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In short, everything about the architecture says that students are there to sit and listen. At a university with more than 59,000 undergraduates and a student-faculty ratio of 28 to 1, what else could they expect?
Julie Donnelly, a lecturer in chemistry, thinks they can expect something more. The instructor has designed her section of Chemistry Fundamentals II, which meets in this room, to feel smaller than its nearly 400 students. The course is structured to foster collaboration through structured work in small groups, using an approach called team-based learning. Pulling off an interactive, more personal learning environment at this scale would be difficult alone. But Donnelly has reserves: Half a dozen undergraduate learning assistants are in the room, circulating and providing support as students work together.
During one recent session, students took a quiz. In Donnelly’s system, that means students submit individual answers and then get a second chance to work through the questions in their groups. When a student raised her hand during the quiz, a learning assistant noticed, crossed the room and spoke briefly with her, then went to fetch Donnelly. It’s the sort of personal attention that might not be possible in a room where one professor alone must be responsive to hundreds of students.
In broad strokes, learning assistants, or LAs, are undergraduates who are trained to support students’ learning in the classroom. The role, for which they earn money, credit, or both, is distinct from a graduate or undergraduate teaching assistant, or TA, who typically works with students outside of a lecture, often by leading a discussion section or lab, and maybe grading assignments and exams.
Here at UCF, responsibilities of the positions vary by department. During class time, a learning assistant might walk around to answer questions during group work, demonstrate how to solve problems to the full class, or facilitate activities. They might hang around after class to answer questions. Some even hold office hours.
Learning-assistant programs aren’t new: They’ve spread to some 100 campuses in and beyond the United States over the past two decades. That growth reflects the fact that they are poised to meet several of the moment’s most pressing pedagogical challenges. Colleges rely heavily on large sections of high-demand gateway courses, but many students struggle in those settings. Active-learning methods can be beneficial, but they’re difficult to adopt. Students feel a deep, often unrealized need to forge connections with other people, especially on campuses with tens of thousands of undergraduates.
In effect, learning assistants can serve as a force multiplier for good instruction in a large course. At a huge institution like UCF, they make interactive and relational teaching possible in more classrooms.
That kind of teaching, research suggests, can help more students pass their science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, courses, and continue on in their intended majors. It can enhance the understanding of students who were always going to pass. And the benefits aren’t only for the students in the courses: Professors and the LAs themselves also reap rewards.
But for all this promise, learning-assistant programs are largely under-the-radar, grassroots efforts, operating on shoestring budgets. At UCF, provost-level financial support for undergrad TAs and LAs is available to departments in STEM, but there’s no sustained support for faculty development for the professors working with them. It’s left up to departments to figure out how to train and utilize their LAs — and how to get professors to work with them.
That makes it yet another effort to improve teaching that depends on professors’ willingness to take on extra work without a clear incentive to do so. For many professors, that’s a nonstarter. But some of them are doing it all the same. What’s happening in their classrooms suggests it can pay off.
Whatever students like about it, the studio approach would not be possible, Doty says, if she had to teach without any backup. In this section of calculus-based Physics II, taken largely by engineering majors, Doty has the support of a graduate TA, Debbie Israel, and an undergraduate learning assistant, Sinan Majeed. The three had worked together on a class before, and Doty requested both Israel and Majeed again because they had developed a good rapport.
Doty runs her plans past them, Israel says, and is receptive to their feedback and ideas.
Teaching with an LA in the room is “relaxing, and kind of like a relief,” Doty says. It is also more enjoyable.
And the instructional team members are able to see the class from different perspectives, Israel adds. Because she does a lot of the grading, Israel notices when lots of students make the same mistake. Because he learned the material just a couple of semesters before starting as an LA, Majeed is best able to identify with the students, and is sometimes first to see how a widespread misunderstanding might develop.
Unlike Donnelly, Doty teaches in a classroom designed for active learning. She stands at a podium in front of her students, who are arranged at large circular tables with desktop computers that some use, though more work on iPads or in paper notebooks. Students follow along with problems using several screens around the room. When it’s time to solve problems in groups, a few hop up to use the white boards that surround them.
