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Connecting the Dots as a SAIL Teaching Team

Several round tables surrounded by chairs in classroom with projectors on the ceiling.

27Sep’24

Feature Stories, Spotlights

September 27, 2024 by Erin Bartnett

In fall 2023, when Jennifer Gil was offered the TA position in Karen Lasater’s Statistics for Research and Measurement (NURS 2300) class, she knew three things: the course was what Penn calls a Structured Active In-class Learning (SAIL) course, she wanted to expand her statistics knowledge, and while public speaking wasn’t her strength, she knew it was an area she needed to work on. As a SAIL TA, she would be required to both test her statistics knowledge and regularly speak to the students in class. She was excited for the challenge: "Not only are you engaging with the material on a deeper level, but you're also actively guiding students through it in real-time. It’s like a teach-back method where you’re constantly interacting with the students, navigating their questions, and helping them connect the dots. It’s really exciting to be in that dynamic environment, where those lightbulb moments happen, and you're part of the process." 

That same semester, Chris Benitez became Joseph Kable’s TA for his 200-level Neuroeconomics course. Benitez had taken several active learning classes as an undergraduate at Duke, where he was also an education minor, and they were some of his most memorable classes, so he was eager to participate in them now as TA.  

Karen Lasater understands that the experience of being a TA in her SAIL course is different than a standard lecture course. “I think it can be uncomfortable for TAs who probably don't yet feel like experts in the content to be put on the spot answering student questions. But that experience is what I think makes it fun.” Like Lasater, Joseph Kable also recognizes the shift in responsibilities for the TAs in his course. “I could not do this class without asking way more of the TA than I did in my lecture classes.”   

While Lasater and Kable may be teaching entirely different subjects, both agree that a strong teaching team makes the SAIL model effective. 

“'There's a lot of checking in throughout the class: Where do you think the students are, did they get this, did they get that, what questions are you getting?' Benitez says, 'It's just much more of an interactive team.'"

How to Build a SAIL Teaching Team

SAIL is a form of active learning that encourages students to interact directly with course concepts through structured, in-class activities. Students prepare for these activities by engaging with course material outside of class. While a TA’s traditional role in lecture —grading, taking notes, or preparing for recitation—is often more behind-the-scenes, the TAs in a SAIL classroom are often hands-on members of the main classroom event.   

To help Gil prepare for the role, Lasater recommended Gil take advantage of the SAIL TA Training program through CETLI.  The program, which meets approximately four times throughout the semester, gave Gil the opportunity to engage with timely teaching challenges, learn from her peers, and be observed teaching, all of which, she says, helped her grow as an educator. “It was nice to do that in a low-stakes environment and gain some tips from my fellow students.”    

Building a SAIL teaching team that supports student learning and provides a meaningful opportunity for TAs, Kable notes, happens when instructors build in ample prep time for the teaching team. Each week, Kable and Benitez met to discuss how the class went the week before and what they planned to do with students the next week. During class, they continued to work together to help students learn. “There's a lot of checking in throughout the class: Where do you think the students are, did they get this, did they get that, what questions are you getting?” Benitez says, “It's just much more of an interactive team.” 

“'There are often memorable moments in class where, for example, a student says something thought provoking or funny or we often reference back to that.' In that way, Lasater says, learning in the course has become 'fun and interesting and about them. With SAIL, there is more space in the classroom for student voices.'"

Impact on Student Learning

The journey to SAIL began for Karen Lasater several years ago when she was teaching the course for the first time. Statistics is a subject she loves, but even she could sense the lectures feeling stale. Something was getting lost in translation. “I had nursing students in this statistics class filled with theoretical math,” Lasater said, “and they're just like, ‘What is this? Why am I learning this if it doesn't fit into my image of my career?’ And I didn't really have the space in a lecture style class to make that argument for them.”  

Similarly, Joseph Kable had his own vision for teaching. He planned to shift his course towards SAIL in the spring of 2020. He laughs when he recalls that first semester: “The wheels sort of came off year one for obvious reasons.”  But the next semester, when students were back to in-person learning, he tried again. “That experience of teaching for the year online,” Kable says, “helped us think: under conditions where we really need to get people engaged, what's going to get them engaged and what would they get out of it and what can we use that time to help them to understand?”   

Kable and Lasater both break their lectures down into short, engaging videos that students are expected to watch before they come to class. Once they enter the classroom, students might work in teams to crack a problem set in Kable’s class, while in Lasater’s, students will use student-generated measures of their height and wing span to understand correlation between variables and outliers.  

Lasater observed that creating more space for interaction between professors, TAs, and students in the classroom has also had a positive impact on not just what, but how students learn. “There are often memorable moments in class where, for example, a student says something thought provoking or funny or we often reference back to that.” In that way, Lasater says, learning in the course has become “fun and interesting and about them. With SAIL, there is more space in the classroom for student voices.”    

Kable has also noticed the value of ensuring students are learning in real time. In the SAIL course, “you could see the student thinking and the depth and the details behind that thinking,” Kable says, which is a more immediate experience than in a lecture course. “I would never know that they didn't get that concept out of the lecture because the feedback was diffuse and distant.” Now, in-class activities allow him to see how well students have grasped foundational concepts before moving to the next. 

Impact on Future Educators

Ultimately, for Gil, the experience of being part of Lasater’s teaching team was an opportunity to find mentorship for her future career. Lasater helped Gil clarify what she wanted to get out of the experience, and also spent time with her outlining the methods and goals for the class.   

Four years into Joseph Kable’s PSYC 2273, and the wheels are firmly on the ground. For Benitez, the class has been a rare opportunity. “I've found a very fulfilling experience within Joe's class because I do find enjoyment as an educator,” he says. “And as a graduate student, there's only a small handful of opportunities that you can really get into the classroom and start teaching college students. I'm very grateful that I can actually feel like that within Joe's class.”  

CETLI SAIL Resources  

Visit CETLI's SAIL page to learn more about SAIL, including how to plan, run, and assess a SAIL class.

If you are interested in a more personalized discussion about how to implement SAIL in your course, CETLI is also available to consult with you.