Preparing for College and University Teaching : Competencies for Graduate and Professional Students 9781000976441, 9781620369104

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“Graduate students provide much of the instruction in American higher education. What should an effective graduate student instructor (GSI) know and be able to do? Preparing for College and University Teaching answers those questions by offering a detailed research-based framework of 10 teaching competencies. This book will instantly become a go-to guide for those who work with GSIs and those who mentor apprentice instructors.” —CHRIS M. GOLDE, BEAM, Stanford Career Education, Stanford University “Preparing for College and University Teaching presents 10 essential competencies for graduate student professional development, each with a theoretical foundation and practical program examples. I have found this competency framework to be very useful for strategic planning, and I envision that other centers for teaching and learning will find this book to be an important guidepost for their graduate and professional student development initiatives.” —MARY C. WRIGHT, Associate Provost for Teaching and Learning; Executive Director of the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning; Professor of Practice in Sociology, Brown University “A framework of graduate student teaching competencies is exactly what we needed when developing our preparing future faculty program. With this volume, we now have a research-supported and actionable guide with which to justify, evaluate, and benchmark our program. This book will greatly benefit our program—and the graduate students we serve.” —KATE WILLIAMS, PhD, Assistant Director, TA Development and Future Faculty Initiatives, Center for Teaching and Learning, Georgia Institute of Technology

THE EDITORS JOANNA GILMORE is director of Assessment and Evaluation for Charleston County School District in South Carolina.

MOLLY HATCHER is director of the Faculty Innovation Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

22883 Quicksilver Drive Sterling, VA 20166-2019 www.Styluspub.com

PREPARING FOR COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY TEACHING

—ANN E. AUSTIN, University Distinguished Professor of Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education; Associate Dean for Research, College of Education; Assistant Provost for Faculty and Academic Staff Development—Career Paths, Michigan State University

GILMORE / HATCHER

“How to prepare graduate students as effective teachers has been a topic of growing importance over the past few decades. Gilmore, Hatcher, and their colleagues have made a major contribution to theory and practice. This book will be of great use to graduate deans, leaders of teaching centers, and faculty advisers committed to preparing graduate students for their responsibilities as effective teachers.”

PREPARING FOR COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY TEACHING Competencies for Graduate and Professional Students

EDITED BY

JOANNA GILMORE AND MOLLY HATCHER

“Graduate students provide much of the instruction in American higher education. What should an effective graduate student instructor (GSI) know and be able to do? Preparing for College and University Teaching answers those questions by offering a detailed research-based framework of 10 teaching competencies. This book will instantly become a go-to guide for those who work with GSIs and those who mentor apprentice instructors.” —CHRIS M. GOLDE, BEAM, Stanford Career Education, Stanford University “Preparing for College and University Teaching presents 10 essential competencies for graduate student professional development, each with a theoretical foundation and practical program examples. I have found this competency framework to be very useful for strategic planning, and I envision that other centers for teaching and learning will find this book to be an important guidepost for their graduate and professional student development initiatives.” —MARY C. WRIGHT, Associate Provost for Teaching and Learning; Executive Director of the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning; Professor of Practice in Sociology, Brown University “A framework of graduate student teaching competencies is exactly what we needed when developing our preparing future faculty program. With this volume, we now have a research-supported and actionable guide with which to justify, evaluate, and benchmark our program. This book will greatly benefit our program—and the graduate students we serve.” —KATE WILLIAMS, PhD, Assistant Director, TA Development and Future Faculty Initiatives, Center for Teaching and Learning, Georgia Institute of Technology

THE EDITORS JOANNA GILMORE is director of Assessment and Evaluation for Charleston County School District in South Carolina.

MOLLY HATCHER is director of the Faculty Innovation Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

22883 Quicksilver Drive Sterling, VA 20166-2019 www.Styluspub.com

PREPARING FOR COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY TEACHING

—ANN E. AUSTIN, University Distinguished Professor of Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education; Associate Dean for Research, College of Education; Assistant Provost for Faculty and Academic Staff Development—Career Paths, Michigan State University

GILMORE / HATCHER

“How to prepare graduate students as effective teachers has been a topic of growing importance over the past few decades. Gilmore, Hatcher, and their colleagues have made a major contribution to theory and practice. This book will be of great use to graduate deans, leaders of teaching centers, and faculty advisers committed to preparing graduate students for their responsibilities as effective teachers.”

PREPARING FOR COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY TEACHING Competencies for Graduate and Professional Students

EDITED BY

JOANNA GILMORE AND MOLLY HATCHER

Advance Praise for Preparing for College and University Teaching “Graduate students provide much of the instruction in American higher education. An enduring conundrum has been how to train them to do this work well. What should an effective graduate student instructor (GSI) know and be able to do? Preparing for College and University Teaching answers those questions by offering a detailed research-based framework of 10 teaching competencies. The framework starts with foundational competencies such as ‘acquire disciplinary expertise’ and ‘understand postsecondary environments’ and encompasses pedagogical competencies such as ‘know how people learn,’ ‘teach with an attention to diversity,’ and ‘assess their own teaching performance.’ This inspiring and practical book offers one chapter for each ­competency: a detailed description, a research-based rationale, and examples of how to teach it. Fortunately, the days when graduate students were thrown into the classroom with no training or support are behind us. Preparing for College and University Teaching provides a way to systematically organize courses and professional development offerings for graduate student instructors. This book will instantly become a go-to guide for those who work with GSIs and those who mentor apprentice instructors.”—Chris M. Golde, Stanford University “Preparing for College and University Teaching presents 10 essential competencies for graduate student professional development, each with a theoretical foundation and practical program examples. I have found this competency framework to be very useful for strategic planning at the Sheridan Center, and I envision that other centers for Teaching and Learning will find this book to be an important guidepost for their graduate and professional student development initiatives.”—Mary C. Wright, Associate Provost for Teaching and Learning, Executive Director of the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, and Professor of Practice in Sociology, Brown University “A framework of graduate student teaching competencies is exactly what we needed—and could not find in a single, integrated resource prior to this book—when developing our preparing future faculty program. With this volume, we now have a research-supported and actionable guide with which to justify, evaluate, and benchmark our program. Preparing for College and University Teaching will greatly benefit our preparing future faculty program—and the graduate students we serve.”—Kate Williams, Assistant

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Director of TA Development and Future Faculty Initiatives, Center for Teaching and Learning, Georgia Institute of Technology “How to prepare graduate students as effective teachers has been a topic of growing importance over the past few decades. By identifying and describing specific teaching competencies that graduate education should address, explaining an array of strategies for teaching these competencies, and providing examples from universities across the nation, Gilmore, Hatcher, and their colleagues have made a major contribution to theory and practice. The ideas offered are compelling and well-researched. This book will be of great use to graduate deans, leaders of teaching centers, and faculty advisers committed to preparing graduate students for their responsibilities as effective teachers.”—Ann E. Austin, University Distinguished Professor of Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education; Associate Dean for Research, College of Education; Assistant Provost for Faculty and Academic Staff Development—Career Paths, Michigan State University

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PREPARING FOR COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY TEACHING

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PREPARING FOR COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY TEACHING Competencies for Graduate and Professional Students

Edited by Joanna Gilmore and Molly Hatcher

STERLING, VIRGINIA

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COPYRIGHT © 2021 BY STYLUS PUBLISHING, LLC. Published by Stylus Publishing, LLC. 22883 Quicksilver Drive Sterling, Virginia 20166-2019 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, recording, and information storage and retrieval, without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gilmore, Joanna, editor. | Hatcher, Molly, editor. Title: Preparing for college and university teaching : competencies for graduate and professional students / edited by Joanna Gilmore and Molly Hatcher. Description: First edition. | Sterling, Virginia : Stylus, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book is a guide for designing professional development programs for graduate students. The teaching competencies framework presented here can serve as the intended curriculum for such programs. The book will also be an excellent resource for evaluating programs, and will be an excellent resource for academics who study graduate students”--Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021007511 (print) | LCCN 2021007512 (ebook) | ISBN 9781620369104 (cloth) | ISBN 9781620369111 (paperback) | ISBN 9781620369128 (library networkable e-edition) | ISBN 9781620369135 (consumer e-edition) Subjects: LCSH: College teachers--Training of--United States. | College teaching--United States. | College teaching--Evaluation. | Education--Study and teaching (Graduate)--United States. Classification: LCC LB1738 .P735 2021 (print) | LCC LB1738 (ebook) | DDC 378.1/25--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007511 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007512 13-digit ISBN: 978-1-62036-910-4 (cloth) 13-digit ISBN: 978-1-62036-911-1 (paperback) 13-digit ISBN: 978-1-62036-912-8 (library networkable e-edition) 13-digit ISBN: 978-1-62036-913-5 (consumer e-edition) Printed in the United States of America All first editions printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard. Bulk Purchases Quantity discounts are available for use in workshops and for staff development. Call 1-800-232-0223 First Edition, 2021

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A decade ago, a group came together with big ideas about ways to improve the graduate student teaching experience. This book is a product of the many conversations, ideas, and hours writing and revising that followed, and we dedicate this work to graduate student instructors. We would also like to acknowledge that this book would not be possible without the support of many colleagues who were a part of those initial conversations, reinforced that we had ideas worth sharing, and/or supported us through publication. We also appreciate the many reviewers who have provided feedback on our manuscript along the way.

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1

Joanna Gilmore and Molly Hatcher 1 OVERVIEW OF THE GRADUATE AND PROFESSIONAL STUDENT TEACHING COMPETENCIES FRAMEWORK

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Joanna Gilmore 2

ACQUIRING DISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGE

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Michelle A. Maher and Michael T. Ashby 3

DEVELOPING PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY AND DISPOSITIONS

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Alan Kalish and Jennifer S. Collins 4 DISCOVERING THE POSSIBILITIES Exploring Disciplinary and Institutional Contexts for Teaching

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Tershia Pinder-Grover and Audra Baleisis 5 INCORPORATING PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS AND ETHICS INSTRUCTION INTO GRADUATE STUDENT INSTRUCTOR AND FUTURE FACULTY PREPARATION

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Molly Hatcher and Linda M. von Hoene 6 USING KNOWLEDGE ABOUT HOW PEOPLE LEARN TO INFORM TEACHING

94

Joanna Gilmore 7 SETTING AND COMMUNICATING LEARNING GOALS AND EXPECTATIONS

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Alan Kalish and Michael K. Murphy 8

TEACHING WITH ATTENTION TO DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION

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Lauren Miller Griffith 9

ASSESSING STUDENT WORK TO PROMOTE LEARNING

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Ashley Leyba and Linda M. von Hoene

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10 TEACHING GRADUATE STUDENTS TO USE DISCIPLINE-SPECIFIC, EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICES Terms, Practices, and Opportunities

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Katherine Kearns 11 LENSES AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR HELPING GRADUATE STUDENTS ASSESS AND IMPROVE TEACHING IN COMMUNITY

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Steven Hansen and Erin M. Rentschler 12 APPLYING THE HOLISTIC COMPETENCIES FRAMEWORK

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Molly Hatcher EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

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INDEX

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INTRODUCTION Joanna Gilmore and Molly Hatcher

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his book provides an overview of the work of the Graduate Teaching Competencies Consortium (“Consortium”) from 2010 through 2019. This group includes academics who primarily work in the field of graduate student instructional development at research universities in the United States. The goal of this group, and the project reported in this book, was to identify, organize, and clarify the competencies that graduate and professional students need to teach effectively if they join the professoriate. To achieve this goal, we developed a framework of 10 teaching competencies. We introduce the framework in chapter 1, and each competency is described in a chapter of the book. We hope the framework will make a significant theoretical contribution to conceptualizing graduate student teaching development, as well as serve as a practical guide for a variety of purposes and audiences. Most commonly, we expect that it will be used in planning professional development opportunities for graduate student instructors (GSIs). Thus, this tool may be most useful to graduate and professional student developers and faculty who supervise graduate students. Other potential audiences for this work include faculty hiring committees; graduate student interest groups and learned societies and organizations; national agencies interested in graduate student development such as the National Science Foundation, the Council of Graduate Schools, the Spencer Foundation, the Teagle Foundation, the National Association of Graduate and Professional Students; and international audiences interested in graduate and professional student development practices in the United States such as the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Finally, graduate students may read this book and use it to further their own professional development and preparation for the academic job market. Overall, we hope the book will contribute to supporting graduate students’ career development and success in higher education contexts. Chapter 1 of this book discusses the emergence of the Consortium, presents the teaching competency framework, and details our process for

1

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developing the framework. The chapter explains how the framework contributes to GSI development and explores its intended uses for those who are interested in graduate and professional student development. Chapters 2 through 10 each provide a deeper dive into a specific competency. These individual chapters frequently acknowledge overlap between the competencies, as we recognize that there are important interactions between the competencies as graduate students develop and apply their knowledge to teaching practice. Chapters 2 and 3 address what we refer to as the foundational competencies, as they underlie graduate student development. These are the competencies graduate students need to achieve by the end of their graduate education to be successful teacher-scholars. Chapter 2 focuses on the critical role an in-depth and organized disciplinary knowledge base plays in becoming an effective disciplinary instructor. This chapter highlights why and how this knowledge base is fundamental to success in the classroom. Chapter 3 highlights the importance of graduate students developing the appropriate professional identities, behaviors, and interactions to effectively teach as faculty in an increasingly changing higher education system. Chapters 4 and 5 explore the postsecondary competencies, aspects of the higher education landscape that graduate students should know in order to have successful careers as educators. Chapter 4 focuses on the ways that institutional climate and disciplinary culture impact teaching and learning. The chapter provides examples of initiatives such as Preparing Future Faculty programs that help graduate students gain a better understanding of their own needs vis-à-vis their own discipline and institution, as well as other types of academic institutions. Chapter 5 explores the importance of instructors effectively integrating professional standards and ethical decision-making to create productive learning environments. Beyond providing an overview of the legal, professional, institutional, and departmental standards to which graduate students must adhere, this chapter provides an example of one university’s comprehensive training in this area. Chapters 6 through 11 delve into the pedagogical competencies. Each chapter identifies an area in which graduate students must develop in order to become successful teachers. Chapter 6 describes how gaining knowledge about how people learn supports GSIs’ professional development and improvement of their instructional practices. It also describes three theories of how people learn and their implications for instructional design, facilitating labs, and lecturing. The chapter concludes with some lessons learned in integrating educational and psychological theories into GSI training programs. Chapter 7 focuses on the development and communication of learning goals and expectations that foster learning and effective classroom

