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Development of a Pedagogically-Focused Course for Engineering Graduate Teaching Assistants

Abstract

Graduate teaching assistants perform an important role at higher education institutions in the United States. Many universities and colleges host formal programs to enhance these graduate students’ teaching skills. Such programs are needed since graduate teaching assistants who receive training, mentoring, and feedback from faculty about their teaching have been found to demonstrate higher self-esteem in their teaching abilities and to provide higher quality instruction within undergraduate courses. Graduate teaching assistant training courses range from campus-wide initiatives, with more organizational and administrative focuses and purely decontextualized teaching methods courses, to content-based discipline specific modules. Since engineering graduate teaching assistants’ have training needs specific to their teaching responsibilities, courses focusing on pedagogy within engineering are desired.

This paper describes the development of a pedagogically-focused engineering education course based on elements of the “How People Learn” framework. The course, “Effective Teaching of Engineering: Linking Theory to Practice,” was first implemented in fall 2007, at a large Midwestern Research I university to provide engineering graduate teaching assistants an opportunity to extend their teaching professional development. The course learning objectives include developing knowledge of effective teaching practices, establishing an engineering “community of teachers” during interactions with engineering faculty and peers, producing personal deliverables that allow reflection upon relationships between pedagogy and engineering, and receiving formative feedback about teaching within engineering courses.

Some of the topics in this one-credit graduate level seminar included “How People Learn” framework principles, characteristics of millennial students, model-eliciting activities, formative feedback, and effective teaching methods in engineering. Through activities such as journaling, creation of concept maps, development of teaching philosophy statements, and analyses of a course syllabus, course participants noted how their ideas about effective teaching evolved during the semester. Strengths and weaknesses of the course will be discussed in the paper as well as elements that may be included within future iterations of the course.

Introduction

Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) perform an important role at higher education institutions in the United States. The tenure race at large research universities and the increasing number of students demanding higher education around the 1960’s have been two of the main components for the growing reliance on GTAs for undergraduate instruction. While accomplishing the mission of relieving some of the faculty’s teaching

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Chavela Guerra, R., & Cox, M., & Diefes-Dux, H. (2008, June), Development Of A Pedagogically Focused Course For Engineering Graduate Teaching Assistants Paper presented at 2008 Annual Conference & Exposition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 10.18260/1-2--3989