Reflections on SoTL as Professional Development for Mathematics Graduate Student Instructors

Abstract

In this reflective essay, we––a faculty mentor and two graduate student instructors––consider the implementation and impact of participating in a SoTL course; this 6-week summer course was designed to empower graduate student instructors in the mathematical sciences to collect research data in their fall courses. We will explore our experiences implementing their data collection plans. The faculty member came to better appreciate the limitations of collecting data in one’s own classroom (versus a more broadly scoped research project) and learned how to promote study designs that would better support sufficient student participation for data analyses. For the graduate student instructors, we found that participating in a SoTL experience inspired both to be more reflective and scholarly teachers. With our essay, we aim to inspire and support other departments considering SoTL as a capstone experience in the teaching professional development of their graduate students.