Resumen de Supporting doctoral candidates as early career teachers: addressing teaching challenges through design
In this paper we discuss the design and the impact of a workshop for doctoral students whoserve as graduate teaching assistants in higher education teaching in the field of social sciences andhumanities. The workshop provides an opportunity of individualized and small group learning fordoctoral students, which helps them address discipline-specific pedagogical challenges. It does soby following stages of a full learning cycle: (1) learning the theory of ‘backward design’ (Wiggins &McTighe, 2005); (2) guided individual session design; (3) teaching the session; (4) reflection and learningfrom peer experience.The observations and the feedback from the workshop participants demonstrated that theywere able to address many of their expected teaching challenges by shifting the focus from ‘the self’to ‘the students’ (Kugel, 1993) - by applying design thinking in their preparation for teaching. It alsocontributed to their understanding of the interconnection between learning goals, activities andassessment of student understanding.Offering workshops such as this one helps close the gap in doctoral education and aims tointegrate pedagogical training in their development as future academics.
