Prioritizing Teaching Development: End-of-Semester Mentoring for Graduate Student Instructors

by Christopher Grabau, Program Director, Reinert Center

The final weeks of any semester bring a whirlwind of responsibility. Between exams, grading, and end-of-term tasks, it often feels like an endless to-do list. For graduate student instructors (GSIs), the stakes are even higher. They are often juggling teaching responsibilities alongside their own coursework and program demands.  This overlap can place real demand on their still-developing instructional skills, professional knowledge, and capacity to manage stress.  

While faculty mentoring graduate students may tend to prioritize administrative tasks like collecting grades, closing files, and planning for the next term, the semester’s end can also offer a great opportunity to mentor on pedagogical development. With minimal planning, mentors can help GSI’s transform this chaotic period into a moment of deep reflection, practical skill-building, and professional development (Schwartz, 2018; Wisdom, 2025).

Below are a few low stakes, actionable strategies to help you and your GSIs not only survive the final stretch but finish strong.  While these suggestions are far from comprehensive, they offer a glimpse into turning a stressful period into a valuable opportunity for professional growth.

• Promote Reflective Practice: Instead of just focusing on what went wrong, invite an opportunity for GSI’s to reflect on areas of growth and success.  Offer non-evalutive, reflective prompts (either in-person or virtually) that invite GSI’s to reflect on their most significant pedagogical achievement and their greatest lesson learned from the semester (Schön, 1987). Here is just one example that invites GSI’s to reflect on their past as well as think about future planning:
  
  • What is the most significant insight you gained about yourself as a teacher this semester?  How will that insight inform the way you prepare for your next teaching assignment?  How might this insight inform your teaching portfolio?
    
• Guide Interpretation of Instructional Feedback:  Receiving student evaluations can be an agonizing experience for any instructor.  However, consider offering guidance on how GSI’s might interpret student feedback.  While SoTL literature offers a lot of clear insights on interpreting instructor feedback (Gannon, 2018; Gilbert & Gilbert, 2025; Zakrajsek, 2019), below are a few suggestions:
  
  • Focus on Themes:  Look for common responses instead of giving weight to outlier comments.
  • Check distribution:  Look at the frequency of responses before talking about making changes
  • Separate course feedback with instructor feedback:  Help GSI’s distinguish between course feedback from instructional feedback
  • Consider the context:  Remind GSIs that many variables – Class size, course difficulty, and student experience – play a role in student feedback.
  • Regroup and plan:  Prioritize one or two instructional “themes” GSI’s might address next term.  Examples could include, develop strategies to offer greater transparency on goals for assignments, plan for more open-ended questioning; offer more explicit student roles during group work…
    
• Transparent Course Design as Stress Prevention:  Research consistently shows that instructional transparency helps students better understand the purpose, task, and assessment of a course.  Helping GSIs design for instructional transparency can include a number of effective strategies including (but not limited to):
    
  • Introduce your mentees to the Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) framework: TILT structures assignments around essential questions about the purpose, task, and criteria of an assignment or course (Winkelmes, 2023).  Consider asking GSI’s the following questions:  What is the purpose of this assignment/course?  What tasks must students complete?  How will their work be evaluated?  These questions help GSIs make evidence-based instructional choices that clarify expectations, align student work with learning goals, and reduce confusion.
  • Using Rubrics for Assessment:  Using rubrics to help articulate learning goals and standardize grading.  Rubrics also serve as a decision-making tool that can speed up the grading process.
  • Model Academic Time Management:  Helping GSI’s balance end-of-semester exams and grading with their own academic workload and emotional bandwidth.  Consider showing how to work backwards from final deadlines to establish a realistic grading timeline that also accounts for their own academic work.   

By using a few simple strategies, faculty mentors can model thoughtful closure practices that not only prepare GSIs for their future academic careers but also build confidence, encourage reflective practice, and strengthen collegiality through pedagogical development.  

If you would like to discuss ways to mentor your graduate students on effective teaching strategies, the Reinert Center offers individual and unit-level consultations.  More information can be found on our website:  https://www.slu.edu/cttl/services/index.php

To request a consultation, complete our online request form. 

References:

Schön, D. A. (1987). Educating the reflective practitioner: Toward a new design for
teaching and learning in the professions. Jossey-Bass.

Gannon, K. (2018, May 6). In defense (sort of) of student evaluations of teaching. The Chronicle of Higher Education.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/in-defense-sort-of-of-student-evaluations-of-teaching/ T

Gilbert, R. O., & Gilbert, D. R. (2025). Student evaluations of teaching do not reflect student learning: an observational study. BMC medical education, 25(1), 313.
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-025-06896-3

Schwartz, H. (2018). Connected Teaching Relationship, Power, and Mattering in Higher Education. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing

Weimer, M. E. (2013). Learner-centered teaching: Five key changes to practice (2nd ed.).
Jossey-Bass.

Winkelmes, M. A. (2023). Introduction to transparency in learning and teaching. Perspectives in Learning, 20(1), 2.

Wisdom, M. L. (2025). How to mentor anyone in academia: A practical guide to the art of mentorship in higher education. Princeton University Press.

Zakrajsek, T. (2019, June 26). Analyzing student end of course written comments. The Scholarly Teacher.
https://www.scholarlyteacher.com/post/analyzing-student-end-of-course-written-comments