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interaction. This chapter examines the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary for GSIs to set and communicate learning goals and expectations, as well as strategies to support GSIs in achieving this competency. Chapter 8 considers student diversity and inclusion, an area critical to pedagogy. This chapter articulates the benefits of a diverse educational environment, specifically fostering student growth, decreasing prejudice, and promoting civic engagement. In addition, this chapter contains strategies to help GSIs learn to teach with attention to diversity and inclusion. Chapter 9 turns to the area of assessment, discussing the emergence of a focus on assessment in higher education and describing activities that help prepare GSIs to assess student work in a way that promotes student learning. Chapters 10 and 11 delve into the final two pedagogical competencies. Chapter 10 provides an overview of various forms of teaching and learning literature and describes programs and curricula that teach GSIs to read, analyze, and apply teaching and learning literature, particularly that which is specific to their disciplines. The chapter concludes with recommendations for graduate student professional development opportunities that focus on gaining evidence-based teaching expertise. Chapter 11 identifies four lenses on learning and scholarship that shed light on the assessment and improvement of teaching practice. The contributors examine how these lenses are helpful in understanding graduate student development generally and specifically within the context of their work in training GSIs. Finally, chapter 12 examines holistic applications of the teaching competency framework by describing a GSI training program that emerged directly from the framework. It explains how the goals, content, instructional activities, and assessments for the training program developed from the framework in an effort to demonstrate how the framework can be tailored to meet the needs of specific graduate student communities. We do not think of the framework presented in this publication as a finalized product. Instead, we hope that other scholars will build on our work and continue to refine it. Some remaining issues that could be explored to further the work reported in this book include the following: •• The order in which the teaching competencies are/should be developed: We suspect that some of the competencies we identify in this chapter may underlie development in other areas. For that reason, we have identified our first two competencies as foundational. However, empirical work could be conducted to investigate whether these foundational competencies or any of the other competencies serve as threshold concepts, meaning that they are critical to master before other knowledge, skills, and attitudes can be developed. Work in this

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area could complement research on exploring threshold concepts in graduate student research skill development (Timmerman et al., 2013). In general, more research on how the competencies interact would be helpful. •• The need for empirical research on the competencies: Although this book clarifies the intended curriculum for GSI professional development (e.g., the curriculum as defined by experts in the field), it will also be helpful to empirically investigate the enacted curriculum (the content and activities that are presented during training and instruction); the achieved curriculum (the knowledge and skills that participants can demonstrate after instruction); and the desired curriculum (the competencies that graduate students need to achieve to be viable on the job market) (Moercke & Eika, 2002; Thomas & Border, 2011). •• Competencies outside of the U.S. context: It would be helpful to better understand how the competencies identified in our work align with the competencies needed by graduate students in international contexts. •• The desire for measures of the competencies: It would be fruitful to develop measures of the teaching competencies we have identified to provide a means by which graduate students can assess their growth as instructors and that faculty can use to provide support to their mentees. We hope that this book provides a strong foundation for these lingering questions by creating a set of teaching competencies for graduate students that is both grounded in expertise and best practices as well as flexible enough to reach a wide range of practitioners and administrators. It is our aim to create a practical book that provides concrete examples for implementing the competencies to those who support graduate and professional student development. Finally, we hope that this book demonstrates the importance of each individual competency as well as the holistic competency framework to the growth of graduate and professional students who aim to be future members of the professoriate.

References Moercke, A., & Eika, B. (2002). What are the clinical skills levels of newly graduated physicians? Self-assessment of an intended curriculum identified by a Delphi process. Medical Education, 36(5), 472–478. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.13652923.2002.01208.x

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Thomas, D., & Border, L. (2011). Assessing graduate consultant programs: Directors’ perceptions of rationales, content, activities and benefits. In A. Kalish & S. S. Robinson (Eds.), Mapping the range of graduate student professional development: Studies in graduate and professional student development, 14 (pp. 37–52). New Forums Press. Timmerman, B., Feldon, D., Maher, M., Strickland, D., & Gilmore, J. (2013). Performance-based assessment of graduate student research skills: Timing, trajectory, and potential thresholds. Studies in Higher Education, 38(5), 693–710. https:// doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2011.590971

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1 O V E RV I E W O F T H E G R A D U AT E A N D PROFESSIONAL STUDENT TEACHING COMPETENCIES FRAMEWORK Joanna Gilmore

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he graduate student instructor (GSI) program at the University of Texas at Austin’s (UT Austin) Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) emerged in the 1990s. The focuses of the program were to help GSIs teach, improve their teaching, and prepare for their instructional roles as faculty if their goal is to join the professoriate. Although the GSI program’s work was guided by this larger mission, program staff had never formally articulated the competencies graduate students should develop to be effective GSIs or what they would need to know or be able to do to secure jobs as faculty. Thus, we were left to ask questions such as the following: •• How do we know who is an effective GSI? •• What should be the focus of the workshops or the new seminar we are creating for GSIs? •• How do the workshops we offer for graduate students fit together to inform their development more holistically? To answer these questions, we needed to develop a GSI competencies framework. In order to begin the process of identifying important GSI teaching competencies, UT Austin’s GSI program coordinator reached out to a diverse group of higher education leaders whose primary responsibility is to 6

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promote GSI development. Known as the Graduate Teaching Competencies Consortium (“Consortium”), this group initially included nine members primarily from research-intensive universities in the United States. The GSI program coordinator had been involved with the work of many members of this group as they published a special edition of Studies in Professional and Graduate Student Development (Kalish & Robinson, 2011). She recognized that collaborating with this group around that current work, rather than working individually, would produce a framework that would be more comprehensive and systematically developed and thus, more credible. The GSI program coordinator also recognized that this framework would be useful to other institutions that train GSIs. The result of the conversations and work that followed is published in this book.

Chapter Purpose This chapter provides an overview of the Consortium’s work from 2010 through 2019. This includes a description of why a teaching competency framework is needed for GSIs, how we developed the framework, an overview of the framework we created, how we intend for the framework to be used, and deliberations we made in developing the framework. Finally, this chapter identifies the structure and purpose of each additional chapter in this book.

The Value of Promoting GSI Development As early researchers recognized (Chism & Warner, 1987; Davis et al., 2002; Lewis, 1993; Nyquist et al., 1991), graduate students are critical in the higher education academic pipeline. To illustrate, historically graduate students teach between 25% and 50% of courses offered at the undergraduate level nationally (Nicklow et al., 2007). Graduate student teaching is also critical because during early teaching experiences teachers establish a teaching style and set of teaching skills (Boice, 1996) that will endure as graduate students enter the professoriate. Although teaching represents only one of the many duties of faculty of higher education, faculty identify this as an area in which they need more professional development (Theall et al., 2010). As Golde and Walker (2006) discussed, “Many new faculty members do not feel ready to carry out the range of roles asked of them, particularly those related to teaching” (p. 5). Thus, impacting graduate student development is a potential doorway for changing faculty practices and promoting institutional change.

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Partly prompted by the Preparing Future Faculty program (www.preparingfaculty.org), many institutions of higher education (e.g., M.S. Palmer & Little, 2013) have recognized the importance of GSIs and have begun to provide programs focused on their development as future members of the professoriate. That said, the pedagogical competencies that such programs seek to develop are not widely agreed on.

Need for a GSI Teaching Competency Framework Developing an effective curriculum is critical in delivering high-quality learning experiences (e.g., Barnett & Coate, 2005; Russell, 1997) and may be one of the most important matters in higher education (Hyun, 2006). A solid curriculum provides the basis for instructional design, allowing teachers, instructional designers, and program developers to first consider the purpose of instruction and then backward design the learning activities to achieve desired learning outcomes (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). The goal of the project reported in this book was to clarify the intended curriculum that could guide pedagogical training and support programs for graduate students, particularly the competencies they would need to teach effectively if they join the professoriate. The intended curriculum is one of the three kinds of curricula defined by Moercke and Eika (2002). They suggested that all curricula actually consist of three curricula: (a) the intended (as defined by experts in the field); (b) the enacted (the content and activities actually presented during the training/educational period); and (c) the achieved curriculum (the knowledge and skills that participants can demonstrate after instruction). To address the growing concern (e.g., Golde & Walker, 2006; Krebs, 2014) that graduate school only prepares students for the ivory tower and does not teach them what they need to succeed on the nonacademic job market, Thomas and Border (2011) built on Moercke and Eika’s work. They added a fourth type of curricula, the desired curriculum, which describes what future employers want new hires to be able to do when they arrive on the job. Although the intended curriculum is critical in designing professional development for GSIs and guided the initial goal of this project, the Consortium also recognizes the need to investigate the enacted, achieved, and desired curricula in the future. Although some work has been done to identify the competencies that GSIs need (Austin & McDaniels, 2006; Chickering & Gamson, 1987; Fitzsimmons & Fenwick, 1997; McDaniels, 2010; Nyquist & Wulff, 1996; Poock, 2001; Simpson & Smith, 1995; Tigelaar et al., 2004), the existing frameworks are limited. For example, Austin and McDaniels (2006) identified 15 skills and abilities that graduate students need to be successful as

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faculty. Although this is an excellent starting place for our work, this model is not specific to teaching competencies. Simpson and Smith (1995) identified 26 teaching competencies in six skill areas that are beneficial to undergraduate student instruction provided by GSIs. In both Austin and McDaniel’s (2006) and Simpson and Smith’s (1995) frameworks, the competencies themselves are not fully described. A more complete description would include a definition of each competency, instructional behaviors and strategies associated with each competency, and research that connects each competency to specific student outcomes, as well as information about how to develop each competency. Thus, while we acknowledge that many of the competencies we included in this framework are not novel, what we see as our primary contribution is that we have integrated them into a holistic framework and described each in substantial detail, particularly in terms of how they apply to GSI teaching and professional development. The framework we propose is necessary for practical reasons. As Austin and McDaniels (2006) and McDaniels (2010) note, currently graduate education is not generally systematically or developmentally organized. This often results in graduate students reporting that they receive “mixed messages” about how they can be successful (Austin & McDaniels, 2006, p. 432), inadequate mentoring (McDaniels, 2010), and limited opportunities for “guided reflection” (McDaniels, 2010, p. 32). Further, when graduate students receive explicit pedagogical professional development, they often report that it does not meet their needs (Golde & Dore, 2004; Gray & Buerkel-Rothfuss, 1991; Luft et al., 2004). Receipt of “mixed messages” and lack of awareness of the needs of GSIs may partly account for the large percentage (roughly 40%) of graduate students who do not complete their programs of study (Golde, 2005). We feel that if administrators, supervising faculty, and graduate and professional student developers were provided with a research-based framework for promoting GSI development, they could better organize systematic professional development opportunities that align with GSIs’ needs. This work may be particularly timely given the expansion of certificate programs for college teaching offered to GSIs (Kalish et al., 2009). Next, I will present the framework we have developed and how we intend for it to be used and then discuss substantial considerations that arose during the development process.

The Graduate and Professional Student Teaching Competencies Framework The Consortium defines a teaching competency as a convergence of knowledge, behaviors/skills, and attitudes/values/dispositions that support effective

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instructional practices to promote student learning, professional problemsolving, and instructional decision-making (Biesta, 2009; Le Deist & Winterton, 2007). A competency is larger than an objective (which is usually specific, measurable, and taught in the course of a single workshop or lesson; see chapter 6 for further discussion of the definition of an objective). For example, Competency 5 in our framework focuses on gaining knowledge about how people learn (as well as applying this to instruction). It is not possible to gain this knowledge in the course of a single workshop or class session because there are many areas of research and theories of human learning that are important to consider in instructional design. Thus, gaining knowledge about how people learn is best accomplished through a series of class sessions, workshops, or courses. The graduate and professional student teaching competencies framework includes 10 competencies organized around three overarching questions (see Figure 1.1). The first overarching question is “What do graduate students need to achieve by the end of their graduate education to be successful teacher-scholars?” We describe this set of competencies as “foundational competencies” to mean that these competencies are not specific to teaching. In fact, they underlie the graduate students’ development as researchers as well. Although they are not specific to teaching, these competencies are critical for GSIs to become effective higher education instructors. For example, it is critical that effective higher education instructors have an in-depth and organized knowledge of their discipline in order to be able to teach novices. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the foundational competencies and explain how these competencies connect to teaching effectiveness. The second overarching question that our framework answers is “What do graduate students need to understand about higher education to have successful careers as educators?” The “postsecondary competencies” focus on what GSIs need to know about the larger environment in which they will teach in order to become effective higher education instructors. Though not directly related to pedagogy, these competencies indirectly influence GSIs’ classroom practices and should not be ignored. The emphasis on graduate students learning about their institution is also supported by other researchers (Austin & McDaniels, 2006; Gaff et al., 2003; Pruitt-Logan et al., 2002). Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the postsecondary competencies, describing the contexts, cultures, policies, and standards in higher education that should inform GSIs’ teaching practices. The third overarching question that our framework answers is where our discussions began. It addresses the heart of this work: “What do graduate students need to do by the end of their graduate education to be successful teachers?” To address this question, we have identified six “pedagogical

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Figure 1.1.  Graduate and professional student teaching competencies framework. Foundational Competencies: “What do graduate students need to achieve by the end of their graduate education to be successful teacher-scholars?” 1. Graduate and professional students will acquire disciplinary knowledge (includes content, skills, procedures, and metacognitive knowledge) and consider the historical, contemporary, and future potential of scholarship in their disciplines. 2. Graduate and professional students will purposefully participate in activities to develop an integrated understanding of themselves as ethical, collegial individuals, teachers, and scholars in their classrooms, departments, and disciplines. Postsecondary Competencies: “What do graduate students need to understand by the end of their graduate education about higher education to have successful careers as educators?” 3. Graduate and professional students will explore and situate their practice and potential career choices within the contexts and cultures of postsecondary disciplines and institutions. 4. Graduate and professional students’ practice will be guided by an understanding of educational standards and policies in postsecondary environments. Pedagogical Competencies: “What do graduate students need to do by the end of their graduate education to be successful teachers?” 5. Graduate and professional students will gain knowledge of how people learn and how to teach consistently with these principles of learning, using a variety of techniques appropriate for the discipline, level, and learning context. 6. Graduate and professional students will consistently set and communicate learning goals and expectations, both for individual class sessions and the overall course, that are appropriate for the discipline, level, learning context, and institutional curriculum. 7. Graduate and professional students will teach with attention to diversity, inclusion of multiple perspectives, and demographics so that every student has the opportunity to learn. 8. Graduate and professional students will assess student learning responsibly, equitably, and in alignment with learning goals and use the results to enhance student learning. 9. Graduate and professional students will use evidence-based pedagogical approaches specific to the discipline and that facilitate student learning of disciplinary content. 10. Graduate and professional students will assess and improve their own teaching performance through inquiry-based practice informed by a community of scholarly teachers.

