Hello! My name is Philip Parel and I was an Undergraduate Learning Assistant (ULA) for CHEM 1112: General Chemistry 2 in Spring 2020! Prior to coming to GW, I had not been exposed to the concept of learning assistants and I was not sure what to expect when I was first presented with this opportunity. So, for the students interested in becoming a future ULA, I just want to take the time to talk about some of my experiences as an ULA in the context of a Chemistry classroom.
My first few days as an ULA were a bit intimidating. I wasn’t sure what to expect from my host instructor, I wasn’t sure how I should proceed about helping my peers in the host classroom, and I wasn’t sure where I was going to sit - was I supposed to integrate myself with the students, or sit apart as I was not a student in the class? But, luckily, my host instructor was very polite and comforting and, during our first few meetings, we laid out each of our expectations, how I could contribute to the classroom lectures, and how I would go about helping the students. As an ULA, my role was to integrate myself as much as I could into the classroom - sit with the students, talk about our expectations from the class, and even talk about events outside of school. I think one of the most common misconceptions is that ULAs are like TAs, which is not true. If anything, ULAs are much more like a friend who’s already taken your class and who you go to for help. We don’t help grade tests, we don’t help make tests, and we don’t have access to grades. We do, however, have office hours, review sessions, and participate in the lecture in order to help students.
In this blog, I also want to expand a bit on my role in the classroom. I think one of the biggest misconceptions I held was that, as an ULA, I’d be sitting near the professor and helping him with the lecture. However, this is not the case! ULAs try their best to sit in the middle of the classroom and we listen to the lecture, just as other students. When in-class examples appear, it’s our job to locate any students who appear to be struggling or who call for our help, and to sit with these students and help them understand the problem. This is an important distinction, as our goal is not simply for students to get the answer to the problem. We often ask students conceptual questions related to the problem at hand in order to guide the student to arrive at his/her own answer. Each student often sits in a group, so we also try to encourage discussion within the group so that, collectively, the students can all contribute to each other’s knowledge and arrive at the correct answer and correct process together. This approach not only deepens individual thinking, but also allows students to get exposed to the thought processes of other students, thereby allowing for a collective deepening of knowledge and problem-solving skills.
Of course, mistakes are made along the way - I sometimes didn’t know the answer to a problem and I sometimes guided students along the wrong problem-solving path. But, this is a learning experience for ULAs as much as it is for students. As an ULA, I learned to own up to my mistakes and to be able to sit down with students when I didn’t know how to solve a problem in order to solve the problem together with the students. For this reason, I would definitely recommend the ULA program to any students interested in becoming future learning assistants.
Until next time.
- Philip Parel