Assessing and Improving Your Teaching First-time GSIs and seasoned veterans alike look for ways to further develop their teaching. Having someone observe your teaching and gathering student input using midterm evaluations are great ways to spot things you’re doing…
Public speaking, conveying complex information to non-experts, managing teams, evaluating the work of junior colleagues — these are among the many skills GSIs develop in their teaching, and these skills are eminently transferable to career settings in higher education, private industry, non-profits, or governmental agencies. The documents linked below can…
This is a good time in the semester to review ways you can encourage students to engage actively in their learning. The online Teaching Guide for GSIs offers some excellent strategies to use in a variety of GSI-led settings. Active Learning…
Each year the GSI Teaching & Resource Center offers a three-afternoon seminar for faculty on how to work effectively with GSIs and provide GSIs guidance and mentoring in teaching. This year’s three-session seminar will take place on November 5, November 12, and November 19, 2014 from 3 to 5 p.m.
Students commonly experience increasing stress in the last weeks of the semester. There are several campus services you can recommend to help them out. Students can discuss concerns around academic pressures, relationships, career decisions, and personal matters with counselors at Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS, 510-642-9494). These…
Over 800 graduate students gathered for the fall 2014 teaching conference on August 21 and 22. Day 1 of the conference focused on cultural, institutional, and linguistic issues for international GSIs. Day 2, for all first-time GSIs, featured talks and workshops on the nuts and bolts of teaching as a GSI at Berkeley.
Each semester, the GSI Center sponsors a campuswide teaching conference to prepare first-time GSIs for teaching. On this page you will find highlights from the most recent teaching conference, which took place on January 24, 2014. Keynote address by Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton: Growing Our Students’ Intelligence Comments from GSIs…
The GSI Teaching & Resource Center is an academic unit of the Graduate Division. We provide resources for graduate students as they develop professional skills in teaching in higher education, and we work with faculty and departments to assist them in the mentoring and training they offer graduate students in…
As a national leader in preparing graduate students for teaching, UC Berkeley was one of the first universities in the country to create a campuswide policy on the mentoring of graduate student instructors. This policy supports GSIs’ professional…
Elaine Yau, History of Art I have often noted that students who have never had an art history course can be overwhelmed by a commonplace assumption that artistic “masterpieces” are self-evidently great. This point of departure usually results in hackneyed discussions about beauty, perfection, or “pinnacles of civilization.” I wanted my first writing assignment to provide a structured, accessible process for formal analysis that would equip students with a vocabulary from which to build their own interpretations confidently — to treat paintings as primary sources from a moment in history.