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competencies” that GSIs need to be effective instructors. Chapters 6 through 11 describe each of these competencies in detail.

Competency Development Process To develop the competencies framework discussed in the last section, the Consortium first met in April 2011 in Chicago for a 2-day meeting and continued to meet in person once or twice per year. These meetings were typically held the days before the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) conference, which most of the Consortium members attend. The Consortium members also met via Web conferences. At the first meeting in 2011, the Consortium members clarified the purpose and goals of the Consortium and began discussing the value and purpose of a set of teaching competencies for GSIs. At this meeting, we also began to brainstorm the competencies that might be included in this model. Thus, the ideas we initially generated stemmed from the members’ knowledge of the literature on teaching effectiveness and experiences working with GSIs. A subsequent meeting in Atlanta in October 2011, as well as several Web conferences, were used to make improvements to the competency statements, generally focused on using terminology that resonated with Consortium members and the constituents they serve. My involvement in a forum on teaching, learning, and research held by the Center for the Integration of Research on Teaching and Learning (CIRTL) the very same month reinforced the value and timeliness of the work we were doing, as one of the purposes of the forum was to develop a “shared vision for future faculty teaching processional development” (CIRTL Network, 2017, para. 6). After generating a preliminary list of teaching competencies, Consortium members began organizing these competencies. This process involved identifying overlap between the competencies and grouping similar competencies. We also examined existing frameworks for GSI development and teaching effectiveness in higher education to identify any gaps in our model (Austin & McDaniels, 2006; Chickering & Gamson, 1987; Fitzsimmons & Fenwick, 1997; McDaniels, 2010; Nyquist & Wulff, 1996; Poock, 2001; Simpson & Smith, 1995; Tigelaar et al., 2004). All Consortium members were invited to provide feedback on the resulting list of 10 competencies. As the list of competencies increased in number, the group developed a framework for organizing the competencies using three overarching questions. Separating the competencies into 10 individual areas organized under three overarching questions allowed us to give each competency individual attention, while also allowing us to demonstrate how they build on and interact with each other. For example, the foundational competencies are critical to the development

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of other competencies in this chapter. As Kalish and Collins discuss in chapter 3, if a GSI does not view themselves as a teacher, it is much less likely they will be motivated to develop other pedagogical competencies. Another example of this interaction is evident across chapters 7 and 9. In order to develop effective assessments of student learning (chapter 9), one must first determine the goal of instruction (chapter 7) (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). By giving these competencies individual attention, we are not suggesting that they should be taught in isolation. Instead, we encourage graduate and professional student developers to consider ways in which multiple competencies can be thoughtfully integrated into GSI professional development (see chapter 11 for an example of integrating the competencies). After developing the list of teaching competencies and the organizing framework, the Consortium members began to further clarify each competency and connect each of the competencies to available research. I took the lead on this project by developing a one-page overview for each competency. This overview clarified terminology included in competency statements and connected the competencies to research that supports their importance for GSIs. These preliminary descriptions and literature reviews were useful in ensuring that all Consortium members were clear about the focus of each competency, and they were useful in sharing our preliminary work with other graduate and professional student developers through presentations at the 2012 POD conference and the 2013 Higher Education Teaching and Learning conference. Although the initial descriptions and literature reviews were helpful in discussing and disseminating our work, they lacked much of the information that would allow other higher education faculty and staff to use these competencies in their work. For example, the descriptions did not include practical examples of how the competencies could be taught. Thus, this book will provide the details necessary to use the framework we have developed to plan and evaluate GSI training across the nation.

Framework Purpose Although we described the development of the framework very linearly, in fact, the framework has slowly evolved over time. We also do not think of the framework presented in this publication as a finalized product. Instead, we hope that other scholars will build on our work and continue to refine it. We also recognize that the framework will need to be adjusted as higher education and higher education pedagogy changes. For example, we suspect that as GSIs begin teaching online more frequently, they may need additional competencies to be effective online instructors, or additional information

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about how our framework translates into teaching effectiveness in an online environment may be useful. In addition to thinking of our framework as evolving, we also do not view the purpose of this framework as prescribing specific recommendations for GSI training. Instead, from our perspective, this framework serves as an impetus for discussions about GSI training among graduate and professional student developers, graduate pedagogy instructors, department chairs, deans, faculty, future graduate student employers, and the graduate and professional students themselves. This framework may help provide a common language for these groups to discuss GSI training. Through these discussions, we encourage individuals to tailor or redesign our GSI competencies to meet the needs of their GSIs, departments, colleges, programs, or universities. This framework and book may generate useful conversations among these groups around questions such as the following: •• What do we want GSIs at our institution to know about teaching and learning and be able to do in the classroom? •• What knowledge and skills are the potential employers of our GSIs seeking? •• Who is currently responsible for developing each of these competencies (e.g., faculty, departments, the university CTL)? •• Is there overlap in the roles of faculty, departments, or the university CTL in terms of training GSIs? Should there be overlap? •• Are there gaps in training for GSIs at our institution? •• How can these groups at our institution better work together to prepare GSIs? •• Do we know if GSIs at our institution are developing these competencies? How can we measure their growth and identify deficits? Overall, we hope that the framework we discuss in this book will make a significant theoretical contribution to the research on graduate student instructional development as well as a practical contribution by serving as a vehicle for sharing strategies that can be used to teach and reinforce the competencies.

Deliberations in Developing the Framework Determining the appropriate level of specificity or granularity of the competencies was an area that we considered throughout the development process. We chose to avoid making the competencies too specific. The more

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specific we made our model, the more likely that (a) it would be less relevant in certain disciplines and instructional contexts, (b) it would need to be updated regularly to reflect changes in higher education, and (c) perhaps most importantly, it could become overly prescriptive by identifying specific instructional strategies. We do not feel it is appropriate for us to recommend specific instructional approaches, as effective instructional strategies are dependent on the instructional context—the discipline (Shulman, 2005), the desired learning outcomes (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005), the amount of student prior knowledge and self-regulation (Kirschner et al., 2006), and the instructors’ teaching style (P. Palmer, 2007). Instead, we prefer our model to be highly adaptable across contexts. Rather than identifying specific instructional strategies in the competency statements, subsequent chapters provide examples of instructional strategies that are connected to the competencies we have developed. How to organize the list of competencies was an important decision that we made in this work. For example, we considered organizing our competencies by dividing them into three categories: knowledge, behaviors/skills, and attitudes. However, as we considered this organization we recognized that this would result in artificial distinctions in our competencies. For example, Competency 6, which is focused on setting and communicating goals, requires the instructor be both knowledgeable about the value of goals and how to develop them and also skilled at creating and using them to inform instructional practice. In instances such as this, an organizational framework that separated knowledge, behaviors, skills, and attitudes would not properly represent this overlap. Another concern we had about the organization of the competencies was how the organization would be interpreted by others. For example, the foundational competencies (developing disciplinary knowledge and forming an integrated identity as an ethical, collegial individual, teacher, and scholar) are often thought of as primarily within the purview of departments. We worried that others (e.g., CTLs) might misinterpret this organization to mean that developing foundational competencies is not their responsibility. In reality, we hope that departments and CTLs will work together to discuss how they can collaborate to advance graduate students’ foundational competencies. In general, the decision to include foundational competencies was discussed on numerous occasions. The argument against including these competencies in our model was that foundational competencies are the departmental focus. Given the amount of attention already devoted to this area through taking classes in one’s program of study, we worried that including them in our model would dilute the emphasis on teaching that we wanted to maintain. Despite this concern, we recognize that these foundational

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competencies are critical for becoming an effective teacher. Thus, we decided to include them in our model. Related to the idea of developing graduate students’ disciplinary knowledge and identity as a scholar, we debated about whether our framework should also include the competencies that underpin graduate students’ development as researchers. The rationale for including competencies related to graduate student development as researchers is that one of the goals of graduate education is to help graduate students develop an integrated identity as teacher and researcher. As Colbeck (2008) explains, ideally graduate students will “find synergistic connections between their multiple identities” to gain an “integrated understanding” of their identity (pp. 13–14). Thus, we considered creating a model that integrates teaching and research competencies. We ultimately decided not to include competencies specific to conducting research for two reasons. First, as described previously, there is already substantial attention paid to developing graduate students’ research skills. Second, we as graduate and professional student developers working largely in CTLs primarily hold expertise around teaching, and we did not feel qualified to put forth expectations for graduate students’ development as researchers. That said, we hope that this book may also encourage faculty, departments, colleges, and universities to identify the research competencies they expect graduate students to acquire. Currently, although much attention is paid to graduate students’ development as researchers, the specific knowledge, skills, and behaviors that graduate students are expected to develop as researchers is often not articulated to them (Maher et al., 2013). In addition to discussions about the specificity, organization, and focus of the graduate and professional student teaching competencies framework, there were some competencies Consortium members suggested that we significantly debated. One competency that we discussed including on several occasions relates to the use of technology in teaching. We decided not to include a competency related specifically to technology. Although effective pedagogy requires tools of all types—from pen and paper to “high-tech” tools such as digital simulations—we made the assumption that technology can be and is used creatively across the pedagogical competencies. Further, use of technology in education should be strongly tied to student learning goals, not simply used for the sake of using technology (Mishra & Koehler, 2006); thus, we felt any discussion of technology used to enact the competencies described in this book should be integrated throughout the chapters and tied to specific competency-related objectives.

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Structure of Subsequent Chapters Each of the subsequent chapters in this book focuses on one of the 10 competencies. Each chapter •• defines all terms used in the competency statement; •• provides examples of teacher behaviors and classroom activities that exemplify the competency; •• provides a rationale, based on our professional judgment, theory, and/or research, for why this competency is important in terms of promoting student learning and why it is important to departments and hiring bodies; •• discusses training methods for helping GSIs develop the competency; and •• shares an example of how the competency is developed a program for graduate students. While we attempted to identify unique examples of GSI professional development programs in each chapter, it should be noted that there are some redundancies across the chapters, reflecting the overlap in the methods used to prepare and support GSIs across institutions of higher education.

Acknowledgments I would like to specially thank Lynn Jones-Eaton who, as former coordinator for the graduate student instructor program at UT Austin, was critical in organizing the Consortium. I would also like to thank the graduate student developers who have contributed to our conversations and work, often through participation in annual meetings of the POD conference. Some of these colleagues include Stephen Spencer Robinson and Mark Connolly.

References Austin, A. E., & McDaniels, M. (2006). Using doctoral education to prepare faculty for work within Boyer’s four domains of scholarship. New Directions for Institutional Research, 2006(129), 51–65. https://doi.org/10.1002/ir.171 Barnett, R., & Coate, K. (2005). Engaging the curriculum in higher education. The Society for Research in Higher Education. Open University Press.

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Biesta, G. (2009). Values and ideals in teachers’ professional judgment. In S. Gewirtz, P. Mahony, I. Hextall, & A. Cribb (Eds.), Changing teacher professionalism (pp. 184–193). Routledge. Boice, R. (1996). First-order principles for college teachers: Ten basic ways to improve the teaching process. Anker. Chickering, A. W., & Gamson, Z. F. (1987). Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education. American Association of Higher Education Bulletin, 39(7), 3–7. Chism, N., & Warner, S. (Eds.) (1987). Institutional responsibilities and responses in the employment and education of teaching assistants. Center for Teaching Excellence, The Ohio State University. CIRTL Network. (2017). CIRTL forums. https://www.cirtl.net/about/cirtl_forums Colbeck, C. L. (2008). Professional identity development theory and doctoral education. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 2008(113), 9–16. https://doi .org/10.1002/tl.304 Davis, W., Smith, J., & Smith, R. (2002). Ready to teach: Graduate teaching assistants prepare for today and for tomorrow. New Forums. Fitzsimons, P., & Fenwick, P. (1997). Teacher competencies and teacher education: A descriptive literature review: A report. New Zealand Council for Educational Research, New Zealand Ministry of Education. Gaff, J .G., Pruitt-Logan, A. S., Sims, L. B., & Denecke, D. D. (2003). Preparing future faculty in the humanities and social sciences: A guide for change. Association of American Colleges & Universities. Golde, C. M. (2005). The role of the department and discipline in doctoral student attrition: Lessons from four departments. The Journal of Higher Education, 76(6), 669–700. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2005.11772304 Golde, C. M., & Dore, T. M. (2004). The survey of doctoral education and career preparation: The importance of disciplinary contexts. In D. H, Wulff, A. E. Austin, & Associates (Eds.), Path to the professoriate: Strategies for enriching the preparation of future faculty (pp. 19–45). Jossey-Bass. Golde, C. M., & Walker, G. E. (Eds.). (2006). Envisioning the future of doctoral education: Preparing stewards of the discipline. Jossey-Bass. Gray, P. L., & Buerkel-Rothfuss, N. (1991). Teaching assistant training: A view from the top. In J. D. Nyquist, R. D. Abbott, D. H. Wulff, & J. Sprague (Eds.), Preparing the professoriate of tomorrow to teach (pp. 29–39). Kendall/Hunt. Kalish, A., & Robinson, S. S. (Eds.). (2011). Mapping the range of graduate student professional development: Studies in graduate and professional student development, 14. New Forums Press. Kalish, A., Rohdieck, S., Border, L., Schram, L. N., von Hoene, L., Palmer, M., Chandler, E., Maurer, V., & Volpe Horri, C. (2009, October). Structured professional development for graduate and professional students: A taxonomy [Paper presentation]. Professional and Organizational Development Conference, Houston, TX.

