(565b) Chemical Engineering Teaching Practicum Course: Reflections after Five Years

We introduced a teaching practicum course for first-year chemical engineering graduate students in 2013. The learning goals for this course are to prepare new graduate students for their upcoming assignments as teaching assistants and to develop communication skills that will be transferrable to their research training. In this talk we will provide a synopsis of how the course has evolved in five years and share our key actions for success, which include using a co-teaching model for the course and rotating instructor assignments among faculty in the department. We have collected outcomes data using a survey instrument for graduate teaching assistants developed by Sohoni, Cho, and French [1]. The survey was administered during the practicum course and midway through the students’ first semester of teaching. We find that students show gains in their confidence to effectively communicate with undergraduate students. We will provide additional analysis of student outcomes measured in this survey to describe the impact that the course has made on graduate student education and the undergraduate teaching mission in our department.