Pedagogy Course for First-Time GSIs

Departments that employ first-time GSIs offer pedagogy courses to provide them with an orientation to the teaching strategies and methods of their discipline and to support them throughout their first semester of teaching. In most departments the course number is 375, but some departments use another number in the 300 range (professional development courses).

The Graduate Council’s Policy on Appointments and Mentoring of GSIs provides that

every first-time GSI must either have completed or be enrolled in a 300-level semester-long pedagogy seminar on teaching in the discipline offered by the GSI’s department. The pedagogy seminar may only be taken in another department with the advice and approval of the Faculty Advisor for GSI Affairs in the teaching department and with the consent of the 300-level course instructor in the other department. First-time GSIs who fail to pass the 300-level course must retake and pass the course before they are eligible to teach again.

The policy further states that departments must schedule 300-level courses so as to minimize scheduling conflicts with other graduate-level courses. The departmental Faculty Advisor for GSI Affairs is responsible for resolving remaining schedule conflicts for the 300-level course.

As a resource for departmental Faculty Advisors for GSI Affairs in resolving scheduling conflicts, the GSI Center has posted a list of departmental pedagogy courses that are open to GSIs from outside the department:

In addition, the Mentoring Policy requires that when experienced GSIs teach a Reading and Composition (R&C) course for the first time, if the 300-level course they took as first-time GSIs did not include the development of skills needed to teach Reading and Composition, they must take a 300-level course in another department that is tailored to the teaching of R&C prior to or concurrently with teaching their first R&C course (see Mentoring Policy section III B 4).

Some departments’ pedagogy courses have been approved as satisfying a requirement for the Certificate Program in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Please consult the list of qualifying pedagogy seminars to see whether the one you are taking or have taken will count toward the certificate.