2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The STEM fields continue to struggle broadly with attrition, equity, and inclusion issues across many – often intersectional – identities and backgrounds. While the opportunities for graduate student teaching training have been increasing widely in recent years, we identified a need for specifically focused training on inclusive teaching for graduate student teaching assistants and instructors of record.

In this workshop series, we create a shared understanding and application of terminology and definitions, explore inclusive teaching practices, and prepare students for facilitating difficult conversations and situations in teaching. These are presented in a sequence of three 90-minute sessions with facilitated content and breakout small-group discussions. Two of the sessions also have two discussion scenarios on difficult teaching situations for students to think through and problem solve in small groups.

The content is important; however, the novelty of this programming is the development process. We reverse engineered the development of this program (applied the educational technique of backwards design), starting from learning goals and outcomes, back to activities and evidence of learning, then finally back to instructional approaches and content. As a bonus, this programming also maps onto and aligns with the professional development learning outcomes for more comprehensive faculty programming around inclusive teaching. To our knowledge, this program is the first of its kind in inclusive teaching training for STEM graduate students, particularly with the “reverse engineering” development approach and alignment with separate faculty professional development programming.

This work is a result of a highly productive collaboration between the teaching and learning center and the college of engineering’s diversity office. The content developer/facilitator, from the teaching and learning center, also holds a PhD in engineering.

We have offered this program three times (each fall and spring semester since Fall 2023) to enthusiastic reception. With each offering, we continue to assess and will report on the program, outcomes, and efficacy, with positive programmatic assessment already observed. As part of this paper/presentation, we seek to share not only the methods and our observations, but also content (learning outcomes, slides, advertising/recruiting, and program promotion ideas) so others may adapt and apply this program at their own institutions without the need to recreate from the beginning.