Putting research into practice: Pedagogy development workshops change the teaching philosophy of graduate students.

Abstract

Teaching competence is an important skill for graduate students to acquire and is often considered a precursor to an academic career. In this study, we evaluated the effects of a multi-day teaching workshop on graduate teaching philosophies by surveying 200 graduate students, 79 of whom had taken the workshops and 121 who had not. We found no difference between groups (workshop attendees versus non-attendees) in their beliefs that (a) it is important to focus on in-depth learning of core concepts when teaching and (b) “memorization” is a poor learning strategy for students. On average, however, respondents who had taken the workshop allocated more in-class time for student-to-student discussions (interactive engagement) and placed less emphasis on lecturing. These results suggest that graduate students are generally aware of the importance of conceptual learning, but workshop attendees have clearer ideas on how to teach for effective learning.

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

“…TAs also reported increased teaching self-efficacy for the skills which they practiced during the course. Similar effects of TA training programs have been documented in other studies [1,7,10,11]. As Connolly et al [1] postulated, it is possible that courses such as ours increase TAs' self-efficacy by providing students opportunities to engage in the four key activities for increasing self-efficacy.…”

“…While rigorous evaluations of STEM TA training programs are scarce [2,7], three Canadian studies particularly interested us. White et al [10] found that participants in a two day workshop for STEM TAs did not hold different ideas about teaching than nonparticipants, however attendees reported they would allocate more class time for student-to-student discussions and lecture less than non-attendees. They conclude that their workshop assisted TAs to identify effective pedagogical strategies.…”