Integrative engineering leadership initiative for teaching excellence (iELITE)

Beginning in the spring of 2017, a team of engineering faculty, in collaboration with professionals across campus, designed a new teaching and leadership program and successfully offered it as a pilot course for three semesters. Desiring to prepare graduate students for careers in both academia and industry, this program aims to enhance the teaching skills of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) while simultaneously augmenting their professional skills. The goal is to train the next generation of leaders who will possess technical and academic expertise as well as critical skills such as communication, organization, and relationship building. The team used an integrative approach to design and later modify the course. This paper describes this approach, as well as the results of an investigation into whether the course impacted GTA perceptions of teaching self-efficacy and GTA perceptions of whether teaching skills transfer to other professional contexts.