Educating the Future Professoriate: Summer Institute for Graduate Teaching Assistants

Speakers

Details

It has been said that university faculty are perhaps the most highly qualified profession but with essentially no training for (the teaching part of) the job they are hired to do. This seminar will discuss our effort to change that, by including formal training in teaching for our Teaching Assistants – the future professoriate. The idea was born out of the merger of Clarkson with what is now our Capital Region Campus, formerly Union Graduate College, in Schenectady, NY. The talk will begin with a little background to set the scene and then discuss the implementation of our intensive training program for new TAs in the STEM disciplines. Of course, mathematics is at the heart of STEM as the common element in almost all STEM fields, and so mathematics TAs are perhaps especially important. Typically, new PhD student TAs arrive with misconceptions about their role, about how to teach, and about their audience and that audience’s base of knowledge and understanding. What worked for them as undergraduate learners is not a good model for all, and many are new to the US educational system, too. The program will be described and then we will share results from the research evaluating the program. Because the history is short and the numbers are not yet large, this will include both quantitative and qualitative results. We will also share our thoughts on future developments as we seek continual improvement of our program, and to make it available to others.

Seminar Info