Categories: GSI Online Library, Teaching Effectiveness Award Essays
By Ishani Chesire, Astronomy
Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2025
It was a situation many GSIs are familiar with: following the first midterm in Astron 7B, a student approached me looking nervous and asked to talk about her grade. She had not done well in the midterm, but even before that, she had been struggling with the weekly problem sets, often turning them in unfinished. I asked her if she knew anyone else in the class. She did not.
In every class I have served as a GSI for, I have noticed this trend: the students who are at the very bottom of the class are, nearly universally, alone. They don’t have a study group; they often don’t know any of their classmates. It’s not difficult to understand why these students struggle. Astrophysics homework sets are quite difficult—partially due to the nature of the material, and partially on purpose, to encourage such collaboration. It’s also not difficult to see why students get stuck like this—if you miss your chance to form a study group in the first week, it can be very hard to join one later. This ‘collaboration gap’ was rapidly becoming a problem for me. Even though I have always included collaborative activities (e.g. Think-Pair-Share) in my sections, it wasn’t solving the fact that some students were being left behind. Because I allowed students to choose their partners, existing study groups paired together, leaving those without established connections in the class—often those who were struggling the most—to pair with each other. In discussion, a binary pattern emerged: groups had either completed the practice problem easily, or they had struggled to even get started and given up completely.
To address this uneven distribution of knowledge, I decided to make some extreme changes in the way I ran discussion. First of all, I started randomly assigning partners. This broke up established study groups and mixed together students of different ability levels. This was obviously beneficial to the students who were struggling, but it was also beneficial for more advanced students, as teaching others is often the best way to reinforce the material. Second of all, I required students to work on the board, allowing me to more easily see if all students were engaging in the problem-solving process. Finally, at the conclusion of boardwork, I started to ask students to explain their work to the class, with the caveat that the student who did the explaining could not be the same student who had been writing on the board—another way of making sure students had to work together.
I am not afraid to admit that students, at least at first, did not enjoy these changes. The random assignment especially was uncomfortable in multiple senses—it asked students to get up and physically move around the room, then it asked them to talk to a stranger about their work. However, upon implementing the new policies, the change was instantaneous. I had thought my classroom was fairly active and engaged before, but suddenly every group was discussing the problems loudly. It was the good kind of chatter—the kind that, as a GSI, you’re reluctant to interrupt at the end of class. I could hear students disagreeing about methodologies and asking each other questions that got at the root of the material. I could hear previously quiet students now able to engage, no longer feeling stuck on the first step. Finally, I could hear students who had previously been content to enjoy agreement from a like-minded study group, now have to defend their approach to their peers—and come out stronger for it.
For me, the difference in my classroom has been night and day since implementing these policies. I’m used to students losing a bit of energy and verve as the semester wanes on, but this year that has not been the case. Instead, they have had admirable enthusiasm as they learn different methods from different students every week. I’ve even had students approach me to tell me that the random partner activities were extremely helpful to them understanding the material. But to me, the strongest endorsement of my methods was when I saw the student who had previously approached me after the first midterm, now working happily with a new study group—the very one she had been randomly assigned earlier that week.