IEEI Peer Coaching Program for Teaching
Author: Shawna Thomas 
This semester brings many new challenges to engineering education as faculty are thrust into previously foreign modes of teaching, but one thing that has not changed is a passion to teach with excellence. This passion fuels everything IEEI does to advance engineering education research and promote best practices. This fall, the Institute launched an exciting pilot program for faculty to sharpen each other’s teaching practices and curate outstanding digital teaching portfolios to showcase their individual strengths. The Virtual Peer Coaching Program is positioned to take unique advantage of this unprecedented semester of online and hybrid teaching.
The pilot program is facilitated by Nancy Simpson, Teaching Fellow in the Mays Business School and supported by Jean Layne, Lead Instructional Consultant from the Center for Teaching Excellence. Both have a proven history in helping faculty apply evidence-based best teaching practices to higher education. The pilot program contains 6 faculty participants from different engineering disciplines, spanning different levels of teaching experience from less than 3 years teaching to more than 30 years in higher education. The pilot program unites both tenure-track faculty and academic professional track faculty under a common goal to improve engineering education, starting with themselves.
The program has already held several sessions where participants have established a collaborative appreciative agreement to govern future feedback sessions, shared initial teaching video snippets with each other, and received practical training on how CTE consultants conduct effective faculty observations and review meetings. Participants look forward to peer coaching each other in this trusted community as well as support in developing digital teaching portfolios from the feedback received from each other and CTE consultants. Participants will receive a bursary to support their research and teaching upon successful completion.