Part of Majeed’s role is to walk around and make himself available as students work on problems in their groups. But Majeed and Israel also take turns with Doty, solving problems in front of the class. There are multiple ways to come at a calculus problem, Doty says, and it’s helpful for students to see different methods. Majeed’s status as a near-peer is also helpful. In one recent class period, she says, he brought up a connection to Physics I while working out a problem. It’s something Doty probably wouldn’t have done in that moment, and it’s the kind of thing that can help students make a meaningful link in what they’re learning.
Majeed also likes to provide students with tips and tricks for solving problems more quickly, he says. Sometimes, he says, professors emphasize a particular solution because it is illustrative of a broader concept in physics, even if it is more time-consuming. But if there’s a shortcut, students will want to know it for the exam.
Even at this somewhat smaller scale, teaching a course with active learning means managing a lot of moving pieces. From her podium, Doty toggles between slides that display questions for students to work through, a projector that lets them follow along as Majeed solves a problem, and a QR code students use to mark their attendance. Sometimes technical difficulties arise. Having an instructional team makes those logistics a lot easier — especially when something goes wrong.
During a recent class period, while working through a relatively simple problem that students might have done in Physics I, Doty accidentally accounted for zero twice.
When Doty paused and asked if anyone had questions, a student asked about how those two zeros fit together. Doty gave him an answer, but didn’t notice her mistake. Israel, though, realized what had happened. Doty moved on to the next problem.
A little while later, Majeed took his turn to work out a different problem in front of the class, narrating his thought process as he went. Meanwhile, Doty and Israel sat behind the podium and again ran through the problem the student had asked about. Doty then understood what had gone wrong.
When Majeed was done, students expected to turn to some group work. Instead, Doty called for the class’s attention, and had them go back to the earlier problem.
“I’m sorry that I missed something on this one,” she said, taking pains to make the moment a learning experience for the class. “Even I can make mistakes sometimes, too.” Her description of her own mistake demonstrated her familiarity with “error framing,” or the way that mistakes can be viewed as part of the learning process. Despite her own research on the subject, it still bothers her when she gets something wrong in front of her students.
She also pointed to the value of her instructional team: “Which is why it’s awesome that I have Debbie and Sinan here to double check things.”
Had Doty been teaching on her own, she says, it would have been much harder to handle that moment, even if she had realized she’d made a mistake. She could have stopped the class to work through the problem again on her own. Or she could have come back to it the next class period. With Israel and Majeed on hand, she was able to correct the problem while it was fresh in students’ minds, without the mistake settling into their memories, or the class falling behind schedule.
Active learning requires juggling. Learning assistants can pick something up if it drops.
After Doty’s class, Majeed chatted with a few students before walking to a neighboring building where the physics learning assistants hold office hours. Two LAs who support different courses were already there.
When Majeed heard about the learning-assistant program in an email from the physics department, he applied right away, because he’d been looking for a job that was related to his academic work. He can also see himself becoming a professor one day — the sort of instructor, like Doty, who pays a lot of attention to teaching. Growing up, Majeed felt dissatisfied with how math was taught. He often found himself wanting to understand the reasons behind the right answers.
A student from Doty’s course, Jonathan Beckford, visited Majeed for help. He had been mulling over a practice problem from class, which asked students to find the electric charge at a certain point, “p”, between positive and negative charges in a system. Beckford, a sophomore majoring in civil engineering, explained to Majeed that he could do the math and get the right answer: zero. But he wanted to know why the answer was zero.
So Majeed and David Monroy, an LA for a course called “Concepts of Physics,” tried a bunch of explanations. The two LAs and the engineering student took turns drawing on the dry-erase board. They erased. They explained. They debated. They got a bit frustrated. They nerded out.
What if the point, “p”, were instead a charged particle? What if it were a point somewhere else in the system? What if they looked at force?
