Participating in Syracuse University’s groundbreaking Teaching Assistant (TA) Orientation program was a life-changing experience for me.  The numerous plenary and breakout-group presentations and workshops provided excellent professional development opportunities to expand my knowledge about the role and responsibilities of a TA and a member of the community of teachers at SU.

 

   TA Mentors demonstrated their obvious passion for teaching through large group, small group, and individual coaching and instructional interactions.  This type of peer training and mentoring has been of particular interest to me during my career as a Simulated Patient (SP) Educator at Upstate Medical University, where I worked as a trainer and coordinator for 12 years.  Coaching hundreds of SPs of all ages and backgrounds to portray the role of the patient in live, medical educational simulations was a large part of my many responsibilities.  Using my training from the BFA in Acting degree program I completed at the SU Drama Department in 2001, as well as by seeking out my own professional development opportunities, I strove to continuously reflect upon and improve my skills as a coach and trainer.  Instructing SPs on accurate performance and assessment procedures; meticulously observing and recording SPs’ performances and conducting analysis on their completed assessments; encouraging SPs’ self-reflection; asking questions of the SP to organically “draw out” the best performance they can give; offering specific, behavioral feedback; and frequently evaluating SPs’ performance – as well as the performance of medical learners and my own performance as a trainer – were just some of the skills that have served me well as a teaching assistant and peer mentor.

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   While at Upstate, I also helped to implement the “Teaching on the Fly” (TotF) and “TotF Mentor” workshops with the Department of Physical Therapy Education at Upstate (our article about these programs can be found here).  These Continuing Education Unit workshops were designed to systematically train practicing Clinical Instructors (CIs) on the skills they need to coach students who have been placed for clinical rotations at physical therapy practices all over New York State.  The TotF Mentor workshops drew upon graduates of the TotF workshops to provide peer mentoring to novice CIs.  The highlight of this program was the Integrated Simulated Patient Exam, where Doctor of Physical Therapy students would examine and interact with SPs, meanwhile CIs and CI Mentors would observe the exam live, via video feed, and then "coach" students, post-encounter.  The iterative nature of training, performance, and feedback is one of the greatest lessons that I have learned as a SP Educator. 

 

   Putting my career on hold to embark upon graduate school full time, I am now fully immersing myself into the field of Instructional Design, Development, and Evaluation.  As an instructional design student, I have been trained on a skillset that would allow me to participate and collaborate with TAs-in-training in the university setting.  Understanding the philosophies, theories, taxonomies, and models behind high-quality instructional design has been endlessly fascinating work.  Putting this knowledge into practice as a TA is the perfect environment for a scholar of androgogy.  

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      The undergraduate courses I have taught (8 semesters: Fall 2018 - Spring 2022) at Syracuse University as a graduate teaching assistant have been captivating and challenging.  When the university transitioned to online learning, I redesigned my curriculum (with final approval from our faculty advisor/department chair, Dr. Jing Lei) to incorporate a set of instructional modules I called Quality Online Teaching.  These were based on the National Standards for Quality Online Teaching, Courses, and Programs.  These standards included the online teacher's professional responsibilities, digital pedagogy, community building, learner engagement, digital citizenship, diverse instruction, assessment & measurement, and instructional design.  A special emphasis was placed on inclusive learning; the majority of the undergraduate students I have taught are inclusive/special education teaching majors.  A commitment to celebrating diversity and inclusion - as well as identifying instructional technology tools that best help support learners in all their unique abilities - is a hallmark of Syracuse University's School of Education and my own teaching philosophy. 

 

      My current doctoral research focuses on evaluating instruction: how do trainers/instructors include evaluation of their training procedures into their overall instructional design? How is evaluation data collected? How are results used to improve future iterations of the instruction?  My aim is to help instructors in any discipline to analyze the successes and areas of improvement in their teaching/training.

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   I invite you to explore my teaching portfolio on this website.  You will find my CV, an essay about my teaching philosophy, descriptions of my teaching experiences, an analysis of my students’ course evaluations and other comments they have made about my instruction, and other resources to help you get to know me as a TA, scholar, and mentor.  Being selected as a TA Mentor would be a new highlight in my career.

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~Amber A. Walton