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Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 75–86. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep4102_1 Krebs, P. (2014, January 2). Training Ph.D.s to teach where the jobs are. The ­Chronicle of Higher Education. https://chroniclevitae.com/news/241-training-phd-s-to-teach-where-the-jobs-are?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en Le Deist, F. D., & Winterton, J. (2005). What is competence? Human Resource Development International, 8(1), 27–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/1367886042000338227 Lewis, K. (Ed.). (1993). The TA experience: Preparing for multiple roles. New Forums Press. Luft, J. A., Kurdziel, J. P., Roehrig, G. H., & Turner, J. (2004). Growing a garden without water: Graduate teaching assistants in introductory science laboratories at a doctoral/research university. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 41(1), 211–233. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.20004 Maher, M., Gilmore, J., Feldon, D., & Davis, T. (2013). Cognitive apprenticeship and the supervision of science and engineering research assistants. Journal of Research Practice, 9(2), Article M5. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1043506.pdf McDaniels, M. (2010). Doctoral student socialization for teaching roles. In S. K. Gardner & P. Mendoza (Eds.), On becoming a scholar: Socialization and development in doctoral education (pp. 29–44). Stylus. Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2006). Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A framework for teaching knowledge. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 1017– 1054. http://one2oneheights.pbworks.com/f/MISHRA_PUNYA.pdf Moercke, A., & Eika, B. (2002). What are the clinical skills levels of newly graduate physicians? Self-assessment study of an intended curriculum identified by a Delphi process. Medical Education, 36(5), 472–478. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.13652923.2002.01208.x Nicklow, J. W., Marikunte, S. S., & Chevalier, L. R. (2007). Balancing pedagogical and professional practice skills in the training of graduate teaching assistants. Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering and Practice, 133(2), 89–93. https:// doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)1052-3928(2007)133:2(89) Nyquist, J. D., Abbott, R. D., Wulff, D. H., & Sprague, J. (Eds.). (1991). Preparing the professoriate of tomorrow to teach: Selected readings in TA training. Kendall/ Hunt. Nyquist, J. D., & Wulff, D. H. (1996). Working effectively with graduate assistants. SAGE. Palmer, M. S., & Little, D. (2013). Tomorrow’s professor today: Tracking perceptions of preparation for future faculty competencies. In J. E. Groccia & L. Cruz (Eds.), To improve the academy: Resources for faculty, instructional, and organizational development (vol. 32; pp. 251–268). Jossey-Bass. Palmer, P. (2007). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life. Wiley.

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Poock, M. C. (2001). A model for integrating professional development in graduate education. College Student Journal, 35(3), 345–352. Pruitt-Logan, A. S., Gaff, J. G., & Jentoft, J. E. (2002). Preparing future faculty in the sciences and mathematics. Council of Graduate Schools. Russell, S. J. (1997). The role of curriculum in teacher development. In S. N. Friel & G. W. Bright (Eds.), Reflecting on our work: NSF teacher enhancement in K-6 mathematics (pp. 247–254). University Press of America, Inc. Shulman, L. S. (2005). Signature pedagogies in the professions. Daedalus, 134(3), 52–59. https://doi.org/10.1162/0011526054622015 Simpson, R. D., & Smith, K. S. (1995). Validating teacher competencies for graduate teaching assistants: A national study using the Delphi method. Innovative Higher Education, 19, 223–234. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01191221 Theall, M., Mullinix, B., & Arreola, R. A. (2010). Promoting dialogue and action on meta-professional skills, roles, and responsibilities. In L. B. Nilson & J. E. Miller (Eds.), To improve the academy, 28 (pp. 115–138). Jossey-Bass. Thomas, D., & Border, L. (2011). Assessing graduate consultant programs: Directors’ perceptions of rationales, content, activities and benefits. In A. Kalish & S. Robinson (Eds.), Studies in graduate and professional student development, 14 (pp. 37–52). New Forums Press. Tigelaar, D. E. H., Dolmans, D. H. J. M., Wolfhagen, I. H. A. P., & Van Der Vleuten, C. P. M. (2004). The development and validation of a framework for teaching competencies in higher education. Higher Education, 48(2), 253–268. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:HIGH.0000034318.74275.e4 Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (2nd ed.). Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

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2 AC QU I R I N G D I S C I P L I N A RY K N OW L E D G E Michelle A. Maher and Michael T. Ashby Competency 1: Graduate and professional students will acquire disciplinary knowledge (includes content, skills, procedures, and metacognitive knowledge) and consider the historical, contemporary, and future potential of scholarship in their disciplines.

“Y

ou cannot teach what you do not know.” Despite its simplicity, this statement captures why having in-depth and organized knowledge of a discipline is fundamental to becoming an effective disciplinary instructor at the college or university level. A solid disciplinary knowledge base includes a deep understanding of the skills and procedures that define how disciplinary knowledge is created and shared. This knowledge base must be accompanied by an understanding of the commonly accepted curricular approaches or pedagogical paths by which students are introduced to and invited into the discipline. A disciplinary instructor is, in a very real sense, a disciplinary ambassador. This ambassadorship becomes even more important when teaching students who may know little about the discipline and may hold misconceptions about it. To define and consider the value of acquiring an in-depth and organized disciplinary knowledge base, we consider literature delineating how disciplinary experts differ from novices; justify why this competency is important; provide examples of instructional behaviors that allow students to build disciplinary expertise; describe how graduate students acquire a knowledge base; and conclude by showcasing an exemplary, newly revised doctoral curriculum in the chemical and biochemical sciences at the University of Oklahoma (OU).

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Competency Description An in-depth and organized disciplinary knowledge base is the foundation of disciplinary expertise. Expertise has been studied from several disciplinary perspectives; we clarify that our consideration of this concept draws from a psychological perspective. From this perspective, Ericsson (2014) defined an expert as “someone [who] has gained special skills or knowledge representing mastery of a particular subject through experience and instruction” (p. 508). Dane (2010) further stated that expertise “consists of a high level of domainspecific knowledge acquired through experience” (p. 580). To anchor our discussion of expertise, we note two premises that ground the study of this concept. First, the study of expertise is “based on the premise that experts in different domains follow a similar path of [knowledge] acquisition” (Ericsson & Towne, 2010, p. 404). This implies that regardless of disciplinary background, discussions around graduate-level training for acquisition of an in-depth and organized disciplinary knowledge base share a common footing. By extension, discussions around how graduate student instructors (GSIs) and professional students prepare undergraduate students for acquisition of an in-depth and organized disciplinary knowledge base also share a common footing. Second, despite the popular idea that “talented people display superior performance in a wide range of activities” (Feltovich et al., 2006, p. 47), expertise is domain specific, even when the domains seem intuitively similar (Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996). Thus, an expert in the biological sciences is unlikely to also be an expert in romance languages. However, both may be expert teachers in their respective domains. The graduate and professional student teaching competencies framework delineated in this book offers GSIs a clear path toward acquiring pedagogical expertise in their respective disciplinary domains. Our description of the competency of an in-depth and organized knowledge base is underpinned by research investigating the defining cognitive processes underlying expertise. Early work by Chase and Simon (1973) and Simon and Chase (1973) hypothesized that, across many expertise domains, general characteristics of experts differentiate them from novices. These differences represent cognitive processes acquired in response to experts’ extensive experience in their respective domains (Ericsson & Towne, 2010). Building on the National Research Council’s (2000) summary of cognitive processes that distinguish how experts differ from novices, in the following sections we overview the five defining principles of disciplinary expertise. These principles underlie the justification we then present for the need to

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acquire disciplinary knowledge and shape how disciplinary knowledge is most effectively taught.

Meaningful Information Patterns The first principle of research on expertise focuses on meaningful information patterns. Early research (de Groot, 1965, 1966) into how expert chess masters could outplay their capable but less experienced opponents indicated that expertise depends on knowledge being organized into meaningful domain-related patterns. When presented with structured chess positions, experts and novices perceived and understood them differently. Chess masters quickly recognized and remembered patterns of chess pieces on the chessboard; less experienced opponents did not. Follow-up research conducted by Chase and Simon (1973) and Simon and Chase (1973) revealed that chess masters’ memory advantage was only found when they viewed meaningful patterns of chess pieces on the chessboard. When chess pieces were randomly arranged, chess masters remembered no more than their less experienced opponents. This finding unleashed extensive research into the nature of these patterns, termed schemas, or cognitive structures containing “knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among those attributes” (Fiske & Taylor, 1991, p. 98). Compared to their novice counterparts, experts’ schemas are larger and much more complex in terms of interrelationships among attributes (Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Rousseau, 2001). Schemas develop over time with domain-relevant experience and guide how new information is organized (Stein, 1992). The following example, adapted from Rousseau (2001) and Dane (2010), represents schematic knowledge about the concept of a faculty member’s responsibilities, including its attributes (i.e., teaching, research, and service) and the relationships among those attributes. A layperson’s schema of a faculty member varies noticeably from that of a person in the job, a professor. A layperson’s schema of a faculty member is of someone who mostly teaches. A professor’s schema of a faculty member is of someone who simultaneously balances many professional obligations, such as conducting research; publishing; serving on various university committees; and, for most, teaching. Teaching can include activities outside the classroom, such as doctoral advising and creating curriculum. Further, teaching, research, and service responsibilities can be connected. As Dane (2010) stated, “This example highlights the higher degree of complexity as well as the enhanced accuracy associated with expert schemas” (p. 581).

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Knowledge Organization A second principle of expertise is that experts’ knowledge is organized around core concepts or, as the National Research Council (2000) described them, the “big ideas” (p. 36) of their expertise domains. For example, the National Research Council noted that experts in physics organize their ability to problem-solve around Newton’s second law, while novices attempt to solve problems by applying memorization and manipulating equations. From our readings on the topic of expertise, we recognize that a “big idea” underlying expertise is knowledge organization. We return to this idea later when we discuss instructional behaviors that allow students to build disciplinary expertise.

Conditionalized Knowledge A third principle of expertise is the idea that experts have the ability to discern under which conditions subsets of their knowledge are applicable. As the National Research Council (2000) noted, experts’ knowledge is conditionalized in that “it includes a specification of the contexts in which it is useful” (p. 43). Without this ability, knowledge cannot be applied to the task or problem at hand. It remains inert (Whitehead, 1929) and largely meaningless. More broadly, as related to our previous discussion of expertise being domain specific, this conditionality points to why an expert in the biological sciences would struggle to draw on that expertise if asked to teach a romance language course.

Fluent Retrieval A fourth principle of expertise is that experts can fluently retrieve relevant knowledge with little conscious attention and effort. Their ability to do so can be attributed in part to their extensive knowledge of their expertise domain, which allows them to quickly identify salient information and disregard irrelevant information (Barrett et al., 2004; Feldon & Stowe, 2009). Further, they can attend to a much larger quantity of information simultaneously than can their nonexpert counterparts because of their well-developed, information-rich schemas, which expand their working memory (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995; for a description of working memory, see chapter 6 of this book). Their frequent access of these schemas (Moors & De Houwer, 2006) also assists with fluidity. Fluid retrieval is seen in a seasoned instructor’s ability to quickly and easily respond to student questions about in-depth content during a class session. Fluidity is often paired with automaticity (e.g., National Research Council, 2000), however, automaticity can lead to concerns, as we note in discussion on the fifth principle.

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Limits to Expertise A fifth principle of expertise is that despite its many benefits research suggests that as domain expertise is acquired, an expert can lose flexibility in several areas (Chi, 2006). For example, when confronted with a domain-relevant problem, certain solutions may immediately become apparent to an expert (Gobet & Simon, 1996). These solutions may work well in one case but not in another. As Dane (2010) observed, if an expert cannot disregard the original solution and search for one better suited to the case at hand, problemsolving fixation can occur. Further, experts may lose flexibility in their ability to adapt to new rules and conditions. Compared to novices, expert accountants were less adept at applying a tax law that superseded a previous rule concerning tax deductions (Marchant et al., 1991). Additionally, as experts’ knowledge becomes automatized (Moors & De Houwer, 2006), experts can find it difficult or even impossible to verbally describe the contextually based intuitive actions they take to address a domain-relevant problem or task (Benner, 1984). As such, “Expertise can sometimes hurt teaching because many experts forget what is easy and what is difficult for students” (National Research Council, 2000, p. 44).

Competency Rationale As Hunt (2006) wryly observed, “Experts know a lot about their field of expertise. This is hardly surprising; an ignorant expert would be an oxymoron” (p. 31). We leverage Hunt’s observation to offer our own: Outstanding college teachers know a lot about their discipline. This is hardly surprising; an ignorant outstanding college teacher would be an oxymoron. Bain (2004), in his investigation into what the best college teachers do, supported this contention by stating, “Without exception, outstanding teachers know their subjects extremely well” (p. 15). He added, “Outstanding teachers follow the important intellectual and scientific or artistic developments within their fields, do research, [and] have important and original thoughts on their subjects” (p. 16). Both Bain (2004) and we acknowledge that one does not need a lengthy publication record to be an outstanding teacher. However, in concert with the competency statement that starts and guides this chapter, we suggest that being active disciplinary researchers can benefit teaching and allows instructors to consider the historical, contemporary, and future potential of scholarship in their disciplines. The act of creating knowledge that extends a discipline’s boundaries allows instructors to bring “breaking news” from the discipline’s front lines to students. Further, it firmly ties instructors to

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their discipline by solidifying their identity of becoming or being a disciplinary expert, which supports their identity as a disciplinary ambassador. More broadly, finding connections between academic roles and responsibilities provides a holistic approach to instructors’ professional practice and improves professional balance and well-being, increasingly important topics in today’s academy for both GSIs and early-career faculty (Benjamin et al., 2017; Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2012). Not all who graduate with their discipline’s highest degree pursue an academic career. However, those who do can count on the fact that having an in-depth and organized disciplinary knowledge base will be critically important to those who make hiring decisions at colleges and universities. A strong disciplinary knowledge base is the sine qua non of a career as faculty member and underpins success in both teaching and research. In previous sections, we outlined what an expert knowledge base looks like in any discipline and discussed why this knowledge base is instrumental to both teaching and faculty success in general. In the next section, we discuss how this knowledge base translates into instructional behaviors that can help students move toward disciplinary expertise.

