I was kindly invited to come along and observe Chris Cammies, winner of the 2024 Inspiring and Innovative Teaching award in the Faculty of Life Sciences, and his team of demonstrators for a Monday morning lab session on ‘Mammals as Predators’.
After winning his Bristol Teaching Award, I got in touch with Chris to find out a little more about the work he has been doing in his school. Although nominated mainly for his work on inclusive labs (we’ll look more at this in an upcoming post), we ended up mostly chatting about his work embedding pedagogy into the work he does with demonstrators.
A demonstrator is a part-time, ad hoc role undertaken by students taking MRes or PhD courses in which they attend undergraduate lab sessions and support the students. There are often up to 100 students in these sessions and so demonstrators’ contributions are invaluable to the lecturer as it means many more queries can be answered.
But there’s more to it than that – students I spoke to, and in some recent research Chris and a colleague undertook (Palumbo and Cammies, 2022), see the demonstrators (the literature uses ‘GTAs’ or ‘Graduate Teaching Assistants’ interchangeably with ‘demonstrators’) are role models, with 73% of students in their research considering a Masters’ or PhD after conversing with demonstrators.
Students I spoke to used phrases like ‘they’ve been through it recently’ and that they saw the demonstrators ‘more like peer mentors’, which reflects what we saw students being keen for in a recent hackathon we ran – students really value these near-peer relationships when working in academic settings. In Palumbo and Cammies’ research, students reported demonstrators as being ‘warm, kind, empathetic, understanding, caring and compassionate (and not condescending, aloof or unapproachable)’. When I asked why they preferred approaching the demonstrator, rather than the tutor, they responded that they felt like that they weren’t ‘experts’ and so didn’t feel they were as intimidating.
Chris is unusual in that he hand-picks each of the demonstrators for each session, ensuring that their own research interests line up to the work covered in the lab (the students who acted as demonstrators in the lab I attended all had a background in animal-related research, rather than microbiology or neurology, for example).
The School also makes sure that they all attend a briefing (between 30 – 60 minutes long) before the session starts, where Chris or the lecturer will go through the material to be covered in the lab, directing demonstrators on how to best support the students and providing them with some additional facts they can relay to the students to make it a little more interesting.
He also encourages demonstrators to give the students feedback in a constructive way, providing informal training through the demonstrators’ briefing on how to give feedback. Student who took part in his research described demonstrators as ‘one of the few key sources of reliable feedback’ (Palumbo and Cammies, 2022) with 64% of students perceiving demonstrators to be the main source of feedback during laboratory sessions, and 27% choosing demonstrators as their first choice for help (60% chose peers first, with 15% choosing lecturer). All GTA’s (this includes demonstrators) are contractually required to undertake training before they start, and this includes the BILT-delivered course ‘Intro to teaching’, details of which can be found here.
Chris has created a huge number of support resources for his demonstrators, which are available to them all as training modules on Sharepoint and include information about pedagogy and feedback, as well as generally useful information about getting paid and the role profiles. You can take a look at the Sharepoint site here.
There are benefits not just to the students, but to the demonstrators themselves, too. One demonstrator I spoke to said that she really enjoyed the role; she said that the skills required in the role had increased her confidence and she liked the fact she revisited so many topics she had forgotten about. The skills demonstrators gain in these roles will leave them well-equipped to take on roles supporting teaching and learning in the future.
It is clear that both students and demonstrators benefit from the role and their experiences are enhanced by this. However, the attention to developing the demonstrators as learning professionals is not practised across all departments and approaches to working with demonstrators is not consistent.
Do you work with demonstrators? Are you embedding pedagogical training as part of their role? We’d love to hear from others who are working in this area.
Palumbo, V., & Cammies, C. (2022). Exploring student and demonstrator perspectives of the teaching and learning provided by demonstrators during undergraduate laboratory practical sessions. Journal of PGR Pedagogic Practice. 2. 9-26. 10.31273/jppp.vol2.2022.1224.
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