In Majeed’s estimation, students majoring in engineering tend to mainly be interested in getting the math to work. They’re not as drawn to all of the what-ifs as physics majors like him and Monroy. But this student was curious.
Majeed’s office hour is supposed to be just that: an hour. But he says he often stays later. He certainly did with Beckford. As Beckford walked out the door, the LA told him, “Come on Wednesday if you still don’t get it.”
Beckford’s desire to connect a practice problem to the bigger picture reflects a desire to learn that many professors would surely find appealing. But that doesn’t mean they’d be able to attend to it during class time — especially if they were trying to guide many students working on problems together and cover a lot of material.
If a student had questions like these during class, the instructor would quickly redirect in the interest of time, Israel says. But freewheeling, intellectual conversation is really valuable, she says, and help hours are a great venue for it. “At the end of the day, we want to have students get their degrees, but after they get their degrees we want them to become engineers, scientists, doctors.” The goal is not to learn stray information, “like memorize what Gauss’s Law is. We also want to make sure that they know, ‘How can I use this concept in a framework that maybe isn’t so neatly organized as it would be in a classroom setting?’”
The help-hours conversation stayed with both Majeed and Beckford. Majeed did some more digging and approached Beckford in class the following week to share further thoughts. Beckford thought it had taken half of the office hours for Majeed to see what he was really getting at, and he still hadn’t quite gotten the answer he was searching for. But the conversation with Majeed helped him clarify exactly what he was asking, and helped him see how this one physics course fit with the other things he’d need to know as an engineer. It was, he thought, a good use of his time.
Beckford knows how to find answers to his questions by watching engineering videos on YouTube and using ChatGPT, he says. But to understand how one problem connects to everything else he knows? That, he says, takes back-and-forth with another person.
As near-peer mentors, learning assistants are well-positioned to translate between students and their instructor. But LAs are still students themselves. They are not subject-matter experts. They don’t always have the right answer, or know how to get it. And their authority is, by design, limited.
When a reporter described to a group of Donnelly’s LAs observing a student pull up ChatGPT during their quiz, one of the LAs replied that she’s learned from Donnelly that it’s not their job to proctor. The worry is that if LAs policed the back of the lecture hall, students in a class would be less likely to turn to them for help.
To help learning assistants become more skilled at supporting their peers, they take a pedagogy course. This preparation is so integral to the model that the Learning Assistant Alliance includes it in its definition.
The pedagogy courses are quite different from many others students take, especially in the sciences. Here, students get personal. In one such course for chemistry LAs, Donnelly has them sit in a circle and open up by sharing their “roses and thorns” from working in the role.
One recently volunteered that she’d made a mistake in an answer key. Later, when the LA was out sick, the course’s professor told students about the error. When the LA heard about it, she thought the students in the course “probably don’t want to talk to me anymore.”
Donnelly asked the student if she’d lost confidence, and asked the class: “Has anyone else — safe space — like, told a student something and later realized that it was the wrong thing?”
“Twenty minutes ago,” one student said.
Cynthia Bayer is an associate lecturer in biology who teaches a pedagogy course. In biology, LAs support a handful of active-learning exercises throughout the term. Bayer knew some LAs had just done their first one. So to open class, she asked them about it.
One student brought up a frustrating situation in which a student refused, even after being nudged, to participate in a group for an activity.
“So, you offered,” Bayer summarized for the class. “You were encouraging him to be part of the group. But we can’t ever make someone be part of a group.”
Bayer urged the LAs not to jump to conclusions about what drives students’ behavior. Sometimes, she told them, students are not in the “emotional state of mind” to work in a group. Maybe there’s been a conflict among the students who are supposed to be working together. Maybe the unwilling student is just having a bad day.
Bayer put the LAs into groups to do an activity themselves. The topic of the day’s class was group work, which may well be the hardest part of relational teaching to orchestrate. Each group was asked to act out a skit based on a short scenario illustrating challenges in group work, and how an LA might intervene. The scenarios all related to one of active learning’s core challenges: Group work generally helps students learn — but students often dislike it. They can have concerns about fairness in the division of labor and in how they’ll be graded. Plus, classmates might just not get along.
