How Early Is Too Early To Start Teaching? Teaching Portfolios As A Training Tool For Undergraduate Instructors

Undergraduate students, especially juniors and seniors in their programs, often have the necessary content knowledge to be able to assist effectively in teaching prerequisite courses in engineering and science. Because these undergraduates are ‘near peers’, undergraduate teaching assistants may seem more approachable than faculty instructors and serve as role models to students in classes that they teach. With some training, advanced undergraduate teaching assistants or instructors can potentially serve as a cost-effective way to provide additional instructional support. As part of an NSF funded teaching and learning center, the Engineering Teaching Portfolio Program (ETPP) has designed a four session teaching portfolio program that helps train undergraduate students to be more effective as instructors. During these 1 hour sessions, undergraduate instructors share and discuss teaching strategies with a forum of their peers while documenting their instructional activities through creating teaching portfolios. This paper describes the teaching portfolio program curriculum and discusses the curriculum design, the results of the initial curriculum usability testing with the undergraduate instructors who staff the Minority Science and Engineering Program (MSEP) study center, and the perspectives of these undergraduate instructors on teaching and learning. As a result of the success of this pilot offering, the MSEP study center is currently considering requiring the undergraduate ETPP as training for all MSEP student instructional support staff. Introduction Undergraduate students, especially juniors and seniors in their programs, often have the necessary content knowledge to be able to assist effectively in teaching prerequisite courses in engineering and science. Because undergraduate instructors and tutors are ‘near peers’, undergraduate teaching assistants may seem more approachable than faculty instructors and serve as role models to students in classes that they teach 1 . However, undergraduate students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields have few opportunities to work as course instructors or teaching assistants, and even fewer opportunities to explore and develop scholarly approaches to teaching. Although many undergraduates gain teaching experience through peer tutoring programs, these programs usually do not provide formal training for peer tutors about best practices for STEM instruction. Furthermore, undergraduates may not recognize that learning how to teach more effectively is a professional development skill that could be useful to them in non-teaching focused STEM fields. They also may not have a reason to archive or save work that they have done towards developing products of instruction such as worksheets, solved problem sets, lesson plans, and other documents related to their teaching. Unless a system exists to archive or save P ge 10700.1 “Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education” these products, this lost work adds to personnel turnover costs when student teaching assistants move on. The professional development benefits for undergraduates in STEM fields working as instructional staff include increasing their knowledge and core understanding of course material by learning through teaching. Other benefits include improving their communication skills, practicing their mentoring skills, and gaining more confidence in their leadership skills. Getting undergraduates in STEM fields to think about teaching at the college level early in their careers may make them more aware of the possibility of continuing their education in graduate school or faculty careers. In addition to these higher level professional outcomes, undergraduate teaching assistants and tutors are typically compensated for their work through hourly pay rather than teaching appointments. With some training, advanced undergraduate teaching assistants can potentially serve as a cost-effective way to provide additional instructional support. This paper presents a pilot offering of a peer-focused teaching training program in which undergraduate instructors discuss, reflect, and share strategies about their teaching within the context of creating a teaching portfolio documenting their instructional activities. This pilot offering also included a preliminary research study that had two major goals: to gather some early stage user data about the initial curriculum design, and to gain insight about how undergraduate instructors think about teaching. The purpose of this research study was not to conduct an exhaustive, in-depth, generalizable investigation of these issues, but rather to take a snapshot that represented the experiences of a small number (N < 6) of undergraduates and graduate students within the context of this program. In this paper, we will first describe the background for this project. Secondly, we will provide an overview of the undergraduate Engineering Teaching Portfolio Program (ETPP) which includes a description of the context in which we piloted this newly developed undergraduate version of the ETPP curriculum and the process we used to adapt the curriculum materials that we previously developed for an advanced graduate student audience to the undergraduate level. Third, we will present the design of the research study linked with this pilot offering and discuss the results and their implications of the formative evaluation of the curriculum redesign. We will then discuss what we learned about impact of creating teaching portfolios on these undergraduates, and what we learned about the attitudes these undergraduate instructors had about teaching and learning. Finally, we will talk about future work related to this pilot offering. Background—portfolios in education Portfolio construction represents a promising pedagogy for teacher training by helping undergraduate instructors learn more about teaching and make connections between teaching and professional development as they go through the process of archiving and presenting their teaching related work. This statement may feel odd to some readers since there is already much interest in portfolios from an assessment perspective 2 . However, there is also burgeoning interest in the learning that takes place when developing a portfolio. For example, Christy and Lima describe two uses of portfolios in engineering education, and report that at least 78% of the students who created these portfolios thought that “portfolios enhanced their learning” 3 . Moving beyond self-report data, Finlay and his colleagues found that certain oncology students who prepared a portfolio did better on a final exam than students who did not 4 . Even in some of the P ge 10700.2 “Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education” assessment research, there are indicators that learning is taking place. For example, Scholes and her colleagues reported the need for nursing students to deconstruct and reconstruct their experiences when developing an assessment portfolio 5 . This deconstruction and reconstruction process strongly suggests that the portfolio creation would have resulted in learning. We are developing a teacher training curriculum that leads undergraduate instructors through a series of facilitated discussions about teaching and learning as they create individual teaching portfolios documenting their instructional activities. As part of the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE), a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded center for engineering education research, the Engineering Teaching Portfolio Program (ETPP), was initially developed to help engineering graduate students discuss and reflect about their teaching in a group of their peers within the context of creating a teaching portfolio that could be used for faculty job searches 6 . The curriculum for this graduate level program is being modified and adapted into a pilot teaching portfolio program geared towards training undergraduate students to be more effective as instructors. This undergraduate version of the ETPP curriculum was piloted at the University of Washington with a group of undergraduate instructors and peer tutors working for the Minority Science and Engineering Program (MSEP) 7 , an undergraduate diversity program housed within the College of Engineering that focuses on the recruitment and retention of underrepresented students in STEM fields. Undergraduate ETPP These undergraduate ETPP program sessions focused on giving the undergraduate instructors and tutors a forum to share their thoughts and strategies about teaching within the context of a discussion about instructional issues that they were facing in their teaching and tutoring. Specifically, the undergraduate instructors were asked to discuss and share successes and challenges that they were facing in classroom instruction and peer tutoring, and to create artifacts documenting the teaching work that they were doing. The instructors and tutors were encouraged to use the first 20-30 minutes of the meeting times to compare notes about student learning in the pre-engineering courses for which the instructors and tutors were all providing support, and to brainstorm solutions for how to help students learn difficult concepts. These discussions about teaching and learning took place with other instructors and tutors in their program, with light facilitation from an experienced teacher, and with occasional visits from fulltime MSEP program staff. This section will describe the context for the pilot offering of this curriculum in Autumn Quarter 2004. This section will also describe the user-centered design approach by which we are adapting a previously developed graduate level engineering teaching