The Teaching Toolkit: design of a one-day pedagogical workshop for engineering graduate teaching assistants

Through their role in labs, exercise/recitation sessions and tutorials, graduate or doctoral teaching assistants play a significant role in the education of engineering students. Yet doctoral assistants frequently get little pedagogical training, what training is offered may be generic rather than specifically adapted to the subject epistemologies of science and engineering, and the training itself may not actually influence their teaching practice in any meaningful way. In this article, we describe an evidence-informed model of a pedagogical training workshop for doctoral assistants in engineering and science which is short, focused on the specific teaching methods associated with the disciplines in question (rather than general pedagogy), and based upon recent best evidence about teacher education. Feedback data from 191 participants over 3 years found that the vast majority of participants (98%) indicated that they would use the pedagogical skills in their own teaching practice.