Resources for understanding instruction: Identifying Learning Assistants' ideas about student assets and instructor roles

The practice of noticing, understanding, and building on student ideas is thought to be beneficial in several research-based teaching strategies, including responsive teaching and resource-oriented instruction. Nonetheless, attending to student thinking and viewing student ideas as instructional assets can be a challenge for novice instructors. 

Here, in order to investigate the ideas from which these practices are built, we follow Learning Assistants (LAs) in the pedagogy courses of two universities over the course of two academic quarters. We apply a conceptual resources framework to identify LA resources for understanding instruction. In particular, we focus on the ideas LAs have about 1) what assets students have for learning and 2) what roles instructor attention or intervention play in learning. We also consider the context in which these resources are elicited, both within the sequence of LA pedagogical instruction over time as well as in response to varied situational prompts.

This work can inform LA pedagogical instruction and guide future research about the development of novice teachers’ orientation towards student ideas.