Examples of Instructional Behaviors Earlier we noted that from our readings on the topic of expertise, we recognized that a “big idea” underlying the study of expertise is knowledge organization. Nilson (2016) observed something similar in her discussion of how students learn. She stated, “Structure is so key to how people learn and remember material. . . . Structure distinguishes knowledge from mere information” (p. 7). She continued by contrasting information, such as material found on the internet, with knowledge. While anyone can find endless pieces of information on the internet, Nilson stated, “What isn’t so available is knowledge, that is, organized bodies of knowledge, which is what we academics have to offer that information-packed websites do not” (p. 7, emphasis in original). She added, “The kind of deep, meaningful learning that moves a student from novice toward expert is all about acquiring the discipline’s hierarchal organization of patterns, its mental structure of knowledge” (p. 8). In this section, we point to examples of instructional behaviors that, underpinned by the principles of expertise, help students grasp the mental structure of a discipline’s knowledge. The National Research Council (2000) specified, “Many approaches to curriculum design make it difficult for students to organize knowledge meaningfully” (p. 42). We agree and encourage GSIs to incorporate approaches

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throughout their course to help students meaningfully organize the course material into well-developed disciplinary schemas. For example, using a graphic syllabus can be a good place to start. A graphic syllabus, as described by Nilson (2016), is meant to supplement, not replace a standard syllabus. It displays both the “big picture” of the course content, the interrelationships among key concepts, and provides rationale for the order and flow of topic presentation. It is, essentially, the instructor’s underlying schema of the course content; making this explicit to students as the course begins can greatly improve their ability to organize knowledge meaningfully instead of simply memorizing random patches of facts. As the course unfolds, a range of instructional activities (e.g., fieldbased activities, team-based activities, case studies, or problem-based learning) can be used to promote students’ ability to organize knowledge meaningfully, recognize in which context knowledge is useful, and fluently retrieve relevant knowledge. For example, asking undergraduate engineering students to document their observations of an active construction site over 9 weeks noticeably deepens their understanding of the nature, timing, organization, and complexity of on-site activity, including the intricate connections among people, materials, and tools (Haselbach & Maher, 2007). Using case studies that require students to consider relevant background, facts, dilemmas, and potential outcomes can sharpen students’ ability to recognize and retrieve content-relevant knowledge. Moreover, changing the case study “on the fly” as students engage with it (e.g., “Oh!! The legislature just voted to decrease the college’s budget by 10% for the upcoming fiscal year. As an educational leader, now what are your options?”) can promote fluent retrieval of relevant knowledge and create a sense of excitement around the instructional activity. We point readers to Bain (2004), Davis (2009), and Nilson (2016) for additional ideas on how to engage students. Further, instructional activities that promote meaningful learning need not be time-consuming or cumbersome. A favorite example of helping students keep key course concepts front and center comes from Bain (2004), who described a mathematician using a principle he called “WGAD—Who Gives a [Darn]?” (p. 39). As Bain (2004) recounts, At the beginning of his courses, he tells his student that they are free to ask him this question on any day during the course, at any moment in the class. He will stop and explain to his students why the material under consideration at that moment—however abstruse and minuscule a piece of the big picture it may be—is important, and how it relates to the larger questions and issues of the course. (p. 39)

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While many of these sample instructional behaviors can be used across disciplines, it is also critical for GSIs to develop pedagogical competency in discipline-based teaching strategies. Chapter 10 in this text expands on this topic. Further, instructional activities that prompt meaningful disciplinaryspecific learning can be found in discipline-dedicated journals such as the Journal of Chemical Education and the Journal of Engineering Education. As an example of the latter, Litzinger et al. (2011) summarized instructional practices promoting the development of expertise in engineering education, such as presenting students with context-rich, multifaceted problems. These problems “lie somewhere between well-structured problems found in textbooks and large, ill-defined, open-ended challenges” (Ogilvie, 2009, p. 3). As Litzinger et al. (2011) noted, “A key characteristic of multifaceted problems is that they require students to integrate multiple concepts to construct a solution. Thus, students cannot use usual strategies of seeking examples in textbooks to identify the particular algorithm to solve the problem” (p. 132).

Teaching the Competency Graduate students acquire an in-depth and organized disciplinary knowledge base using several often overlapping methods. Being mentored by a faculty member is an essential method. However, participating in discipline-specific coursework; teaching assistantships; research assistantships; and, for those entering programs in the laboratory sciences, laboratory rotations in the first year are also key methods. These methods are often accompanied by reading disciplinary scholarship, attending and participating in discipline-related conferences, conducting independent research, and learning to write for publication in the discipline. It has been widely recognized in literature on graduate education that faculty mentorship is essential in the development of graduate students’ disciplinary competence (Barnes & Austin, 2009; Walker et al., 2008). This type of mentorship is thought to occur through cognitive apprenticeship, a process in which the mentor uses modeling, scaffolding, and coaching to nurture the students’ development of disciplinary expertise (Austin, 2009). The faculty mentor “establish[es] a working relationship with a student and shepherd[s] [them] through the [degree] process to completion” (Nettles & Millett, 2006, p. 98). In doing so, the faculty mentor identifies areas in which the student may need additional assistance and provides the necessary support to close perceived gaps in disciplinary competence (Ahern & Manathunga, 2004).

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Good mentoring at the graduate level doesn’t just happen; it takes dedication and effort from both the faculty mentor and the student mentee. However, the academy and supporting organizations have begun to recognize that structured guidance around the faculty mentor-student mentee relationship is also needed. Examples of this guidance can be found in the University of Michigan’s (2018) Rackham Graduate School guide for faculty mentors and the Council for Graduate Schools’ guide for student mentees (Lunsford & Baker, 2016). These resources and others on the faculty mentor-student mentee relationship (e.g., Shore, 2014) make clear that the benefits of this type of relationship to both mentors and mentees are plentiful. However, first and foremost, it is likely that the mentoring relationship helps both parties to stay abreast of emerging disciplinary knowledge and techniques that underscore the development and maintenance of disciplinary expertise. Graduate students typically complete their discipline-related coursework within the first few years of their program, although this timing depends on the discipline and on the degree being pursued. As graduate degree programs increase in interdisciplinarity, such as the one we describe in the next section, flexibility in course timing becomes critical in meeting students’ unique disciplinary acquisition needs. Coursework completion often coincides with the administration of comprehensive examinations that are designed to assess the extent to which the student has gained mastery over core disciplinary content. Graduate training can also offer opportunities to teach, and the content in this book provides strong guidance for becoming proficient in this area. Except for nonthesis master’s degree programs, graduate training also requires that students conduct research. For students who are pursuing their doctorate, engagement in research activities can be intense throughout graduate training, with some students spending an average of 45 hours a week in research laboratories (Ferreira, 2003). In some laboratory-based science programs, such as the one we highlight in the following section, first-year students participate in laboratory rotations. Rotations expose students to differing research topics and laboratory environments (Maher et al., 2019). Their end goal is to allow students to identify a faculty member who will not only guide their acquisition of disciplinary knowledge in a laboratory but assist them in its creation (Joy et al., 2015). In support of learning how to create new disciplinary knowledge, graduate students also gain disciplinary expertise by reading discipline-specific scholarship, attending and participating in discipline-related conferences, and learning to write for publication in the discipline (Thompson & Walker, 2010). Graduate programs may offer structured activities beyond the class to support students’ efforts to gain disciplinary knowledge. For example, programs may sponsor journal clubs, “formally organized reading groups

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that discuss an article found in the recent research journals” (Golde, 2007, p. 345). Groups typically include faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and advanced and novice graduate students. Alternatively, graduate programs or the larger academic unit in which they are housed may sponsor writing groups. For example, the first contributor’s home academic unit, a school of education, sponsors a writing group for advanced doctoral students and faculty that meets weekly during the academic year to review and provide feedback on members’ writing-in-progress; the goal is to support members’ efforts to write for publication within their discipline. All of these methods contribute to graduate students acquiring an in-depth and organized disciplinary knowledge.

OU’s Innovative Modular Graduate Curriculum At OU, the innovative graduate curriculum in chemistry and biochemistry was redesigned to better promote graduate student acquisition of disciplinary knowledge (Arnaud, 2015). In this section, we provide contextual background for the redesign efforts; compare the traditional and redesigned curriculum; and highlight considerations associated with potential transportability, amplification, and propagation of the redesigned curriculum.

Contextual Background Historically in chemistry, a laboratory-based science, curricula intended to create an in-depth disciplinary knowledge base consist of two components, classroom instruction and research. Typically, classroom instruction begins in the first year of graduate training while participation in laboratory research begins later. Graduate students take approximately 2 years of classroom instruction at the beginning of their studies, including classes that create a depth of understanding in a single subdiscipline of chemistry (traditionally analytical biochemistry, organic, inorganic, and physical) and breadth across several subdisciplines. These historic subdisciplines are becoming outdated as interdisciplinary research becomes commonplace (e.g., bioinorganic chemistry), and the normal breadth requirement is being redefined. Furthermore, the field of chemistry is evolving against a backdrop of several pressing realities. First, national studies on the future of graduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education (e.g., American Chemical Society, 2012; National Research Council, 2012; Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, 2005) have recommended that additional content be incorporated into graduate curricula to better prepare graduate students for their careers, which may unfold in

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academia or industry, while reducing the time to degree (TTD). Second, as research becomes interdisciplinary, graduate students are routinely recruited without a background in chemistry. From the perspective of TTD, graduate students who are recruited from outside chemistry are particularly challenging because they must receive remedial/additional training to prepare them for their research and GSI responsibilities. Third, most graduate curricula in STEM are still based on relatively inefficient undergraduate models, using conventional semester-long, three-credit-hour lecture courses.

Curricula Comparison Figure 2.1 compares traditional instruction previously offered in the first year of graduate training with the modular approach of the new curriculum now offered in the first year of graduate training. We highlight two key differences between traditional instruction and the modular approach. The first difference is the format and nature of courses; the second is the addition of laboratory rotations in the modular approach. In the modular approach, courses are taught more efficiently, thereby permitting a reduction of the instructional credit hour requirements from 21 to 16 hours. More efficient delivery of the coursework has been achieved primarily as a consequence of eliminating cross-listing of undergraduate courses and introductory graduate courses, combining overlapping material in different graduate courses, and scheduling the length of a course in line with the depth and breadth of its content (instead of the standard three-credit-hour course). Figure 2.1.  Representative traditional and modular schedule for the OU curriculum.

Note. The disciplinary programs of study (POSs) in inorganic chemistry are used as an example.

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Additionally, in the first 5 weeks of the semester, the modular approach quickly and effectively addresses any need for remedial/additional training. In doing so, it increases the likelihood of academic success for newly enrolled students from diverse backgrounds. For example, typically one quarter of the students who join OU’s program in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry have undergraduate degrees in biology, not chemistry. Consequently, they have not completed undergraduate physical chemistry. However, they will enroll in introductory biochemistry and organic chemistry courses in their first semester as a graduate student. These courses contain fundamental concepts from physical chemistry that these students would not have been exposed to as undergraduates. In the past, because at least one semester of physical chemistry was a prerequisite for graduate work, these students would have been required to co-enroll in the first semester of a year-long undergraduate course that focuses on the subjects of kinetics and thermodynamics. Unfortunately, that instruction would have come too late for the students as they were all simultaneously enrolled in the entry-level graduate course in biochemistry and organic chemistry (which both contain elements of kinetics and thermodynamics). Furthermore, the students would not have been exposed to elements of bonding and spectroscopy (subjects that are also needed for the introductory graduate coursework) that are typically taught in the second semester of the undergraduate physical chemistry course. Now, because OU’s entry-level graduate courses in the modular approach do not begin until the sixth week of the first semester (Figure 2.1) and the remedial issue is identified during the initial advising process, we can provide remedial instruction to bring the biology students up to speed before they begin entry-level coursework. The remedial course is titled Selected Topics in Physical Chemistry for the Life Sciences and is self-taught. There are 16 learning objectives on which students are tested using online quizzes. The students are provided the resources, and they are ultimately responsible for learning the material, although they meet as a class once a week for a brief lecture and a problem-working session. Importantly, the material is presented in the context of biology, a subject that is familiar to the students. Ultimately, nearly all of the students demonstrate competency (answered more than 80% of the quiz questions correctly). Then, they go on to successfully complete the entry-level graduate coursework later in the same semester. This opportunity for remediation ensures that graduate students have a strong foundation in the physical chemistry concepts on which they build further disciplinary expertise throughout the graduate program. Creating more efficient course scheduling with the modular approach allows time for students to engage in laboratory research, the principal

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mechanism by which students acquire pragmatic disciplinary knowledge. Under traditional instruction, students did not participate in laboratory research until the summer after their first year of graduate training. Under the modular approach, students engage in laboratory research through participation in laboratory rotations starting shortly after graduate program entry. Students select two laboratories within which to rotate. They spend 7 weeks in each, engaging in research with the laboratory members and the faculty member who leads the laboratory. As noted earlier, laboratory rotations expose students to different topics and laboratory environments and allow them to identify the faculty mentor under whose direction they will complete their degree. If they request to do so, students can rotate in a third laboratory at the beginning of their second semester in the program. However, most students select a permanent faculty mentor and laboratory by the end of their first semester, before the winter holiday break. We note that laboratory rotations are not commonly used in chemistry graduate programs, but they can be found in biochemistry graduate programs. Since the OU Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry combines these two disciplines, the decision was made to incorporate the use of rotations into the modular approach. With the implementation of the modular approach, milestones denoting student acquisition of increasing levels of disciplinary expertise are achieved earlier compared to traditional instruction. These milestones include the full integration into a research laboratory by the end of the first semester, coursework completion by the third semester (instead of fourth semester), a candidacy examination taken before the second summer (instead of in the third year), and a final defense by the end of the fifth year (instead of in the sixth year or beyond). In turn, moving students from disciplinary outsiders to disciplinary experts more quickly integrates the students into departmental culture, an important consideration given the consistently high level of doctoral degree attrition (Berelson, 1960; Bowen & Rudenstine, 1992; Cassuto, 2013; Council of Graduate Schools, 2008).

