The Teaching Toolkit: design of a one-day pedagogical workshop for engineering graduate teaching assistants

Tormey, Roland; Hardebolle, Cécile; Isaac, Siara

doi:10.1080/03043797.2019.1584606

Cited by 6 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 26 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In our context, participants’ utility judgements describe the degree to which they found the activity useful to achieve their current goals (as engineering students) or future goals (as engineers). While the ultimate goal of our workshop is behavioural change, participants’ utility judgements are useful since utility judgements have a stronger correlation with participants’ transfer into their practice than do direct tests of participants’ learning at the conclusion of a training session (Alliger et al, 1997 ) (for a discussion on the costs and benefits of different methods of workshop assessment see Tormey et al, 2019 , pp. 388–389).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The philosophy of the educational team in which both Siara and Roland work is to engage in evidence-informed educational practice, which is subject to rigorous evaluation and where the results are shared with the wider community. This philosophy influenced the design of the evaluation of the workshop: Our methodology for assessing the workshop’s impact is an adaptation of a method common among pedagogical advisors and one we have used previously in other projects (Tormey et al, 2019 ).…”

Section: Taking Action On Unconscious Bias In Engineering Student Tea...mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Educating Engineering Students to Address Bias and Discrimination Within Their Project Teams

2023

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

What training should engineering students receive to enable them to contribute to reducing bias, discrimination and the persistent lack of diversity in engineering? Collaboration is central to professional engineering work and, consequently, teamwork and group projects are increasingly present in engineering curricula. However, the influence of unconscious bias on interactions within teams can negatively affect women and underrepresented groups and is now recognised as an important engineering ethics issue. This paper describes a workshop designed to enable engineering students to work equitably in diverse teams. Key features of the workshop include (1) the emotionally safe, empowering and warm environment created, (2) the creation of opportunities for students to discuss and apply the issues raised to their own engineering projects, and (3) the opportunities to practice the use of both proactive and reactive strategies to address bias and discrimination in teams. The evaluation of the workshop suggests that engineering students regarded both onsite and online formats as providing useful skills that they intended to apply in practice. Follow-up evaluations suggest that the workshop leads to behavioural change, especially the use of proactive teamwork strategies intended to reduce the impact of unconscious bias.

show abstract

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Taking Action On Unconscious Bias In Engineering Student Tea...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Educating Engineering Students to Address Bias and Discrimination Within Their Project Teams

2023

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Tormey et al [9] argue that STEM TAs need "training which is informed by evidence, which addresses the needs of engineering disciplines and which is short enough so that doctoral assistants will not be discouraged from participation" (p.379). While rigorous evaluations of STEM TA training programs are scarce [2,7], three Canadian studies particularly interested us.…”

Section: Sct and Self-efficacy In Teachingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effect of a practice-intensive course on doctoral teaching assistants' teaching self-efficacy and priorities

Isaac¹

2022

Towards a New Future in Engineering Education, New Scenarios That European Alliances of Tech Universities Open Up

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Doctoral teaching assistants (TAs) provide key support for learning in STEM fields because they are present during exercises, labs and projects when students are actively engaging with course material. While some institutions provide training for TAs, their effect on teaching activities is rarely assessed. We use the lens of Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) to analyse data on the pre and post course teaching priorities of 20 doctoral TAs who followed a 5 day practice-intensive course on STEM HE. Course time was split between instructors modelling interactive teaching strategies to engage TAs in a data-driven reevaluation of their beliefs about teaching and having each TA teach a lesson everyday using a structured feedback loop to promote reflection. TAs reported self efficacy gains for designing instruction, addressing disruptive behaviour and managing student attention spans after the course. Their priorities also appear to shift away from ‘teaching’ and towards ‘learning’. TAs’ affective reactions and utility judgements after the course indicated that they thought the course was useful and they intended to use the strategies that they had learnt. This practice and reflection intensive course model, able to accommodate up to 40 TAs, is relevant for institutions seeking to improve the quality of undergraduate education or doctoral candidates' preparation for academic roles.

show abstract

“…graduate stipend) to professional growth, though the difficulty of achieving the latter can be a function of how much the university invests in preparing these GTAs to carry out their pedagogical duties. Generally, GTAs are selected for their content knowledge of a given area, but pedagogical knowledge is not always considered in the selection process [4]. This results in some GTAs being more prepared than others in commanding a classroom and promoting student engagement and success.…”

Section: Introduction and Purposementioning

confidence: 99%

“…This results in some GTAs being more prepared than others in commanding a classroom and promoting student engagement and success. The discrepancies in preparation for their roles as a GTA can be glaring; some programs require graduate students to take a semester long course to learn about and prepare their online or faceto-face pedagogical approach, and others offer no training at all [4]- [7]. Given that time pressure has been recognized as one of the primary disadvantages of a graduate student's involvement as a GTA [8], care should be taken to strike an effective balance between these relative extremes of training.…”

Section: Introduction and Purposementioning

confidence: 99%

“Examining the Changing Perceptions of Graduate Students’ Role as Teaching Assistant with Online and Hybrid Labs during COVID-19” (Instruction)

Brown

2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access Proceedings

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Teaching Toolkit: design of a one-day pedagogical workshop for engineering graduate teaching assistants

Cited by 6 publications

References 26 publications

Educating Engineering Students to Address Bias and Discrimination Within Their Project Teams

Educating Engineering Students to Address Bias and Discrimination Within Their Project Teams

Effect of a practice-intensive course on doctoral teaching assistants' teaching self-efficacy and priorities

“Examining the Changing Perceptions of Graduate Students’ Role as Teaching Assistant with Online and Hybrid Labs during COVID-19” (Instruction)

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About