The Lead Graduate Teacher, appointed by the department and hired by the University’s Graduate Teacher Program, is a general teaching resource available to both new and returning graduate students—whose chief responsibility is to help graduate teachers become more effective and engaging instructors, who are committed to the personal development and academic success of their students.
Serving as a liaison between the Department of Political Science and the Graduate Teacher Program, the Lead is part of a larger network of graduate students, faculty, and administrators who are dedicated to helping graduate students refine their teaching skills and to begin preparing their teaching portfolios.
To this end, augmenting the formal training our grads receive from the department, the Graduate Teacher Program provides various resources for both beginning and advanced graduate teachers, including its nationally renowned Certificate in College Teaching program. Currently, CU-Boulder is one of only 43 universities in the country to offer such a college teaching certificate.
In addition to acting as a mentor to his fellow graduate teachers who seek guidance and direction—with preparing lesson plans, writing course assignments and exams, creating engaging lectures, managing the classroom, soliciting student feedback, writing a teaching statement, and so forth—among Dr. Szentkirályi’s principal tasks as his department’s Lead (2012-2014) was to digitally record graduate instructors’ class lectures, and to conduct in-depth consultations concerning the positive aspects of their teaching styles and skills and the areas that deserve improvement.
Lev Szentkirályi, Ph.D. 