Teaching

The Teaching Assistant (TA) Mentors program is sponsored through the Center for Teaching at Learning at UGA. Each year, 15 of the Outstanding Teaching Assistants are invited to participate in the program. This year-long program begins with the preparation for the TA Orientation and focuses on developing instructional strategies, understanding student learning and professional development. For instance, the TA Mentors participated in sessions in service learning, integrating technology into the classroom, and understanding student diversity and diverse learning styles. The TA Mentors program is a unique program that has truly shaped my understanding of pedagogy and broadened my teaching skills. 

Before the start of the fall semester, new teaching assistants attend an orientation where concurrent training sessions are held to prepare students to teach. The TA Mentors play an important role in organizing and conducting the orientation. In 2006, I was a part of a team that conducted training session for graduate laboratory assistants. We held two sessions, each with roughly 50 new graduate students. Our duties were to provide advice on how to best instruct students. The sessions consisted of a brief overview of suggestions for instruction in a laboratory environment and a lively question and answer period. 

I returned to assist in the 2007 TA orientation. This year, I participated in a panel leading a session titled "Strategies for the First Weeks of Class" where we provided an overview of techniques to build a constructive learning environment. I stressed the importance of professional behavior in the classroom. I encouraged all teaching assistants to quickly learn student names, as freshmen and sophomores rarely hear their names spoken by instructors. This simple strategy, in my experience, demonstrates that each student is a welcome participant in a larger learning community.

The CURO Symposium is sponsored by the UGA Honors Programs. This symposium is an opportunity for some of the top students to present the results from their undergraduate research projects. My roles in the symposium included: conducting workshops for the students to prepare their presentations, reviewing and critiquing submitted abstracts, as well as planning and convening concurrent sessions. The workshops were held in both late Fall and early Spring Semesters and demonstrated how to compose a presentation abstract, design poster and oral presentation, and how to deliver their presentation. Students from all disciplines attended and sessions were designed to establish cross-disciplinary sharing of research findings. For example, concurrent sessions included presentations from students in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. My work with CURO gave me an opportunity to mentor very talented young researchers

Matt First's Teaching Portfolio