(184b) Graduate Student inside an Undergraduate Class Room - an Integrated Experience

The teaching preparation for a graduate student has been quite different across the nation. Some graduate students have very limited teaching experience; others have served as a teaching assistant in a couple of different courses; some have taught laboratories; others have taught a single course; and a few have independently taught several courses. This work suggests a procedural pattern for training graduate students as co-instructors to teach an undergraduate course with the supervision of a full-time faculty. This was implemented in a senior level chemical engineering controls course in the spring 2005 semester. The co-instructors' involvement with the supervisor was on various levels from the course design to the grading schemes. The co-instructors were also trained to design and teach laboratory experiments pertaining to the course material. Various aspects of active learning were also introduced to the co-instructors. This procedural pattern as well as the feed back from the students and faculty members provided a positive effect on the departmental perspective on training graduate students as co-instructors. Based on the feed back received from the students, it was concluded that this type of an academic ambience provided a learning experience for both the students and the co-instructors.