Delta Program: Training future faculty
 raduate students and postdoctoral associates interested in pursuing academic careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) develop expertise in research and the technical aspects of their chosen field through their coursework and thesis projects. However, despite the central role of teaching in an academic career, traditionally graduate students have received little or no instruction on how to instruct. Graduate students in this department, as in most STEM departments nationwide, have long been expected to participate in the under-graduate teaching program as teaching assistants, working alongside faculty and gaining instructional experience.
In addition, the College of Engineering has developed a series of teaching assistant workshops to provide pedagogical instruction to TA’s. But as CBE graduate student Samira Azarin said, “After TA’ing a course, I didn’t feel like I could teach it. I could barely keep up with the course material each week!” So for those students like Samira or fellow graduate student Dan Agnew looking to academic careers, something more was needed. Over the last five years, a new program unique to UW-Madison and five cooperating institutions has developed a learning community across campus that is providing additional support to both current and future STEM faculty in their ongoing efforts to improve student learning.
The Delta Program in Research, Teaching and Learning is an initiative of the NSF-sponsored Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL) that is based at UW-Madison and has programs at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Howard University, Michigan State University, Texas A&M University, and Vanderbilt University. Students and post-docs can earn a Delta certificate by enrolling in Delta courses, pursuing an internship, attending roundtable dinners and seminars, and developing an instructional portfolio, while faculty and instructors can enroll in Delta courses to solve specific teaching challenges.
Samira has participated extensively in the program during her three years as a graduate student. In fact, the Delta program was a key factor in her decision to attend UW. “I wanted to pursue my graduate work at an institution that truly valued teaching,” she says. She completed an internship working with a group of engineering faculty, including Dan Klingenberg, in the development of a new college-wide introductory course for freshmen, InterEngineering 102, Introduction to Society’s Engineering Grand Challenges. Samira was able to develop assessment tools for the course that would enable instructors to make improvements to the course in real time. She also says she enjoyed, “just being a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ at meetings and seeing how a new course is developed.”
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Currently, Samira and second-year graduate student, Dan Agnew (who Samira helped recruit to the department by discussing the Delta program when he first visited), are enrolled in the Delta course on instructional materials development. As part of the course, they are working with CBE professor Regina Murphy to address issues in the teaching of the introductory course, CBE 250, Process Synthesis. Instructors in subsequent courses reported that students were not retaining key concepts in thermodynamics learned in CBE 250 (and Samira saw this first-hand when she served as a TA in CBE 426, Mass Transfer Operations), so Samira and Dan decided to begin by focusing on one piece of the problem—phase equilibria, and specifically, how the properties of mixtures differ from the properties of their components.
A key to the Delta program is that students learn to treat teaching as a research problem. According to Bob Mathieu, astronomy professor and Delta co-director, “The idea of teaching-as-research is that to enhance student learning, which is our ultimate goal, you have to really understand what the students are learning… [Teaching] is a dynamic, interactive, constantly improving process. In order to do that improvement, we need to understand what the students are learning, and that’s fundamentally a research question.”
So Dan and Samira designed a diagnostic quiz for students to take before the subject was introduced in class, from which they learned that many students approached the subject with a variety of misconceptions that would first need to be unlearned. Since the traditional combination of textbook and lecture didn’t seem to communicate the information in a way that stuck with the students, Dan and Samira are working to develop other teaching approaches including lecture demonstrations and videos of molecular simulations to help explain the concepts. Future course instructors will be able to use the materials they develop and follow up with a quiz to reassess student learning of the subject.
Both Dan and Samira have now spoken with prospective graduate students when they visit the department and report that there are always a few students who perk up when they learn of the Delta program. Bob Mathieu says, “Fundamentally, the future faculty of the nation lies in the graduate students. If we can change the way graduate education happens, we can change the nation.” Delta provides a useful new model for how to change graduate education.
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