Description of the Program

As part of the national Preparing Future Faculty initiative, the Graduate School offers courses designed to provide academic credit for students who work with teaching mentors (GRDSCH 610, Teaching Mentorship), to have an opportunity for students being mentored for teaching to discuss their work together (GRDSCH 620, Teaching Mentorship Seminar, required for Huckabay Fellows), or to delve into special topics (GRDSCH 630, Special Topics in College/University Teaching) such as Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, Exploring Faculty Careers in Higher Education, or discipline-specific areas. These courses are of special interest to those considering careers in the professoriate and will enhance their preparation as college or university teachers.

Recent course offerings include:
Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: http://depts.washington.edu/gs630/
Exploring Faculty Careers in Higher Education: http://www.grad.washington.edu/courses/Syllabus.htm
Active Learning for Engineering Education: http://ssli.ee.washington.edu/courses/GRDSCH630.html

Outcomes of the Program

Graduate School courses are interdisciplinary by design. Since the 620 & 630 courses were first offered, participation by students from STEM disciplines has ranged from one-half to three-fourths of the students enrolled. STEM disciplines represented in the 630 courses include :

• Aeronautics and Astronautics
• Applied Mathematics
• Aquatic and Fishery Science
• Archaeology
• Astronomy
• Atmospheric Science
• Bioengineering
• Biostatistics
• Botany
• Chemical Engineering
• Chemistry
• Civil Engineering
• Computer Science and Engineering
• Earth and Space Science
• Economics
• Electrical Engineering
• Environmental Health
• Epidemiology
• Forestry
• Genome Sciences
• Geological Sciences
• Immunology
• Math
• Microbiology
• Neurobiology and Behavior
• Nursing
• Nutritional Science
• Oceanography
• Oral Biology
• Pathobiology
• Pathology
• Pharmaceutics
• Physics
• Speech and Hearing Science
• Statistics
• Technical Communication
• Urban Design and Planning
• Zoology

Feedback from students in these courses has been uniformly positive (see for example http://depts.washington.edu/gs630/feedback.html). Students from the course have later taken on TA leadership responsibilities in their departments, participated in teaching and learning fellowships and/or research in their disciplines, and have taught or contributed to teaching and learning courses in their respective departments. Students reported 1-3 years after taking the course:

I was recently telling a friend about GRDSCH 630 and some of the ways it has continued to help me …. This was my third year of teaching, and so I was required to go through a fairly extensive third year review process in which so many of the ideas we had talked about in GRDSCH 630 came back into focus. I went back to my class notes many times, and found the content and discussion we had had related to the question of "How do we know that students have learned?" to be particularly useful as I looked through my evaluations and course changes to try to articulate this to my review committee more clearly. Had I not had the class, I feel like I would have been much less prepared to know how to prepare, much less provide evidence of student learning.

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I recently went through the job search process, and had pretty darn good luck. I ended up taking a tenure track job at a small liberal arts college. It was exactly the kind of job I wanted, and I ended up being able to select from a few offers, so obviously I am really happy with how it turned out. A few months ago when I was still doing lots of phone interviews, I always asked at the end (when they allowed me to ask questions of them) "So, what was the one thing that stood out in my application that made you think you might want to hire me?” …. Well, almost without fail, every single place mentioned my teaching philosophy statement as something that they thought was really good and set me apart. So I thought I would just say thanks for your help both in getting us all to start early on that statement (for the course) and for your more specific suggestions later about how to improve it. It is pretty obvious now in retrospect that the effort that went into the teaching philosophy statement was well worth it, so thanks!

Implementation of the Program

Courses are designed to be interdisciplinary. Students from both STEM and non-STEM disciplines report that the opportunity to interact with others outside of their departments is a great strength of the course, giving them a sense of how to work constructively with others outside their specific disciplines (which they anticipate doing in future faculty positions), and also requiring them to think through and articulate assumptions which are often taken for granted when communicating with others in the same discipline.

Courses are often team-taught by people who have familiarity with the teaching and learning conditions of different disciplines. Courses are offered once per year, and meet weekly for one academic quarter.