Description of the Program

Professional development programming for Stanford graduate students, including STEM students, has existed on campus at least since 1975 when the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) was founded and began offering orientations and workshops to interested teaching assistants. The array of CTL services steadily expanded over the years, as did the number of STEM departments collaboratively or independently offering programs to their graduate students. The desired outcomes are two-fold: 1) to introduce graduate students to the general principles and techniques of good teaching and communication, and 2) to provide development in discipline-specific pedagogy.

In 1991 a Faculty Senate report suggested an overall framework for these programs, with CTL providing training in general teaching skills in partnership with departments that would concentrate on the discipline-specific aspects of TA development. Shortly thereafter, annual Faculty/TA Conferences on TA training were launched—one for STEM departments and one for humanities and social science departments—that provided a forum for departments to share successes and discuss ongoing challenges. In 1997, the Faculty Senate intensified earlier efforts by creating a Teaching Assistant Oversight Committee (TAOC) to formally monitor departments’ progress in preparing TAs to assume their teaching responsibilities. The TAOC’s first achievement was the development of guidelines for TA training, including the mandate that departments appoint a faculty point person for such efforts. With the hiring of an Associate Director for Science and Engineering in 1999, CTL stepped up its focus on STEM departments. At the same time, the TAOC held direct discussions with the Deans of Engineering, Humanities and Sciences, and Earth Sciences, confirming their commitment to the professional development of their graduate students. The combination of a CTL associate director with a background in science, the appointment of faculty point persons for TA training in most STEM departments, and the support of the cognizant deans, propelled STEM graduate teaching development significantly forward.

While Stanford has no single centralized professional development program for STEM graduate students, the TAOC and CTL have succeeded in forging strong links with and among STEM departments by providing pedagogical support, archiving program information, and disseminating best practices. STEM pedagogy courses, teaching workshops, and brown-bags are offered by both the departments and the CTL, often in close collaboration with one another. Given the distributed nature of these activities, it is difficult to estimate the time invested by graduate students (“program-rich” departments 20-40 hours; “program-lean” departments <5 hours).

Adding to the growing culture of teaching and professional development on campus are nationally visible programs such as the CTL-sponsored Tomorrows’ Professor Listserve and the Stanford Research Communication/I-RITE program. In addition Stanford has hosted NSF-funded multi-day career preparation and mentoring workshops for STEM graduate students from around the country. The challenge now before us is to decide if we are doing enough, if it is appropriately “packaged,” and if what we are doing best meets the needs of our STEM graduate students.

Outcomes of the Program

Because we are describing a distributed partnership, rather than a single program, it is not feasible to report on each of the wide variety of department-based offerings. The following general numbers will give a sense of the total number of STEM graduate students who receive support at the university and/or department levels.

Stanford’s 18 STEM departments and programs support about 350 TA-ships per year, and graduate students filling these positions intersect various training and/or pedagogy courses at the department level. Each year approximately 250-325 STEM TAs attend the university-wide half-day TA orientations. These orientations follow a “conference model” in which the graduate students select among concurrent offerings that include STEM-specific topics. CTL-sponsored general teaching and oral communication workshops annually reach more than 350 individuals (from all disciplines) and about 300 STEM graduate students attend custom workshops jointly sponsored by CTL and individual departments.

A number of positive changes over the past five years can be attributed, at least in part, to the mandates and concerted partnership effort that has been built around TA training and graduate student professional development. Our campus has moved from having perhaps 5/18 STEM departments supporting substantive programming to about 16/18 of those departments with carefully designed, customized resources for graduate students. An increased culture of teaching has grown within these same groups as department chairs have assumed responsibility to sustain programs and faculty point persons have become integral partners in providing pedagogical resources and maintaining “departmental memory.” Payoff from this “critical mass effect” is evident in the exchange of information that takes place at our annual Faculty/TA Conference on TA Training. We now see active program growth and new initiatives attributed back to information learned from one another at previous conferences. It is also clear from these exchanges that what starts out in many departments as “TA training” morphs over time to include professional development support applicable to a more broadly defined academic career beyond the TA-ship.

Implementation of the Program

Key to the success of our program is effective partnership among major campus governance bodies, service units, and departments. Specifically,

At the University Level:
1) Strong Faculty Senate support, via the Teaching Assistant Oversight Committee, for both discipline-specific and general graduate student teaching development, including a mandate to provide resources and training, guidelines for achieving success, and a mechanism for program review.
2) Engagement and active cooperation of deans as resource provider and, if need be, in an enforcer role.
3) A Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) with disciplinary-based, as well as general, pedagogical services that also provides grants to encourage growth in graduate student professional development, exchange of ideas and best practices, continuity in programming, and awareness of national level resources and pedagogical issues.

At the Department Level:
4) Motivated chairs, faculty and graduate students to assume leadership roles in identifying relevant teaching goals and in crafting individual departmental professional development programs, often in partnership with CTL.
5) A mechanism for providing continuity and ongoing departmental memory, including consistent faculty oversight of the discipline-based programs and effective archive structures.