2025 AIChE Annual Meeting

(395q) Developing a Graduate Student Instructor Training Resource Repository to Share and Promote Better Practice

Authors

Sandy Pettit, University of South Florida
In 2024, the Education Division surveyed departments in the US and Canada over how they trained or otherwise prepared graduate student instructors (GSIs) and the teaching activities of GSIs in these roles. We use the term graduate student instructors to denote a very broad range of teaching positions that graduate students may hold in the department including, but not limited to, instructors, teaching assistants (TAs), graders, readers, and lab managers, as all of these positions support the learning of chemical engineering students. Within this survey, we found a wide breadth of training, requirements, and duties that GSIs take across the nation, and requests from respondents for training resources (both general and specific to chemical engineering) and for greater support for faculty and staff supporting these programs locally. In response, we have begun to develop a resource repository of materials that are relevant to the training of GSIs in chemical engineering. This repository consists of materials shared from the community used in their own departments, and drawn from publicly available pedagogical development materials targeting graduate students. Currently we have this repository organized to include lab training materials for TAs; examples of teaching orientations and role-specific workshops for faculty leaders; guides for GSIs to develop soft skills (e.g., teamwork) and technical communication skills (e.g., writing and presentations); and professional development materials specifically for graduate students seeking to become faculty.

The goal of this project is to help departments better understand and learn from others how they can improve their development of GSIs in alignment with how the departments see pedagogical training as part of the development of their graduate students–be this primarily in transfer to jobs in industry or more focused towards a future faculty role. Additionally, we want to engage the broader chemical engineering community to help guide and contribute to this project so that it can best support GSIs, and faculty leading these training initiatives.