Virtual Conference
July 26, 2021
July 26, 2021
July 19, 2022
Engineering Leadership Development
15
10.18260/1-2--37333
https://peer.asee.org/37333
348
Hannah Choi is an assistant director of assessment and curriculum design at the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. Her responsibilities include program evaluations, and learning outcomes assessments pertinent to innovative curriculum designs. Her areas of interest include, among others, college student development theories, experiential learning, internationalizing curriculum, online learning, and educational technology.
Dr. Blake Everett Johnson is a Teaching Assistant Professor and Director of Instructional Laboratories in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include experimental fluid mechanics, measurement science, and engineering education. He oversees undergraduate laboratories in fluid mechanics and heat transfer. Pedagogically, Dr. Johnson employs evidence-based writing instruction, active learning, inquiry-based laboratory instruction, and initiatives that empower students to do hands-on learning. Additional service interests include teaching and leadership training for graduate students, enhancing communication education for undergraduate engineering students, developing evidence-based design project team formation strategies, and improving engineering design curricula.
Mattox Beckman is a teaching assistant professor in the Computer Science
department. He earned his doctorate from UIUC in 2003 under Sam Kamin,
specializing in programming languages. He was a senior lecturer at the Illinois
Institute of Technology for 12 years, and then returned to UIUC in 2015,
where he teaches the Programming Languages and Data Structures courses.
He has recently adopted Computer Science Education as his research focus.
Dr. Yuting W. Chen received the B.S. degree from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2009 and 2011, all in Electrical Engineering. She is currently a Teaching Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining Illinois ECE as a faculty, she worked at IBM Systems Group in Poughkeepsie, NY in z Systems Firmware Development. Her current interests include recruitment and retention of under-represented students in STEM, integrative training for graduate teaching assistants, and curriculum innovation for introductory computing courses.
Lucas Anderson is a Specialist in Education at the Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning (CITL) at the University of Illinois. He organizes the central campus teacher training program for the more than 800 new Teaching Assistants (TAs) Illinois welcomes each year. He continues to work with TAs throughout their graduate career by observing their classes, helping them collect and interpret feedback from their students, and shepherding them through CITL’s teaching certificate program. He offers a variety of workshops every year to faculty, staff, TAs, and undergraduates, on topics including course design, running effective discussions, and using humor in the classroom.
A team of engineering faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign created an integrated teaching and leadership development program in 2016 after realizing the need for both pedagogical training and leadership education for graduate teaching assistants (GTAs). Training in teaching and leadership at the graduate level are often separated even though the skills needed for good teaching are highly transferable, and many are nearly identical to skills possessed by good leaders. Through this program, GTAs are expected to develop teaching skills as well as leadership skills. Each session in the program provides context in applying leadership skills in their day-to-day duties as a teaching assistant. This program is bringing collaboration across campus with speakers from other non-engineering units, such as the campus-level teaching and learning center, the campus-level leadership center, and the Department of Theatre. Industry speakers are also invited to provide a workplace perspective, with two corporate representatives and a group of local technology entrepreneurs presenting in the past few years. Four of the largest engineering departments have since joined the initiative by requiring their new GTAs to complete the program as part of their on-boarding process. With an initial cohort of 13 graduate students in Spring 2017, the program has now grown to over 190 in Fall 2019. To assess the perception of transferability between teaching skills and leadership skills among participants in the program, a comparison group versus treatment group study was conducted in Fall 2018. The comparison group is comprised of new engineering GTAs who did not participate in the program and the treatment group is comprised of participants in the program. This paper will present the result of the study and discuss lessons learned from implementing an integrated teaching and leadership development program.
Choi, H. H., & Havan, S., & Hathaway, C., & Johnson, B. E., & Beckman, M. A., & Chen, Y. W., & Anderson, L. (2021, July), Inform Track: Integrated Teaching and Leadership Development Program for Graduate Teaching Assistants Paper presented at 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference. 10.18260/1-2--37333
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