Due to high failure rates and student dissatisfaction with university Calculus courses across the United States, wide-ranging efforts are being made to transform such courses to include active learning pedagogies, which have been documented to support student success. Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) and undergraduate Learning Assistants (LAs) (i.e., near- peer tutors who aid instruction of collegiate courses in which they have previously been successful as students) often play key roles in facilitating active learning environments in university STEM courses; however, little is known about their classroom roles and professional development within these environments. This talk explores GTAs’ and LAs’ enactment of and growth within active learning classrooms through three distinct studies.

The first study is motivated by the consistently documented positive content-related outcomes for students in LA-supported classrooms, examining how LAs and students interact around the specific content of implicit differentiation. The second study examines LAs’ pedagogical growth over their first semester as LAs, using an innovative Large Language Model (LLM) assisted analytic approach to uncovering changes in LAs’ perceptions and interpretations of their teaching as they gain experience as LAs. The third study examines how GTAs enact active learning principles within their classroom, focusing on how one GTA’s actions shifted when teaching with LAs of varying experience.

When considered together, these three studies generate a larger picture of life in an active learning Calculus I classroom, depicting how content and communities come together to support student learning in this environment. Motivated by the outcomes of these studies, future pursuit of a large-scale qualitative investigation of active learning Calculus classrooms is suggested.