Curriculum Considerations To contemplate the extent to which the modular approach may be transportable to other institutions, here we briefly discuss considerations specific to the OU Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry that shaped this approach. The first consideration we highlight is related to graduate student teaching. OU is a large flagship land-grant university in the Midwest that the Carnegie Foundation (Carnegie Classifications, n.d.) classifies as a (R1) research university with “very high research activity” (para. 5). About one

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fifth of its more than 30,000 students are graduate students. Within this context, the OU Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry has a responsibility to teach about 40% of the over 4,000 students in each freshman class; thus first-year graduate students in this department are almost always supported exclusively as GSIs. Our point in bringing forward this consideration is to emphasize that the modular approach is fully compatible with graduate students serving as instructors in addition to engaging in coursework and research. Indeed, all three (teaching courses, taking courses, and conducting research) are instrumental to students’ acquisition of disciplinary knowledge. The second consideration we bring forward is the demographics of the department’s graduate students. There is a high expectation placed on English proficiency; nonnative English speakers who do not pass challenging written and oral teaching tests, which test teaching skills and English proficiency, become a significant financial burden on the department. Therefore, there is a high impetus to recruit domestic graduate students, and these domestic students are typically recruited regionally. Further, as noted earlier, because biological chemistry research is pervasive in the department, about one quarter of the several dozen graduate students who are recruited each year have undergraduate degrees in biology (not chemistry). Accordingly, the typical graduate student in the OU Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry is domestic, has received undergraduate training at a smaller regional school, and may be lacking prerequisite disciplinary knowledge that will be required for graduate coursework. Our point in bringing this forward is to be transparent about the somewhat heterogeneous demographics of our graduate student population and to suggest that programs with very different graduate student populations may need to consider if the modular approach is an appropriate structure for their students’ acquisition of disciplinary knowledge. Finally, as noted earlier, academic departments in the sciences have typically been organized around historical disciplines; in the case of chemistry, these include analytical, biochemistry, inorganic, organic, and physical chemistry. In the OU department and in chemistry departments elsewhere, these disciplines are usually embedded within divisions. Each division typically operates largely independently of the others, with independent curricula. Echoing the definition of the term, the divisions erect barriers to cooperation and collaboration. Perhaps most important, divisions have become less relevant as chemical research has become increasingly interdisciplinary. With the launch of the pilot curriculum in fall 2015, disciplinary programs of study (POS) permanently replaced divisions. By deconstructing these silos, new inter-/multi-/cross-disciplinary areas of specialization (e.g., structural biology) are now offered, allowing students to acquire novel areas

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of expertise to expand disciplinary borders. Faculty members are no longer associated with a single division but instead contribute to multiple disciplinary POS. Our point in bringing this forward is to acknowledge the modular approach requires not just a restructuring of courses, but a restructuring of the entire pedagogical context within which the modular approach is housed. This was not easy work for the students, faculty, and administrators involved, and not every academic department will be in a position to undertake this type of major restructuring. For those who are in the process of exploring new ways to facilitate their students’ acquisition of disciplinary knowledge, our hope is that some component or combination of components of the modular approach may be useful to them.

Conclusion We opened this chapter with the statement, “You cannot teach what you do not know” to emphasize the critical role that an in-depth and organized disciplinary knowledge base built on the principles of expertise plays in effective disciplinary instruction at the college or university level. As the example from the innovative modular graduate curriculum at OU illustrates, the disciplinary curriculum that develops and nurtures this knowledge base among GSIs deserves intense consideration and hard work to keep it consistently aligned with the emerging needs of all involved in the graduate teaching endeavor. This is a necessary and critical undertaking, as an in-depth and organized knowledge base is the foundational competency that precedes and enables all teaching and learning in the academy.

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Maher, M. A., Wofford, A., Roksa, J., & Feldon, D. F. (2019). Doctoral student experiences in biological sciences laboratory rotations. Studies in Graduate and Postdoctoral Education, 10(1), 69–82. https://doi.org/10.1108/SGPE-02-2019-050 Marchant, G., Robinson, J., Anderson, U., & Schadewald, M. (1991). Analogical transfer and expertise in legal reasoning. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 48(2), 272–290. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90015-L Moors, A., & De Houwer, J. (2006). Automaticity: A theoretical and conceptual analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(2), 297–326. https://doi.org/10.1037/00332909.132.2.297 National Research Council. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/9853 National Research Council. (2012). Research universities and the future of America: Ten breakthrough actions vital to our nation’s prosperity and security. The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/13396 Nettles, M. T., & Millett, C. M. (2006). Three magic letters: Getting to Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University Press. Nilson, L. B. (2016). Teaching at its best: A research-based resource for college instructors (4th ed.). Jossey-Bass. Ogilvie, C. A. (2009). Changes in students’ problem-solving strategies in a course that includes context-rich, multifaceted problems. Physical Review Special Topics—Physics Education Research, 5(2) 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.5.020102 Rousseau, D. M. (2001). Schema, promise and mutuality: The building blocks of the psychological contract. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 74(4), 511–541. https://doi.org/10.1348/096317901167505 Shore, B. M. (2014). The graduate advisor handbook: A student-centered approach. The University of Chicago Press. Simon, H. A., & Chase, W. G. (1973). Skill in chess. American Scientist, 61(4), 394–403. https://digitalcollections.library.cmu.edu/awweb/awarchive?type= file&item=44582 Stein, D. J. (1992). Schemas in the cognitive and clinical sciences. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 2(1), 45–63. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/h0101236 Thompson, P., & Walker, M. (Eds.). (2010). The Routledge doctoral student’s companion. Routledge. University of Michigan. (2018). How to mentor graduate students: A guide for faculty. Rackham Graduate School. http://www.rackham.umich.edu/downloads/publications/Fmentoring.pdf Walker, G. E., Golde, C. Jones, L. Conklin Bueschel, A., & Hutchings, P. (2008). The formation of scholars: Rethinking doctoral education for the twenty-first century. Jossey-Bass. Ward, K., & Wolf-Wendel, L. E. (2012). Academic motherhood: Managing work and family. Rutgers University Press. Whitehead, A. N. (1929). The aims of education. Macmillan. Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, (2005). The responsive Ph.D.: Innovations in U.S. Doctoral Education. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED536859.pdf

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3 DEVELOPING PROFESSIONAL IDENTIT Y AND DISPOSITIONS Alan Kalish and Jennifer S. Collins Competency 2: Graduate and professional students will purposefully participate in activities to develop an integrated understanding of themselves as ethical, collegial individuals, teachers, and scholars within their classrooms, departments, and disciplines.

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his chapter examines the foundational competency associated with an individual’s professional identity development as a teacher-scholar. In the midst of changing roles and expectations of postsecondary faculty, it is critical that graduate and professional students (hereafter, graduate students) purposefully engage in structured opportunities and experiences to develop a unified teacher-scholar identity. While this foundational competency centers on individual motivation to engage in professional development, we discuss why and how postsecondary institutions and critical stakeholders must support graduate student professional development and subsequent internalization of a strong teacher-scholar identity.

Competency Description This competency explicitly focuses on graduate students’ purposeful engagement in activities and programs that supports their professional identity development as a teacher-scholar. Many researchers have emphasized the multiple roles and identities graduate students experience while completing their education and preparation for the professoriate (Colbeck, 2008; KimPrieto et al., 2013). In fact, most graduate students during their educational journey grapple with professional identity-related questions such as, “Am I a 39

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teacher or scholar or both?” “Am I prepared to become a professor?” and “Do I belong in academia?” (Colbeck, 2008; Kim-Prieto et al., 2013). Answers to these critical questions about professional identity are largely influenced by the social-cultural context (Austin, 2002; Colbeck, 2008; Kim-Prieto et al., 2013). Such critical questions and the educational context in which graduate students are situated drove our inquiry into professional identity development. They also drove our consideration of who graduate students are and must become to successfully enact the key responsibilities of postsecondary faculty. The full range of responsibilities of higher education faculty primarily includes research, teaching, and service, and success requires a well-integrated professional identity that enables one to understand each responsibility separately and the overlap among them (Austin et al., 2008). As such, career readiness for the professoriate warrants the inclusion of opportunities and experiences to encourage graduate students to “find synergistic connections between their multiple identities” (Colbeck, 2008, p. 14). This multifaceted identity should embrace the critical values, attitudes, and norms of their discipline, their institution, and the field of higher education. While the development and internalization of a teacher-scholar is essential for faculty success, it is a long and complex process that requires a significant identity shift from being a student to being a professor (Austin & McDaniels, 2006; Colbeck, 2008). To facilitate this necessary shift, graduate students must purposefully engage in programs and activities that afford them opportunities to think, feel, and act like a teacher-scholar during their graduate studies. Engagement in identity-development focused programs is critically necessary as such programs, if effectively implemented, allow individuals to autonomously learn, internalize, and enact the disciplinary philosophies, norms, commitments, ways of knowing, and attitudes of the profession (Colbeck, 2008; Costello, 2005). The main message of the competency discussed in this chapter indicates that graduate students will be proactive, that they will “purposefully participate” in their enculturation, making at least some intentional choices associated with their identity development. As such, considerable emphasis is placed on graduate students’ intentions and motivations to engage in programs focused on preparation for the full range of faculty work as teacherscholars within their classrooms, departments, and disciplines. As Parker Palmer (2007) so eloquently claims in his classic, The Courage to Teach, “Good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher” (p. 10). While this may not be an easily measurable outcome of graduate education, successful graduate students must come to understand how the parts of their professional practice cohere into an identity that enables them to teach for

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their students’ learning. Moreover, as P. Palmer (2007) argues, much of ones’ teaching practice, many of the choices every teacher makes every day, arises from ones’ identity. While specific, evidence-based practices are offered for each of the pedagogical competencies described in this book, this competency is different. The instructional element of an integrated professional identity is not described only by behaviors; instead, the main feature is the disposition of caring about one’s teaching rather than seeing it as a distraction from one’s “true” identity as a scholar.

Instructional Behaviors and Dispositions of Teacher-Scholars Faculty with a strong sense of teacher-scholar identity will find shared meanings and connections across the full range of their academic work (Colbeck, 2008). As such, the attainment of this foundational competency is best described and assessed as “professional behaviors and dispositions,” only some of which actually occur within instructional context. Teaching in higher education, particularly at research universities, has been traditionally an undervalued part of faculty work. However, in light of recent external pressures for educational transformation and accountability, faculty are being asked to examine and improve their teaching to enhance undergraduate education. Given the impetus for improving teaching, each element described in the following sections provides observable evidence of successful attainment of the competency in terms of teaching. While we advocate for all graduate students to consider all of these, each individual will find their own personally appropriate path.

Ethical Teacher-Scholars Members of any profession must be socialized to the shared values and professional dispositions of the work environment. As faculty in training, graduate students must negotiate complex and interwoven sets of ethics—those of their discipline, of their graduate institution, and of academe. Institutions have policies and procedures, and academia in general has an ethos grounded in scholarship and evidence. Some disciplines have overt, published ethical codes, although these are often focused on research practice, but many have only their unspoken norms (e.g., American Association of University Professors [AAUP], 2009; Keeney, 2017; McGinn, 2018). These seem to be only rarely explicitly part of the graduate curriculum, relying more often on informal transmission by students modeling themselves after their mentors. Graduate students who have successfully adopted an ethical stance toward their scholarship and their teaching will act with the best interests of the higher education community in mind. Examples of ethical instructional

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behaviors include preparing students to engage with sensitive topics in a way that is appropriate to their developmental level. Ethical teaching also demands acting with respect toward one’s institution, colleagues, and students, including protecting their confidentiality and maintaining appropriate relationships with them. Most importantly, ethical teaching is inclusive; it is teaching so that all students can learn (AAUP, 2009; Murray et al., 1996). See chapter 5 for more on how educational standards and policies influence instructional practice.

Balancing Independent and Collaborative Practice Collaboration around research is the norm in many disciplines, but university teaching seems to be often treated as a private, secret activity. Instructors rarely invite peer scrutiny if not required to do so (Nugent & Bell, 2006). However, the model of a completely autonomous and siloed instructor does not work well for everyone. Instructors must indeed have the individual knowledge base and skills to teach on their own. Yet, people improve their practice through support and by receiving and using feedback (see chapter 11 for more on assessment and improving teaching). Some faculty may also have the opportunity for team teaching, and at some institutions they lead instructional teams of teaching assistants. Being part of a teaching team promotes learning from other teachers, and this shared pedagogical expertise can lead to improved student learning (Plank, 2011). Graduate programs should offer both peer and supervisor observation and feedback, and successful graduate students who identify as teacherscholars will request and use that information for professional growth. It is also important that graduate students understand their teaching as part of a larger curriculum. Many university instructors see their courses as their own “property” rather than as parts of a curriculum that they share with colleagues. The entire thrust of program assessment by learning outcomes is predicated on the idea that student success is measured not in one class but across the program. Teaching in balance between one’s individual academic freedom and needs of the shared program is a central instructional behavior of an identity that is both independent and collaborative.

Engagement in Professional Communities Professional identity is developed and performed in professional communities. Typically, an academic’s scholarly identity is developed in the discipline, and as a member of that research community, one is often more connected to members of the discipline at other institutions than to local colleagues from other fields. As chapter 2 discusses, successful graduate

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students need to demonstrate the ability to advance research in their discipline. However, they should also be able to connect with their local communities of colleagues from multiple disciplines, in their home institutions, to support their students’ learning across the curriculum. Engaging their professional communities enables graduate students to find support for teaching and identify effective practices in their discipline and at their home institution.

Committed to Studying (and Improving) Teaching Faculty members with strong and well-integrated professional identities as teacher-scholars are likely to approach their teaching as they approach their research. Teacher-scholars are committed to continuously examining and improving their educational practices to better promote student success. According to Hutchings and Shulman (1999), faculty members who approach teaching as a scholarly endeavor systematically investigate questions related to student learning—the conditions with which it occurs, what it looks like, how to deepen it, and so forth—and do so with an eye not only to improving their own classroom but to advancing practice beyond it. (p. 13)

As such, a teacher-scholar views teaching as a scholarly inquiry that involves the same level of questioning, problem-solving, and analysis as their research warrants (Hutchings & Shulman, 1999). Given the strong body of evidence that traditional teaching practices are not effective in promoting learning, teacher-scholars are committed to examining and applying education research and theory on how students learn to inform their educational practices (see chapter 6). Overall, a teacher-scholar is a student-centered practitioner who considers data, including student learning outcomes, experiences, perspectives, and interests, to shape decisions related to curriculum development and instructional practices (Shulman, 2006).

