Mentored Teaching Assistants

Summary form only given. The College of Engineering at North Carolina State University has developed an innovative program that enables selected graduate students to gain experience in all aspects of preparing and teaching a college-level course. Specially designated Mentored Teaching Assistants (MTAs) perform all the usual TA activities while developing other aspects of their assigned course in collaboration with a chosen professor. This talk reports on a pilot MTA program that was run during the 1996-1997 academic year. The MTA program allows students and faculty to form mentor-mentee teams. Each team applies to the program specifying the goals of their participation and how they will accomplish those goals. In general, the activities proposed involve developing some portion of the course material and presenting it to the students in some fashion. The guidelines of the program recommend at least three hours of classroom presentation and preparation of at least one homework assignment and one exam, but these are not requirements. The pilot MTA program demonstrates the effectiveness of the MTA concept. In addition, the College of Engineering has been rewarded with innovative course materials which can be used in the future.