Report of the Graduate/Professional Student Teaching Committee (2016)

Report of the Graduate/Professional Student Teaching Committee (2016)

Committee Charge (from the Office of the Provost)

Identify the professional development resources, experiences, and programs offered by the UI for graduate/professional student training about teaching.
Gather ideas from committee members about additional efforts and how to support those efforts.
Outline ideas to create and sustain effective communication to relevant audiences.

Committee Members

Co-Chairs: Lon Moeller (Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education and Dean of the UniversityCollege); Jean Florman (Director, ITS Office of Teaching, Learning & Technology Center for Teaching)
Nicole Jardine (CLAS Psychology; President, Graduate Student Senate)
Rachel Anderson (CLAS Psychology)
Wyatt Brockbank (College of Education, Foreign Language Acquisition and ESL; College of Education Graduate Student Executive Committee)

Joanna Krajewski (School of Journalism and Mass Communication)
Mitchell Kelly (ClinicalProfessor of Educational Psychology; Director of the Graduate

Certificate in College Teaching)

Shelly Campo (Associate Professor of Community & Behavioral Health,Administrative Fellow, Graduate College, and Chair, Council on Teaching)
Jennifer Teitle (Assistant Dean for Graduate Development & Postdoctoral Affairs,

Graduate College)

Lisa Kelly (Associate Director, ITS Office of Teaching, Learning & Technology Center for

Teaching)

The Committee met on March 10, 2016, April 15, 2016, and May 3, 2016. Over the course of these three meetings, Committee members:

Sharedour perspectives on the opportunities currently offered to prepare graduate students and post-docs to teach during their time at Iowa and following graduation.

Staff members in the Graduate College, Center for Teaching (CfT), and Office of Graduate Teaching Excellence(OGTE) brought summary lists of optional programs, workshops, institutes, learning communities, web-based resources, and employment opportunities available to graduate students.

During the last three years, the CfT and the Graduate College have hired additional staff specifically to enhance the professional development and training of graduate students. Because the four graduate students on the Committee were all fairly close to graduating, they were relatively unaware of the depth and breadth of professional development opportunities that have been created during the last few years. Several students on the Committee had attended workshops offered by the CfT or earned the Certificate in College Teaching.

Assessedtraining/professional development opportunities currently available at the University of Iowa.

Committee members shared the belief that current programs and resources—including vastly improved web site resources, the New TA Orientation and the Effective Teaching Institute, Certificate in Graduate Teaching, workshops, consultations, teaching assessments,and reading and learning communities—are effective in preparing graduate and professional students for classroom teaching.

The Committee, however, also determined that not all teaching assistants start their teaching career at the University of Iowa with the same level and extent of training and preparation necessary to be successful in their classroom teaching. Likewise, the Committee discussed challenges associated with tracking training completed by UI teaching assistants and the variation in the type of training provided/required of teaching assistants by their home academic departments.

SomeCommittee members suggested that all teaching assistants (TAs) be required to participate in training, but a number of factors argue against the concept of required, single-point, or even longer-term training:

TAs begin their teaching assignments at various times during the school year;
Many TAs are required to attend orientation meetings before the start of the academic year in which a tremendous amount of information about UI policies on student privacy/FERPA, academic misconduct, sexual harassment, student academic accommodations/Student Disability Services, etc., is presented; reviewing specific classroom teaching issues during mandatory orientation sometimes gets lost with the time spent on reviewing the details of various UI policies;
TAs teach in a variety of settings—large-lecture, small discussion, labs—and across a range of disciplines—STEM, humanities, arts, social sciences—each with its own pedagogical framework;
Voluntary professional development opportunities can be very effective, particularly if students chart their own personalized “curriculum” of participation across the arc of their graduate student career;
Practical venues to accommodate all first-time TAs do not exist on campus; and
Several departments (Rhetoric, Math, Gen Ed Lit, etc.) already provide multi-day training specifically framed for their departmental needs.

While best practice and experience indicate that a required, one-time, one-size-fits-all training would not be effective or appropriate for all UI TAs, the Committee advocated for continued institutional support for the following professional development/training opportunities which focus on specific classroom-teaching issues:

Large-scale New TA Orientation (fall; full day);
Effective Teaching Institute (spring; half-day);
Workshops (freestanding and by departmental request; advertised on web sites and CfT poster);
Certificate in College Teaching (including participation in a single course in the program, without necessarily fulfilling all the certificate requirements);
Voluntary, confidential (when appropriate) consultations;
Regular reading groups;
Continued collaboration among the units (Grad College, OGTE, CfT); and
Continued CfTopportunities for graduate students to serve as workshop presenters, Graduate Fellows, and Advanced Practicum students.

Since TA training at the academic department level varies across campus, and completed TA training is not always tracked, the Committee is also suggesting that the University consider a pilot program, aimed at developing department-specific TA training for academic departments that may not currently require classroom-related training of their TAs. This pilot project could be (1) started during the upcoming academic year, (2) coordinated by the Graduate College, the CfT, and Equal Opportunity & Diversity and (3) include training units on things such as pedagogy, responding to students with mental illness issues, creating an inclusive environment to facilitate effective classroom discussions, and compliance with applicable UI student policies – academic accommodations, sexual harassment/sexual misconduct, honor code/plagiarism, etc. The Graduate College and CfT would, however, require additional staffing and budgetary support to implement such a pilot program.

