Brown Bag Lecture

Helping Graduate Assistants Teach: Problems and Solutions

Presented by Eugenia Etkina

May 27, 1999, 12:00 - 1:00pm
Room 259, Educational Sciences Building

In this presentation, Dr. Eugenia Etkina will describe the goals and structure of a new graduate course, "Basics of Teaching Physics" in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rutgers University. The difficulties confronting graduate teaching assistants in large science courses are well known. The purpose of this course is to help physics graduate assistants improve their performance while they teach general physics courses. The main activities of this two-credit, two-semester course are: discussions of general physics teaching methods as well as methods that are specific for certain topics (for example, difficulties that students encounter while learning about magnetic fields), observing the teaching assistants and providing feedback, discussing selected papers in physics education, fostering awareness of the misconceptions and typical difficulties of introductory physics students, and analyzing physics lectures and recitations conducted by other teaching assistants and professors.

Dr. Etkina graduated with honors from Moscow State Pedagogical University in 1982. She has an MS in Physics and Astronomy Education and has taught physics and astronomy in a Moscow middle and high school for gifted students for 13 years. Etkina received her Ph.D. in physics Education from Moscow State Pedagogical University in 1997 and started working as an assistant professor of science education at Rutgers Graduate School of Education the same year. Currently, she teaches courses in science and physics teaching methods for preservice and inservice elementary, middle, and high school school teachers, and graduate students in the Physics Department.

National Institute for Science Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Copyright (c) 1999. The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents. All Rights Reserved.
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Last Updated:  May 05, 2003