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The Graduate School

Teaching Certificate

The Graduate Professional Development Team’s Teaching Certificate offers master’s, doctoral, and postdoctoral scholars guidance for how to effectively teach and mentor within a higher education environment.

The Teaching Certificate is structured to provide foundational workshops and electives that help develop one’s teaching and mentoring skills. Either a teaching or a mentoring experience is required to earn the certificate as well as a “deliverable” that reflects the insights gained from participating in the teaching workshops and experience. If it is your intent to pursue the Teaching Certificate, please sign up here.

Register for a workshop

Graduate students and postdocs who earn the Teaching Certificate will:

  • Identify ways to effectively engage their students
  • Learn teaching strategies that lead to learning outcomes
  • Understand the skills needed to appropriately mentor students
  • Gain an awareness of how who they are is reflected in their teaching approach
  • Recognize what teaching entails and how to manage those aspects that are a part of the classroom experience as well as the needs outside of the classroom
  • Be able to write and articulate their own teaching philosophy
  • Earn a notation on their transcript

Teaching Certificate Requirements

The four (4) workshops listed below, or attendance at the all-day New TA Workshop held in August, are required for the Teaching Certificate. Note: You must attend the entire day of the New TA Workshop in order for it to count in place of the foundational workshops. If you attend only 1/2 a day of the New TA Workshop, you need to take five workshops from either the foundational workshops list or those listed as electives. (When you check-in via our registration system at any of our workshop, we are able to see the time you checked in.):

  • Teaching College
  • Engaging Diverse Learners
  • Using Learning Outcomes
  • Mentoring 101

Four (4) electives are to be chosen from these options. However, if you attend the entire New TA Workshop, any of the four foundational workshops listed above will count as elective(s) as well:

  • Any or all of the four listed above IF you attended the entire New TA Workshop (if you attend only 1/2 a day of the New TA Workshop, you must take five (5) electives from either this list or from the foundational workshops listed above)
  • Accessibility in the Classroom
  • Avoiding Death by PowerPoint
  • Emotional Intelligence: A Tool for Teaching
  • Surviving Your First Days as a TA
  • Managing Conflict in the Classroom
  • Processing Course Evaluations
  • Working with First Generation College Students
  • Writing a Statement of Teaching Philosophy
  • TA Toolkit Workshops offered through DELTA and/or the Library (no more than two (2) can be taken as electives and must focus teaching to count as an elective

One (1) of the following is required for the Teaching Certificate:

  • Teaching assistantship (and a reflection paper)
  • Mentoring an undergraduate student through one of the Graduate School’s partnerships with Office of Undergraduate Research or the College of Engineering (and a reflection paper)
  • Find a job posting that interests you which involves teaching.
  • Submit all required materials to apply for that position such as CV/resume, cover letter, teaching philosophy statement, and the job position description.