Generated ideas to enhance graduate student professional development and strategies to expand awareness of current and future opportunities.

The University has recently joined two national networks of peer institutions that support and train staff and faculty interested in enhancing graduate student professional development on their campuses. The Graduate College and the CfT staff members have attended training sessions conducted by both the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL) and the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN).

CIRTL principles are being used to guide the development of a three-tiered pathway to teaching competency (Associate, Practitioner, and Scholar), which graduate students can opt into. Progression through the levelscan help participants frame their teaching training and experiencesinto a systematic, thoughtful whole and will provide them a way to articulate their graduate teaching career when they seek future employmentopportunities.

The requirements for the CIRTL pathway are being finalized this summer, along with a system for participants and the Graduate College staff to track students’ progress. CIRTL at the UI will also be promoted as something that any graduate student/post-doc can take advantage of regardless of their discipline.

Faculty members and a CfT staff member participated in a National Research Mentoring Network “train-the-trainers” event in Wisconsin. They will use what they learned to teach STEM graduate students strategies for effectively mentoring their undergraduate students to more effectively learn in lab settings.

The CfT will organize periodic (twice-monthly) “office hours/coffee hours” for new TAs to drop in to discuss teaching challenges.

In the future, an online introductory course for all new TAs (andefforts to “flip” content of the New TA Orientation and the Effective Teaching Institute) could help convey best teaching practices to more new TAs and provide participants with networking opportunities. It also would avoid the need to accommodate increasingly large numbers of attendees at introductory professional development events. The CfTand other Office of Teaching, Learning & Technology (OTLT) staff could work with experienced TAs to create these online courses or modules.

CfT staff and other OTLT staff, staff in other UI units, and experienced TAs could collaborate to create mini-online/follow-up courses for TAs about FERPA, Fair Use, etc. We could connect these back to our online resources, (“if you want to learn more about X, look at these resources or contact us…”). In addition, CfT staff could create a list of campus resources and contact information for TAs that could be shared with students, resources such as the UI Counseling Service, Student Disability Services, the Writing Center, and different campus help labs, etc. This list of campus resources/contact information could be posted to the Graduate College’s professional development website -

The Graduate College and the OGTE could create more structured opportunities for early-career students and first-year post-docs to discuss career opportunities and effective paths to successfully finding post-graduation positions.

Staff members, faculty, and experienced TAs could encourage new graduate students to develop their personal goals for developing as teachers and a timeline for achieving them. Experienced TAs and post-docs could help facilitate these discussions.

The CfT could host social events for TAs and post-docs.

Marketing to graduate students and others about professional development opportunities could be improved:

Roll-out of CIRTL—Iowa Now, Daily Iowan, Director of Graduate Studies fall meeting, inform Faculty Senate leaders, include in New TA Orientation;
Include links to the Graduate College and Center for Teaching web sites on the home page of the Office of Graduate Teaching Excellence;
Continue to add names (event participants, DGSs, etc.) to the CfT graduate student listserv, Twitter feed, etc.; and
Create a list of additional professional development opportunities to post on web sites, including the BUILD program, speaking and writing workshops, etc.

Next Steps

We have appreciated the opportunity to connect, learn more about the considerable resources already available, and brainstorm ideas for the benefit of future UI graduate student TAs and post-docs who are teaching at Iowa.

The Committee worked efficiently and in concert to inventory current opportunities at the University of Iowa to develop, support, and assess effective graduate student/post-doc instructors. The inventory is available as a separate document.

The Committee believes that a required “one-size fits all” one-time training program for all TAs at the start of the academic year would not effectively provide the support that TAs require as they are involved with classroom teaching. Since not all TAs will be involved with classroom teaching at the start of the academic year, the timing and extent of training for TAs must necessarily be different depending on the TA’s teaching appointment. The Committee is of the view that offering a menu of opportunities to TAs to help support their classroom teaching is the better option, as is the possibility of creating additional department-specific TA training through a pilot program. Both options, however, require the commitment of UI colleges and academic departments to encourage TAs to participate in training/professional development, as well as additional staff/budgetary support.

The Committee also believes that TAsshould be alerted to the opportunity to engage in the CIRTL credentialing option which recognizes levels of competency for those who complete certain specified opportunities for training/professional development. These CIRTL competency levels could then be included in their CVs.

The Committee recommends that the CfT, Graduate College, and the OGTE continue to work together to develop a complete menu of professional development/training opportunities for TAs, establish a communication plan to “get the word out” about these opportunities, create a plan for “credentialing” TAs who complete different professional development/training opportunities, develop an outline for department-specific training modules as part of a pilot program, and identify additional resources needed to implement this proposal, which can be reviewed by the Office of the Provost.

The menu of opportunitiesfor future professional development of TAs at Iowa is creative and addresses certain specific needs yet remaining on campus. As is often true, however, a number of these ideas would require additional funding resources, whether for positions or to produce events that draw graduate students, post-docs, and faculty to attend.