About this course

The Teaching Preparation Certificate (TPC), is a non-credit and competency-based certificate, designed for graduate students and post-docs who have prior experience teaching or as a teaching assistant, or training in teaching skills. GPS 986 supports participants with assessing their level of competence in areas aligned with the USask Learning Charter and with documenting their growth in a teaching portfolio.

Program overview

Participants will work to document competencies in three categories which align with these Educator Commitments in Our Learning Charter:

  1. Exemplify Learning Behaviours that I am Teaching Others
  2. Strive for Excellence in Course Design and Teaching
  3. Enhance Continuously

Benefits and opportunities

  • Document and reflect on the growth in your teaching practice. 
  • Present evidence of prior learning that demonstrates ways in which you might already have met program outcomes.
  • Build skills and confidence in teaching competencies through attending USask teaching and learning courses and workshops.
  • Establish or build upon your teaching philosophy statement.

Review the TPC Rubric

Essential Teaching Competency A:  Exemplify Learning Behaviours that I am Teaching Others

  • Respond to diversity in worldview, position, and power 
    • I reflect on personal power and position, and develop strategies for power sharing and choices for students.
    • I value perspectives and worldviews different from my own.
  • Communicate effectively
    • I use strategies to encourage and foster open and healthy dialogue among my students.
    • I purposefully select and use strategies to communicate inclusively and responsively with my students.

Essential Teaching Competency B: Strive for Excellence in Course Design and Teaching

  • Design courses with constructive alignment
    • I create outcomes that are active, and have all three parts (active verb, content, and context).
    • I select active and engaging instructional strategies aligned to an outcome and intended assessment.
    • I select assessment strategies aligned to a self-generated outcome.
  • Design lessons to promote learning
    • I chunk, sequence, and scaffold essential content and skills.
    • I design to engage diverse learners.
  • Use effective instructional approaches given the outcomes, context, and learners
    • I use formative assessment to inform and adapt course/lesson design.
    • I purposefully use a wide range of accessible communication strategies that make it easy for my students to understand what I am teaching.
    • I identify potential solutions to prevent and respond to classroom management problems.

Essential Teaching Competency C: Enhance Continuously 

  • Begin to clarify and refine a teaching philosophy
    • I articulate personal beliefs and assumptions about “good teaching.”
    • I set measurable goals for developing teaching practice, guided by evidence.
  • Make appropriate changes based on feedback

Requirements

Students must either be a current Post-Doctoral Fellow or be registered in the College of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (CGPS) in a Master’s or PhD program.  Successful completion of either GPS 989: Introduction to University Teaching or GPS 982: Mentored Teaching may count toward evidence of meeting all outcomes in the three areas of competence. 

The culminating submission for completing the TPC is a teaching portfolio comprised of a self-assessment of competencies, a teaching philosophy statement, and evidence of meeting each of the outcomes and indicators in each of the three competency categories.  

Book a consultation with Roberta Campbell-Chudoba to learn more about this certificate.

Registration

To register for the Teaching Preparation Certificate use the Registration channel in PAWS then search GPS 986. New students may register in either Term 1 or 2.

Questions?

Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning

GMCTL has a variety of programming, workshops, non-credit courses and resources for graduate students or post-doctorals who are new to teaching and who already have some experience but want to learn more.