Fostering Teaching Skills and Collaboration in Online Graduate Teaching Fellowship

Fellowships represent an important mechanism for graduate students to develop their teaching skills and reflect on their career goals, given the inconsistent nature of graduate instructor training in higher education. We developed an online fellowship program focused on digital teaching and learning that offered workshops, mentored cohort experiences, and collaborative development of participant deliverables on a teaching and learning topic. In the 2022 year of this fellowship, we used participant reflections and survey responses (n=17) to evaluate the impact of our fellowship on students’ teaching skills and the impacts of the digital collaborative components of the fellowship on their professional development. We found that students reported improvement in their teaching self-efficacy and pedagogical skills. Regular interactions with interdisciplinary cohorts and teaching mentors through the Microsoft Teams platform were reported as helpful experiences by most participants. However, additional structure in their cohort meetings and guidance for use of the digital tools in the fellowship are needed for some participants. We report on changes we will make to the fellowship moving forward to impact students’ teaching skills and collaborative experiences.