Teaching Engineering Students How to Teach: Training Teaching Assistants for Diverse Responsibilities

Teaching assistants are widely used at universities around the world, and they are an important part of the teaching and learning ecosystem at their institutions. They help support teachers and facilitate learning processes for students. For many teaching assistants, this work will also represent their first experience with formal teaching. Thus, it is crucial that they receive training within the field of pedagogy and didactics to prepare them for their new teaching responsibilities and ensure a consistent and high quality in their instruction. Since they are relatively inexperienced when they start working as teaching assistants, they both need to develop an understanding of the theories and methods of teaching and learning in higher education, as well as lay the foundation for a professional identity as a teacher, helping them develop sustainable teaching practices and teaching self-efficacy. This practice paper presents the design of a teaching assistant training course at the Technical University of Denmark, which is focused on developing an understanding of teaching and learning in higher education for the new teaching assistants, as well as facilitating their development of teaching self-efficacy.