Training graduate students and postdocs in course design: A workshop to bridge the gap between new professors’ pedagogical background and institutions’ teaching requirements
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A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.
The three-model screen
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Evaluates a workshop preparing graduate students and postdocs for academic careers, with survey data on their readiness and competitiveness for academic positions; the object is the training and careers of the research workforce.
The work evaluates training and career preparation for graduate students and postdocs as members of the research workforce.
Evaluates a workshop training graduate students and postdocs for academic teaching careers; research workforce training and capacity.
Abstract
Research-intensive institutions tend to reach hiring decisions mostly based on the applicants’ research achievements with minimal consideration of teaching experience and training. As a result, new professors often have little experience in teaching and lack education on pedagogy. However, graduate students and postdocs who plan to work in academia could be trained in advance to improve their early years’ teaching performance. The Tomlinson Project at University Level in Science Education (T-Pulse) at McGill has recently started offering the Teaching Techniques for Instructors Workshop for graduate students and postdocs. This is a one-day workshop that provides participants with the theoretical and practical tools to design and teach an effective university course. It has been designed to emphasize the alignment between learning outcomes, teaching strategies, and assessment tools; and participants are counselled on the importance, preparation and content of teaching statements used in the application process to teaching jobs. Surveys conducted throughout the workshop, showed that only 17% of attendants feel prepared to teach a university level course, and 63% think that the workshop will help them be more competitive when looking for teaching positions. Remarkably, 86% of the participants agreed that attending a workshop was a better option than taking a 3-credit course, and 100% of them preferred it to learning on their own. These results highlight the potential of the workshop in helping graduate students and post-docs transition into their academic careers, not only benefiting them but also the hiring institutions.
Stored with the screening record, where it is evidence for the labels above.
The record
- Venue
- Scholarship@Western (Western University)
- Topic
- Evaluation of Teaching Practices
- Field
- Social Sciences
- Canadian institutions
- —
- Funders
- —
- Keywords
- Bridge (graph theory)Course (navigation)Graduate studentsMathematics educationPedagogyMedical educationComputer scienceSociologyEngineeringPsychologyMedicine
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes