Board 85: Integrated Engineering Leadership Initiative for Teaching Excellence (iELITE) Year Two: Assessment of Intermediate-Term Outcome for Graduate Teaching Assistant Training

Since the spring of 2017, the Integrated Engineering Leadership Initiative for Teaching Excellence (iELITE) team has been developing and offering a course that seeks to train graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) in the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The training is to be applicable to all types of GTA contexts: lab, discussion, and lecture. Because many of our engineering students’ career goals are within non-academic settings, students often have little natural motivation to develop effective pedagogical skills. As explained in our previous paper1, the team made a strategic decision to combine the teaching of leadership skills and pedagogical skills in order to appeal to GTAs who plan to go into non-academic careers. In this paper, we will present our logic model for the iELITE program, which has four categories of inputs: GTAs, Engineering Faculty, Administration (College and Departments), and External Partners (industry sponsors). The logic model will lay out corresponding short-term, intermediate-term and long-term outcomes for each of the categories. The External Partners category is a new addition to the program this year. After collecting feedback from the teaching community in the college, we think that it is crucial to connect our content to what is being done in the professional workplace to make the learning experience more realistic. Intermediate-term outcomes in the GTAs category will be our main focus for the moment. Furthermore, we will discuss faculty feedback from those who have worked with past GTA participants in the program.