Unified Professional Practice If graduate students engage with and achieve this competency, they will be able to integrate the elements of their identities into a unified professional practice, bringing together their identities as scholars, members of a discipline, postsecondary teachers and mentors, and responsible members of the academic community. A faculty member with a strong, unified professional identity will be cognizant of how their own identity shapes the learning environment. P. Palmer (2007) tells us that

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identity and integrity are more fundamental to good teaching than technique—and if we want to grow as teachers—we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives— risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal, seeks safety in the technical, the distant, abstract. (p. 12)

Faculty who show up in their classroom as their authentic selves without a sense of competition between elements of their identity (teacher or researcher) are more likely to acknowledge the diverse realities and identities of their own students and, consequently, enact inclusive practices that better supports students’ academic engagement and persistence toward their professional goals.

Competency Rationale Postsecondary institutions have a responsibility to ensure that graduate students successfully understand and develop the competencies essential to be ethical, collegial individuals, teachers, and scholars. This development is crucial across multiple contexts, at the level of the classroom, department, and discipline, both as a part of graduate education and to best serve the undergraduates whom these graduate students teach. Demographic shifts in higher education and low baccalaureate degree completions rates warrant a close look at graduate education and its role in preparing future faculty. Problems with undergraduate student success are attributable, at least in part, to the poor teaching practices and lack of preparation during graduate education (Connolly et al. 2016). In fact, as Austin (2002) argues, “the modern academic workplace is characterized by student diversity, new technologies, changing societal expectations, a shift in emphasis toward the learner, expanding faculty workloads, and a new labor market for faculty” (p. 97). Not surprisingly, preparation of graduate students for faculty careers is an urgent priority. It is well established in the graduate education literature that faculty members learn how to be faculty through a process of socialization and enculturation (Austin & McDaniels, 2006; Tierney & Rhoads, 1993). Some scholars categorize the graduate school experience, including the teaching assistant experience, as the early career period of a faculty career (Austin, 2002). That is to say, individuals develop the identity from which their professional practice arises through a complex, social process of joining the community of their profession. Tierney and Rhoads (1993) divide this socialization process into two parts, one during graduate education and another as new faculty. As prospective members of disciplinary cultures and the academic profession,

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graduate students are engaged in the process of anticipatory socialization, the first stage of enculturation, developing initial awareness of professional norms and standards for future faculty roles (Tierney & Rhoads, 1993). The subsequent stage, organizational socialization, reflects a greater sense of self as a new professional in academia and the internalization of the role and responsibilities (Tierney & Rhoads, 1993). Traditionally, graduate schools place considerable attention on ensuring that individuals are learning the language, scholarly practices, and the “values, attitudes, norms, knowledge, and skills” of their discipline and department (Tierney & Rhoads, 1993, p. 6). Comparatively less emphasis is placed on developing the complex identity as teacher-scholars that encompasses diverse roles, including teaching and service, not just research (Austin & McDaniels, 2006; Colbeck, 2008). The lack of emphasis on preparation for faculty as wellrounded teacher-scholars is troublesome, especially because postsecondary institutions, irrespective of type, face external pressures to improve undergraduate education in ways that require faculty to enact new roles to better support an increasingly diverse student population (Austin, 2002). The graduate experience is a key determinant of whether individuals will come to possess the competencies, skills, and attitudes necessary to be proficient, effective, and productive scholars and teachers in higher education (e.g., Austin, 2002; Connolly et al., 2016). All of these elements of socialization are professional experiences that enable the development of a well-integrated, unified professional identity. It is our contention that, unless one develops a professional identity that includes a strong sense of oneself as a teacher, it is far less likely that one will be motivated to achieve the other pedagogical competencies discussed in this volume. Regardless of whether a new PhD is employed as a postdoc, a faculty member, or a member in industry or the nonprofit sector, an “integrated understanding of themselves as ethical, collegial individuals, teachers, and scholars” and as members of their discipline and their new organization is necessary. Teaching is not exclusive to the school; nonacademic professionals must also explain complex ideas and issues to nonexperts all the time. Despite efforts to enhance graduate preparation for the professoriate across postsecondary institutions, improvements in postsecondary teaching have been slow and challenging nationwide. Traditional educational practices that have been well documented as ineffective continue to be the norm in higher education. Brownell and Tanner (2012) argued that one important barrier for the lag in teaching improvements concerns an individual’s professional identity. An educator’s professional identity determines “how they view themselves and their work in the context of their discipline and . . . define their professional status,” while at the same time guides their external

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actions and decisions (Brownell & Tanner, 2012, p. 339). Thus, if graduate students possess a professional identity that does not encompass teaching at all, or if they feel social pressure to avoid publicly embracing an identity that includes interest in teaching, then professional identity itself becomes a critical barrier in efforts to promote effective and thoughtful pedagogical practice (Brownell & Tanner, 2012). This tension between, and arguably prioritization of, research identity over teaching identity might also create reluctance to engage in teaching-focused professional development preparation activities. As Austin and McDaniels (2006) argue, developing a well-integrated professional identity is a vital task for graduate students to better situate themselves in the field of higher education. As such, it is imperative for universities to encourage graduate students to embrace their identity as teachers and develop a more integrated professional identity that values both teaching and research at a time in their careers when this is most easily accomplished. Graduate education is especially important to identity development “because although identity is resistant to change, adaptations to one’s sense of self are more likely to occur when one is transitioning to a new role” (Colbeck, 2008, p. 9). Broadly speaking, graduate students who have internalized their institutional and disciplinary norms, expectations, and ethics are more likely to demonstrate a strong sense of teacher-scholar efficacy, particularly to successfully uphold and perform the diverse roles and responsibilities of the professoriate. A strong professional identity is particularly important in combatting imposter syndrome (Kreuter, 2012; Leonard, 2014). Feelings of not deserving the praise and success one achieves, of not belonging, are extremely common among new academic professionals. Feeling like an imposter in academia is exacerbated by issues of race and gender, often compounded by stereotype threat, the fear of confirming negative stereotypes about an element of one’s identity. Leonard (2014) places the source of this insecurity in the “myth of meritocracy” (para. 5) and says that graduate education does not engage in enough open discussion of these issues. Kreuter (2012) offers a simplistic but insightful response to the syndrome, suggesting in his title that graduate students “walk like a duck”—that acting like a teacher-scholar will cause one to be seen as and to feel like one. Supporting graduate students in purposeful efforts to build their professional identities is the best way to enable this growth toward feeling, thinking, and acting like a teacher-scholar.

Teaching the Competency The competency described in this chapter insists that graduate students be proactive, making intentional choices to purposefully engage in activities leading to their development of a professional identity that includes who

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they aspire to be as teachers. While it is appropriate to expect students to take ownership of their own professional identity development, enactment of their ownership and intentions cannot be attained in isolation and without external support. Purposeful engagement will not happen without external support, encouragement, and investment from key entities including postsecondary institutions, departments, administrators, faculty advisers, and disciplinary organizations. Acting purposefully also requires that graduate students understand that they are active participants in the decision-making related to identifying, choosing, and engaging in programs that contribute to their professional identity development. However, they can only make such choices if the opportunities to engage are available and accessible to them. Making such programming available and promoting its value are collective responsibilities shared by universities, disciplinary organizations, graduate schools, teaching centers, and academic departments. Once graduate students perceive the importance placed on engagement in activities and programs associated with their professional development as teacher-scholars, they will more likely internalize the value of professional development and the related competencies. Simply put, if we do not explicitly communicate our commitment to teaching and make programming available and accessible to support their growth, we cannot expect students to do it on their own. Graduate education has always been very good at preparing the next generation of disciplinary scholars to conduct research. Over the last several decades, universities have offered significantly enhanced support on pedagogical skills and knowledge. However, the existence of this book demonstrates that not enough has been done to prepare graduate students to become good instructors. In fact, beyond the core elements of research and teaching, professional development efforts seem far less coherent and intentional (The Ohio State University, 2017; M.S. Palmer, 2011). The responsibility for devising and offering these activities must be widely shared across all levels of academic organizations; no one player can succeed alone. The following section provides descriptions of a selection of programs that either do or might provide some structured, formal enculturation, enabling graduate students to develop a teacher-scholar identity that includes a strong sense of teacher efficacy. Specifically, we include examples of successful professional identity-focused programs implemented at our own institution, The Ohio State University.

Orientations Preservice orientations were the most common type of graduate student professional development program found in the 2009 national inventory

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(M.S. Palmer, 2011). These programs are generally held prior to the first term of teaching, emphasizing preparation of graduate students to take up their role as teaching assistants. While this is likely too early in the graduate career to work in depth on professional identity, it is a good place to begin the discussion. The Ohio State University requires that departments that employ graduate students to teach provide them appropriate prior preparation and ongoing support (Ray, 2003). While a few departments do this completely in-house, most have their new graduate student instructors (GSIs) attend the teaching orientation provided by the central teaching support center, with some supplementing the general orientation with departmental activities as well. One popular section of the orientation organized by The Ohio State University’s University Center for the Advancement of Teaching (UCAT, n.d.a.) focuses on “Cultivating Your Teaching Identity” (para. 4). As we explain to the senior GSIs who facilitate these sessions for us, many new GSIs have not yet begun to think of themselves as teachers. They see themselves as assistants to faculty members, or they see only that teaching provides funding. But their students will certainly see them as teachers. The orientation asks participants to begin to explore their identities as teachers at The Ohio State University, and we hope, over the course of their careers. We intend that they will develop an awareness of themselves as teachers and understand that they have choices in how they present themselves as teachers. Participants are invited to discuss their images of college teachers and to unpack the assumptions embedded in those ideas. We push them to see themselves as teachers and begin reflecting on what they want that to mean. We also discuss impostor syndrome here, as it often comes up as new teachers try to imagine themselves in their new role.

Workshops and Events Graduate schools and departments should not only explicitly communicate the value of engaging in professional development activities but also provide opportunities for graduate students to share their lived experiences as professionals preparing for faculty careers. Whether one-time events or series of sessions around a single topic, workshops are a common element of professional development offerings at many universities. At The Ohio State University, we offer several types of workshops that address elements of this competency, many focused on topics frequently requested by newer teachers. The goal is to help them identify concrete steps to recognize their competence as teachers. For a long time, we have included sessions on developing a reflective teaching statement. Reflection on one’s teaching intentions and on one’s practices is part of the path to a teacher identity. One very common method

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to structure reflection that has the potential to support graduate students in achieving this competency is writing a teaching philosophy statement. Scholars identify three purposes for teaching statements—self-­knowledge, pedagogical clarity, and making goals explicit—which contribute to a clear and robust teaching element in one’s professional identity (Brookfield, 1990; Goodyear & Alchin, 1998). Like many teaching centers, UCAT (n.d.b.) offers both workshops and individual consultation in support of teaching statements, as well as extensive online resources. We often suggest that graduate students request feedback on their statements from faculty in their discipline. Teaching statements are also central elements in our college teaching-related courses and certificate programs. Regardless of where graduate students work on such a statement, the structured reflection involved in this work is part of achieving this competency.

Mentoring and Role Models Graduate students work closely with a faculty research adviser; this is the core practice in developing their identities as scholars and members of the disciplinary community. In some disciplines, graduate students receive support and guidance on their research role from multiple faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and peers engaged in similar scholarship. Parallel mentorship around teaching can offer support in developing teacher identity. Role models of successful faculty members engaging with teaching in positive ways is a critical element of identity development. At The Ohio State University, faculty are part of the mentoring team that facilitates orientation for new GSIs, even before they begin teaching. Schram and Wright (2011) described a variety of teaching-focused mentoring efforts. These range from very formal and structured to informal and ad hoc. They also occur in a variety of venues, such as within a specific teaching assignment, in the larger disciplinary department, and in the graduate school or teaching center. Instructional teams and peermentoring are two examples of programs that support development of graduate students as effective teacher-scholars. Just as disciplinary research is most often conducted in collaboration with faculty, we suggest that departments offer graduate students opportunities to coteach courses with experienced faculty. A faculty member and graduate student can share responsibility in preparing an undergraduate course and delivering instruction to students. Many larger, multisection courses offered at research universities are taught by teams of instructors. These offer an opportunity to include mentorship around pedagogy and the instructor’s role. For example, at The Ohio State University, both English composition and introductory psychology courses are taught by dozens of GSIs, each with their own sections that share common goals. Both departments organize

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regular meetings of small groups of instructors, led by more senior graduate students, with the whole overseen by instructional staff. These groups allow new teachers to share their growth and concerns with peers and a more experienced mentor. They may observe each other’s teaching and receive feedback, enabling them to practice instructor behaviors to identify which best fit with their developing identity. Another model teaching mentorship in instructional teams is the socalled cluster course, where a lead instructor, often a faculty member, designs the class and delivers lectures to a large group of students, with smaller ­recitations, labs, or lab-recitation hybrids taught by GSIs. This model allows for the lead instructor to serve as a teaching mentor and role model. Teaching mentorship is not always part of the departmental expectation of lead instructors and so happens on an ad hoc basis, if at all. Any discussion of teaching in these groups tends to focus on specific and immediate teaching tasks and not the bigger picture. In addition to departmental peer mentors, central teaching centers at some institutions collaborate with academic departments to support more structured and intentional mentorship on a broader range of teaching issues, including some that may contribute to teacher identity. For example, both the Lead Network at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Graduate Teaching Fellows program at The Ohio State University provide training and support for graduate students to serve as peer mentors and consultants.

Preparing Future Faculty Programs Since the early 1990s, the Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) programs and PFF-like programs have grown. The core feature of PFF is matching graduate students with faculty mentors from a variety of academic institutions with varying missions, diverse student bodies, and different expectations for faculty, rather than limiting mentorship to research university faculty. Engaging with external mentors via the PFF program affords students the opportunity to receive and reflect on constructive feedback on their teaching and service activities. PFF programs broaden the available range of mentors and role models, especially some whose professional identity is likely more teaching focused than faculty at a research extensive institution. Of course, identity development is not the only outcome of PFF (see chapter 4 for a broader discussion on similar programs).

Coursework Courses on university teaching are commonly available to graduate students. These classes may be disciplinary or generic, offered in the academic department

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or elsewhere in the institution. A 2009 inventory of programs across many institutions found that these classes were offered by almost as many universities as held teaching assistant orientations (M. S. Palmer, 2011). While these courses generally focus on the pedagogical skills and information that make up the competencies addressed elsewhere in this volume, several issues that support this competency may be dealt with in this structure. For example, more than one third of both the centralized and disciplinary courses that Chandler (2011) surveyed mentioned including ethics in their curriculum. The creation of teaching statements, which contributes to development of teacher identity, is an element in many university teaching classes (Chandler, 2011). At The Ohio State University, drafting and revising a teaching statement is the culminating activity in our core, generic college teaching class and is also a part of many disciplinary teaching classes offered by academic departments (UCAT, n.d.c.). A benefit of working on this statement in a course is the formal group setting and the opportunity for both peer and expert feedback. Only a few of Chandler’s (2011) respondents mentioned that teaching identities were an explicit part of their curriculum. The mere existence of a graduate class that focuses on teaching implies the importance of learning about teaching as part of professional development.

