Author Description

For the past three years, the Cal State LA English Teaching Associate Program has enabled at least eight graduate students per semester to teach freshmen composition in their own classroom of 18 students. Given a large population who are interested in teaching, more teaching and professionalization opportunities can greatly benefit graduate students since employers value candidates with teaching experience. In order to reach this goal, this project intends to provide that desired opportunity with a graduate student acting as the supplemental instruction (SI) leader assigned to a specific section of ENGL 1010 at Cal State LA and in charge of designing sessions attached to three thematic units in the course. Within this project, I plan to provide some sample SI session plans - along with an ENGL 1010 syllabus to demonstrate how SI positions students as the main focus, as well as detailed explanation for each strategy being used in the plans and how it challenges traditional teaching norms. The SI leader will attend the course with students and offer two workshops each week to reinforce class content, but also foster a collaborative learning environment for students to learn and teach each other. In addition, I will detail how this partnership with a graduate student and professor functions as an informal mentorship whereby graduate students get to observe and ask their assigned professor questions about teaching.