, the project will learn what other units and departments are doing to support development of graduate students as teaching assistants, and then develop efficient and effective TA training modules for the earth ocean and atmospheric sciences context.

Training graduate students in best teaching practices will not only help our undergraduates and faculty, but will also improve the effectiveness of teaching that graduate students become involved when they finish their degrees and enter the work force elsewhere.


EOSC 516: Teaching and Learning in Earth & Ocean Sciences
We have established a TA training course for graduate students. The course is run primarily by graduate students who have facilitator training. Enrolment is about 15/year.
  • Learning goals: Course level goals, Learning goals for each session
  • Assessments: Using Physics’ Teaching Attitudes Survey as Pre/Post, Formative Evaluation after each session, Summative Evaluation
  • Methods and materials: Mini-lesson practice, Group discussions, Lab redesign project
Poster (April 2010): Teaching and Learning in the Earth and Ocean Sciences: Adding Geoscience Education to the Graduate Student Curriculum at UBC - Rebecca Taylor and Brett Gilley