Teaching Certificates Many universities also offer certificates or minors in college teaching. Most of the 72 certificates reviewed in von Hoene’s (2011) study included at least one pedagogy class, as well as participation in other programming, so there is often overlap between the content of these structures. At The Ohio State University (n.d.), the program’s goal is to allow graduate students to engage in a rigorous, structured exploration of theories and practice of university-level teaching, both in general and in their discipline, and to develop skills and experience that enable them as reflective, scholarly teachers as they prepare to enter the professoriate. (para. 4)

Because such certificates are optional and require significant investment of time and effort, participation in them is, of itself, evidence of a strong drive toward an identity as a teacher. The activities undertaken in the certificate, like those in coursework, tend to focus mainly on pedagogical knowledge and skills. However, the sustained attention to teaching and the reflective elements that are also often part of the programming should significantly support growth and refinement of teacher identity. The current learning outcomes of teaching certificates at some institutions are informed by the competencies, and close attention is paid to intentional discussion of teacher identity.

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Professional Portfolio In addition to the aforementioned formal learning structures that support professional identity development, there are activities that take place individually, across time, and as each graduate student decides to engage with them. The creation and revision of a reflective professional portfolio is an asset that most graduate students develop over their educational journey. While it is possible to teach groups of students about professional portfolios in a scheduled event, much of this work will happen “just in time” for each graduate student. Broader than the teaching statement, a professional portfolio is a tool for self-reflection and for representing one’s work. Faculty at most postsecondary institutions are required to develop annual reports and tenure and promotion dossiers to document and illustrate their accomplishments and productivity across research; teaching; service; and, more recently, commitment to diversity. Since assembling such a document is an essential part of faculty work, offering graduate students opportunities to create similar documents supports the development of the foundational competency associated with professional identity. A holistic, integrated portfolio may afford graduate students an opportunity to track and document progress in all aspects of their education and development more broadly than a teaching statement, including disciplinary content knowledge, ability to design research studies, teaching effectiveness, engagement in professional organizations, and professional development. In fact, a professional portfolio can be highly useful for faculty advisers and other key professionals to critically examine and guide graduate students’ professional development toward faculty careers. A well-designed professional portfolio that demonstrates graduate students’ reflective, leadership, and communication skills as well as pedagogical and disciplinary research knowledge is an essential instrument to evaluate growth and development of teacher-scholar professional identity. The teaching statement is often paralleled in this portfolio by a research and diversity statement, outlining growth and future directions for scholarship and improvement.

Conclusion Graduate students’ development and internalization of a well-integrated professional identity as a teacher-scholar, prior to entering the professoriate, provide the foundation for professional behaviors and dispositions necessary to achieve success in the demanding and complex tasks they will typically encounter in their classrooms, departments, and disciplines. While it is appropriate to expect students to take ownership for their own professional

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identity development, it is also at least as important that institutions take seriously their responsibility to offer opportunities. Promotion of graduate students’ interest and engagement in their own professional identity development should be a shared responsibility. Academic departments and graduate schools, with support from other critical stakeholders such as teaching centers, must build and sustain programs to promote graduate student success as teacher-scholars. Of course, the development of one’s professional identity is not complete at graduation. Faculty members continue to grow and learn throughout the arc of their professional lives. Much of one’s teaching practice, many of the choices every teacher makes every day, arise from their professional ­identity. Therefore, the competency discussed in this chapter suggests the need for an integrated, multifaceted professional identity as a teacher-scholar that embraces the critical values, attitudes, and norms of their discipline, their institution, and the field of higher education in order to provide the basis for teacher success, both immediately as a GSI and across the faculty career. Graduate education has long focused its enculturation efforts on the preparation of the next generation of disciplinary research scholars. More recently, the U.S. higher education system has enhanced the support offered around pedagogical skills and knowledge, although much remains to be done. There are specific, evidence-based practices that lead to successful attainment of each of the competencies described in this book. Thus, the main feature of a well-integrated professional identity is the disposition of caring about one’s teaching at all rather than seeing it as a distraction from one’s “true” identity as a scholar.

References American Association of University Professors. (2009). Statement on professional ethics. http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/policydocs/contents/statementon professionalethics.htm Austin, A. E. (2002). Preparing the next generation of faculty: Graduate school as socialization to the academic career. The Journal of Higher Education, 73(1), 94–122. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2002.11777132 Austin, A. E., Connolly, M. R., & Colbeck, C. L. (2008). Strategies for preparing integrated faculty: The center for the integration of research, teaching, and learning.  New Directions for Teaching and Learning,  2008(113), 69–81. https://doi .org/10.1002/tl.309 Austin, A. E., & McDaniels, M. (2006). Using doctoral education to prepare faculty to work within Boyer’s four domains of scholarship. New Directions for Institutional Research, 2006(129), 51–65. https://doi.org/10.1002/ir.171

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Brookfield, S. D. (1990). The skillful teacher: On technique, trust, and responsiveness in the classroom. Jossey-Bass. Brownell, S. E., & Tanner, K. D. (2012). Barriers to faculty pedagogical change: Lack of training, time, incentives, and . . . tensions with professional identity?  CBE—Life Sciences Education,  11(4), 339–346. https://doi.org/10.1187/ cbe.12-09-0163 Chandler, E. O. (2011). Graduate and professional student development: The role of the pedagogy course. In A. Kalish & S. S. Robinson (Eds.), Mapping the range of graduate student professional development. Studies in graduate and professional student development, 14 (pp. 69–86). New Forums Press. Colbeck, C. L. (2008). Professional identity development theory and doctoral education. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 2008(113), 9–16. https://doi. org/10.1002/tl.304 Connolly, M. R., Savoy, J. N., Lee, Y.-G., & Hill, L. B. (2016). Building a better future STEM faculty: How doctoral teaching programs can improve undergraduate education. Wisconsin Center for Education Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison. https://links.imagerelay.com/cdn/2210/ql/bb8ba5ac40984f4fa1121cbe01223940/Building_a_Better_Future_STEM_Faculty.pdf Costello, C. Y. (2005). Professional identity crisis: Race, class, gender, and success at professional schools. Vanderbilt University Press. Goodyear, G. E., & Allchin, D. (1998). Statement of teaching philosophy. To Improve the Academy, 17(1), 103–122. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/ viewcontent.cgi?article=1403&context=podimproveacad Hutchings, P., & Shulman, L. S. (1999). The scholarship of teaching: New elaborations, new developments. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning,  31(5), 10–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/00091389909604218 Keeney, P. (2017). Academic ethics. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315 263465 Kim Prieto, C., Copeland, H. L., Hopson, R., Simmons, T., & Leibowitz, M. J. (2013). The role of professional identity in graduate school success for under represented minority students. Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education, 41(2), 70–75. https://doi.org/10.1002/bmb.20673 Kreuter, N. (2012). Walk like a duck. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered .com/advice/2012/08/20/essay-how-new-faculty-members-can-deal-impostorsyndrome Leonard, D. (February 5, 2014). Impostor syndrome: Academic integrity under siege? The Chronicle of Higher Education. http://chronicle.com/blogs/ conversation/2014/02/05/impostor-syndrome-academic-identity-under-siege McGinn, M. K. (2018). Teaching and researching ethically: Guidance for instructorresearchers, educational developers, and research ethics personnel. The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.5206/ cjsotl-rcacea.2018.1.2

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Murray, H., Gillese, E., Lennon, M., Mercer, P., & Robinson, M. (1996). Ethical principles in university teaching. Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. https://www.stlhe.ca/awards/3m-national-teaching-fellowships/initiatives/ ethical-principles-in-university-teaching/ Nugent, B., & Bell, D. C. (2006). Toward deprivatized pedagogy. Hampton Press. Palmer, M. S. (2011). Graduate student professional development: A decade after calls for national reform. In A. Kalish & S. S. Robinson (Eds.), Mapping the range of graduate student professional development. Studies in graduate and professional student development, 14 (pp. 1–18). New Forums Press. Palmer, P. (2007). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life (10th anniversary ed.). Wiley. Plank, K. M. (Ed.). (2011). Team teaching: Across the disciplines, across the academy. Stylus. Ray, E. (2003). Memorandum to deans, directors, department chairs, and graduate studies chairs. Office of Academic Affairs, The Ohio State University. Schram, L. N., & Wright, M. C. (2011). Teaching mentorship programs for graduate student development. In A. Kalish & S. S. Robinson (Eds.), Mapping the range of graduate student professional development. Studies in graduate and professional student development, 14 (pp. 53–68). New Forums Press.  Shulman, L. S. (2006). Foreword. In T. Hatch (Ed.), Into the classroom: Developing the scholarship of teaching and learning (pp. vii–x). Jossey-Bass. The Ohio State University. (n.d.). Graduate interdisciplinary specialization in college and university teaching. https://ucat.osu.edu/gis/ The Ohio State University. (2017). Report: Campus conversation on graduate education report. https://oaa.osu.edu/report-campus-conversation-graduate-education Tierney, W. G., & Rhoads, R. A. (1993). Enhancing promotion, tenure and beyond: Faculty socialization as a cultural process. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report (no. 6). The George Washington University. University Center for the Advancement of Teaching. (n.d.a). Michael V. Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning home page. https://ucat.osu.edu/wordpress/assets/ Introduction-to-Teaching-and-Learning-Part-1.doc.pdf University Center for the Advancement of Teaching. (n.d.b.) Teaching portfolio. https://ucat.osu.edu/professional-development/teaching-portfolio/ University Center for the Advancement of Teaching. (n.d.c.). Graduate interdisciplinary specialization in college and unversity teaching. https://ucat.osu.edu/gis/ von Hoene, L. (2011). Graduate student teaching certificates: Survey of current programs. In A. Kalish & S. S. Robinson (Eds.), Mapping the range of graduate student professional development. Studies in graduate and professional student development, 14 (pp. 101–124). New Forums Press.

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4 DISCOVERING THE POSSIBILITIES Exploring Disciplinary and Institutional Contexts for Teaching Tershia Pinder-Grover and Audra Baleisis Competency 3: Graduate and professional students will explore and situate their practice and potential career choices within the contexts and cultures of postsecondary disciplines and institutions.

P

reparing graduate and professional students for academic careers is an important issue in higher education, which is confirmed by the growth of programs to prepare future faculty at doctorate-granting institutions since the late 1980s (Border & von Hoene, 2010; DeNeef, 2002; Goldsmith et al., 2004). However, several studies indicate that new faculty do not always feel prepared for the professoriate, especially in the area of teaching (Austin, 2002; Golde & Dore, 2001, 2004; Luft et al., 2004; Nyquist et al., 1999; Walker et al., 2008; Weidman et al., 2001; Wulff et al., 2004). A more recent longitudinal study of doctoral students in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields indicated that high levels of teaching development can improve doctoral students’ self-efficacy and increase their likelihood to obtain tenure or tenure-track positions (Connolly et al., 2016). Graduate and professional student instructors (GSIs) need to develop a variety of teaching skills and expertise: knowledge about how people learn, the ability to set and communicate goals for student learning, and inclusive teaching skills so that all students can participate in learning. In addition to these pedagogical competencies, there are also postsecondary competencies that can provide GSIs with greater insights into the career paths afforded them in the U.S. higher education system. We have designed this third 56

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competency (a postsecondary competency), which will be discussed in this chapter, to address the question, “What do GSIs need to understand by the end of their graduate education about postsecondary education to have successful careers as educators?”

Competency Description GSIs must be able to examine their teaching practice with an appreciation for the ways in which their discipline shapes how students are taught, as well as how the culture, institutional mission, financial situation, and student demographic of their institution will influence instructors’ teaching experiences (McDaniels, 2010). The experience of teaching can be influenced by (a) teaching and advising loads, (b) whether students are at the undergraduate or graduate level (or both), (c) how much variety is possible with the content and level of courses that faculty will teach, (d) different types of instruction (e.g., lecture, lab, etc.), and (e) the reward structure associated with teaching (McDaniels, 2010). As an example of the range of institutional characteristics, Table 4.1 highlights characteristics for colleges and universities in the chapter contributors’ home state of Michigan, as well as information from institutions mentioned in the later sections of this chapter. In addition, GSIs need a greater appreciation for their potential career options across the higher education landscape (e.g., the variety of institutional types, also represented in Table 4.1) that are unique to the U.S. postsecondary education system (American Council on Education, 2007). In the following sections, Competency 3 is discussed in terms of how the higher education landscape intersects, first, with teaching practice, and, second, with the nature of potential careers.

Teaching Practice When GSIs have the opportunity to explore and situate their teaching practice within the context of their discipline, they are able to leverage their own expert thinking to support novice learners. For instance, future faculty can learn how to create classroom environments where common areas of confusion are identified, expert approaches to these learning challenges are modeled, the purpose of and expectations for learning tasks are clear, students have ample opportunities to practice and receive feedback, and assessments are created to measure student progress in these areas (Middendorf & Pace, 2004). On their own, GSIs can engage with a number of activities that apply to Competency 3 by taking a disciplinary pedagogy course to learn the

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Carnegie Classification / Level 1

Associates College/2-year

Baccalaureate College/4-year or above

R3: Doctoral university

Institution

Washtenaw Community College

Concordia University

Eastern Michigan University

12,295

Student Population1

22,401

829

TABLE 4.1

Medium fulltime, selective, higher transfer-in

Full-time, selective, higher transfer-in

Higher part-time

Undergradudate Profile1

18:1 39% of classes have < 20 students

11:1 84% of classes have < 20 students

19:1

Student: Instructor Ratio and Class Size2

Sample of Select Institutional Characteristics

High 65.8% White

Medium 78.8% White

High 64% White

Ethnic Diversity2

25%

13%

11%

Distance Learners2

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Full-time, more selective, lower transfer-in

Undergradudate Profile1

18:1 48% of classes have