One group’s scenario: An LA approaches a table at which most of the group is talking about partying while one member does the activity alone.
The students had a lot of fun with the skit, playing up the group members’ focus on partying — and acting as though they had a limited grasp of science. When the student playing the part of the LA pressed the group to compare plant and animal cells, one student replied, “I don’t know what it is, but I know both of ’em got a nucleus” before returning to loudly discussing parties. The LA remained composed and tried to get the group back on track.
Afterward, the full class debriefed on other things the LA might have done, like moving students around or getting the instructor to intervene.
But the skit underscored that the learning assistant can only do so much.
Bayer said that an LA might also decide to focus more on the student who was on task rather than trying so hard to engage those who were not. The LA, she said, could act as a surrogate group member for the student working alone. It was good of the LA to try to engage the whole group, she said. But then she reminded them of a hard-earned piece of wisdom that can be difficult to accept, particularly for those who are just becoming familiar with teaching: “You can’t make people learn.”
Still, professors who work with LAs don’t want the practice to be reduced to one more way to improve passage rates. The model, they say, has so many other benefits. If LAs allow professors to create a more interactive classroom, that benefits students who are already high-performing. And near-peer mentorship can model successful student behaviors and help students feel more connected in class and on campus.
Working with LAs can change what’s possible in the classroom, but some professors won’t understand how until they see it in action. Next spring, Bayer plans to have biology professors sit in on the pedagogy course and see how the department’s LAs can support their courses. Maybe some will decide to incorporate more active learning; Bayer can help them with course redesign if they do.
Professors like Bayer, Donnelly, and Doty, whose main professional focus is instruction, are often up to speed on evidence-based teaching practices and eager to use them. Indeed, some of them even research such approaches. They are also likely to be charged with teaching the large-enrollment courses that are often a stumbling block for students who intend to major in STEM.
Large class sizes are far from the only teaching challenge at UCF. Here, as around the country, professors have noticed vexing limitations in students’ preparation and confidence in recent years. Meanwhile, they’re under a lot of pressure to improve student success. Bayer, a dedicated instructor, has found it demoralizing.
Working with LAs is a bright spot for Bayer. Not only do they allow active learning in large courses; working with this particularly engaged group of students also offers an emotional lift.
Another beneficiary is the LAs themselves. The pedagogy courses are small, and reflective, and they provide an avenue for the students who serve to build community with engaged peers in their major. Working as an LA also gives students a chance to forge a closer connection to faculty members. Doty, for instance, has helped Majeed locate and apply for an internship in the physics department.
Becoming a learning assistant might seem like a résumé-building activity, says Diane Saintable, a junior biology major who has been both an LA and a TA. But “I got a lot more out of it,” she says.
Her training included studying Bloom’s taxonomy, a widely used framework for classifying educational goals. Now, Saintable has a deeper understanding of what particular exam questions in her own courses are testing for, she says. And knowing she’ll have to support other students to learn material she’s already moved past, Saintable adds, has kept her from jettisoning information she’ll probably need again later.
“I also love the connection with students,” she says. “Sometimes I feel like, when you’re talking to a professor, usually it’s a doctor, and you’re like: Wow, you know everything. I don’t know everything. And so they’ll teach it like you know everything, but you’re still at this level, while they’re at a higher level.” Saintable can offer a different form of support, because she just learned the same material a few semesters ago, she says. “I understand where you are. This is how I learned it.”
That’s the kind of thoughtful reflection colleges seek to instill in their students. But, paradoxically, it’s also the sort of diffuse outcome that, because it’s not chiefly about supporting students who are struggling, can actually make such programs harder to support and sustain. It’s surely part of why they’re often started by professors hoping to create better learning environments, not administrators looking to help more students graduate.
To see learning assistants as a solution, colleges have to see their responsibility in broader, even loftier, terms. It’s not just about getting students to pass their courses and earn their degrees. It’s about making those courses rich learning environments — for everyone.
