Getting to know the GTA Program with Lauren Oliver

Hello everyone, my name is Zachary, Becky and I am with the San Jose State Communication Studies social media team. Today I have an interview with uh Miss Lauren Oliver, how are you doing? I'm doing well. What about you Doing okay, so I guess we should get started. Uh really quick. Tell us about yourself. Who are you? Your interests? Yeah, wow that's a big question. I... Well I'm a communication studies major and the master's programs. I have a bachelor's degree in English. So I really love literature and writing and communicating and speaking. And my ultimate goal is to be a teacher at a community college so. Nice, okay, so what exactly is the GTA program. So the applications for the GTA program, close, I think every March and so if you are applying to the master's program, you can apply to the GTA program. And if you're already in the master's program, you can also apply. And so essentially, if you become a GTA, there's usually about I think, a a year, you are trained, you get professional development on how to be a teacher, and you get one section of COMM 20s. That's public speaking per semester. And so you are the Instructor of Record. And so you do the class sessions, you do lectures, you plan your own lesson plans, you grade, a-a lot of speeches, three speeches a semester per student with other assignments, like outlines. And then along the way you get training on how to teach and how students learn, and best practices and what it's like to teach at a university, and other things like that. And then in the process, too, you get..um, you get two units of teaching practicum a semester. So you end up with four units of electives towards your master's degree. All right, that's good. What are some hardships to the program? Like what would you say is most difficult about you know, learning to be a teacher? My most challenging thing was last semester. So in the fall, I obviously was teaching all online through zoom as we are at San Jose State. And my students were having a lot of challenges with participation. And so I think that's kind of a big challenge is how do I create an environment where students want to participate? And where we're all really engaged in the discussions and the in class activities. And so I think that was my biggest challenge. But some other challenges my colleagues face are like creating rubrics, knowing kind of how do I best assess these learning outcomes? Yeah, probably mostly those things. Yeah, I could, I could definitely see that with the pandemic could be difficult considering you're moving from a physical classroom to a zoom classroom. So it's a lot harder to keep people engaged, I could definitely see that. Uh but on a side note, what would you say? Are the highlights of being involved? What do you love about the program the most? Yeah, so many things. It makes me so excited when I see my students really learning and engaging with the material and applying it to their own lives in a meaningful way. When my students were struggling with the outlines or APA citations, or how do I integrate sources into an argument, and then I'm able to try to help coach them through that and learn from their failures and learn from each other. And so when a student says, like, "Oh, I get it now", or they produce this amazing outline that's improved on all those areas. They were struggling with that super rewarding for me. Another highlight is class discussions. I love kind of discussion based learning. And so when all the students are, yeah, just engaging with the material and dissecting it. I think discussion comes from like a Greek or Latin word that means to dissect. So when we're just kind of ripping apart all these things and mashing it together in a new way, that's just really exciting for me. Yeah, and seeing my students connect personally has been fun during the pandemic, you know, when it's hard to forge those new friendships...