DELTA-P: A Decade of Efforts to Improve Graduate TA Teaching Preparation

In this talk, I summarize the 15-year history of graduate student pedagogical preparation in our physics and astronomy PhD program, as well as lessons learned for better engagement in and perceptions of pedagogical preparation among graduate students in our program. These experiences may help inform other institutions' graduate program pedagogical preparation offerings, and may help open up new pathways towards more desirable graduate programs in physics and astronomy. Starting from its inception in 2010, I walk through the history of our department's program, DELTA-P (Developing Education Leaders Among TAs in Physics), as a mandatory one-hour weekly seminar series with invited speakers (mostly local to the institution) to its current form of targeted pedagogically oriented workshops within the same time constraints. Content and activities of these workshops will be shared, and include a mixture of general education principles borrowed from our institutions Learning Assistant Program training, as well as physics-specific pedagogy tailored to the typical graduate teaching roles in our department. Survey data over several years reveals the topics that our graduate students preferred, and topics they didn't prefer, as well as their perceptions of the DELTA-P program as part of their overall graduate experience in our institution. Lessons learned and the next phases of the program will be discussed, including institutional-level steps taken towards improving the standards of graduate student pedagogical preparation across all departments, which will shape the future evolution of DELTA-P as a department-specific pedagogical training effort.