GTP Kicks Off Year 9 with Teaching Assistant Visits to Participating High Schools
As we have learned in over nearly a decade of working closely with schools in these rural communities, personal connections with our students and teachers are absolutely critical.
To that end, each August, teams of Global Teaching Project Teaching Assistants—current STEM majors at, and recent graduates of, leading universities around the country—visit schools throughout rural Mississippi to work in-person with students and teachers to help GTP’s Advanced Placement STEM courses get off to a strong start.
The August visits are a key component of a sequence of instructional initiatives throughout the year that help GTP students succeed in rigorous AP science classes.
GTP’s students are selected by their schools based on their aptitude and work ethic, but they often have significant gaps in their substantive foundations. GTP works to help students close those gaps—beginning with an immersive residential instructional program at Mississippi State held each June, followed by August in-person sessions at participating high schools, and a January residential instructional program at Jackson State. Most importantly, TAs work with the students by videoconference, typically twice each week, as part of their regularly scheduled AP classes.
This August, three remarkable Teaching Assistants—Tre Peterson (Yale), Numa Maryam (University of Mississippi), and Carson Hill (Georgia Tech), along with GTP staff, Oso Ifesinachukwu and Seger McGuire—crisscrossed rural Mississippi for in-person instructional sessions at schools participating in GTP’s AP STEM Access Program.
The teams spent much of their time in Mississippi’s Delta region, where GTP has a particularly prominent presence, visiting Clarksdale, Cleveland, Elzy, Greenville, Greenwood, Holmes, Humphreys, Leflore, Leland, McAdams, Northside, Palmer, Riverside and Yazoo City. They also headed east to visit Aberdeen, Noxubee, Philadelphia, Union, Meridian, and Newton, for a total of 20 participating schools. Visits to over a dozen additional schools are pending.
The TAs spoke to students about the academic and financial benefits that AP classes offer. The TAs also provided an overview of the Program, including a review of course content, available resources, how tutoring sessions work, and how AP exams are administered and scored.
Most importantly, our Teaching Assistants engaged students on a personal level, making connections with the students and helping them to engage with the subject matter in new and different ways.
As the academic year commences, GTP is excited to report that we are working with a projected 33 schools this year, the vast majority of which had offered no AP classes in any subjects prior to working with GTP. Working with those schools, GTP will provide instruction to hundreds of students in approximately 70 AP classes in 4 subjects: AP Biology, AP Computer Science Principles, AP Physics 1, and AP Statistics. We are grateful for all of our talented educators, staff, and Teaching Assistants, including Tre’, Carson, and Numa, for all their efforts in making this possible.
