TA Program workshop: “How Teaching Assistants Can Use Active Learning to Assess Learning Outcomes”

As a teaching assistant, how do you know that the students are understanding the material before they receive a grade? Are your students missing key information, but you do not know that until they take a test? How do you know if your professor being effective with their lectures (i.e. are the moving on to other topics, when the students do not understand the previous ones or are they covering material again that the students already understand)? During this workshop, Dr. Michael Dunaway will discuss how you can use your discussion sections to assess how well students are comprehending the material and how they are progressing towards the learning outcomes of the class. This session will be hybrid, available in-person and on Zoom.

Dr. Dunaway is currently a Future Professors Postdoc in the Sociology department at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School. He earned his bachelor’s degree in American Indian Studies with a focus on Sovereignty and Decolonization theory at Haskell Indian Nations University.  He received his Master’s in Geography from University of Kansas with a focus on Indigenous Geography and a graduate certificate in Environmental Studies. During his time at University of Kansas, he was awarded the NSF ESPCoR Fellowship, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and was an NSF IGERT Trainee. His doctoral work was completed at Cornell University in the field of Natural Resources. During his tenure at Cornell, he was awarded the Sloan Diversity Fellowship was recognized as a Dean’s Scholar.