The Developing and Teaching Academic Writing (DATAW) Global Online Course (GOC) is a teacher professional development course for writing educators in diverse contexts. The DATAW GOC was designed to employ a flexible, learner-centered pedagogy that combines Backward Design principles, foundational concepts of academic writing, andragogical strategies, and sheltered English instruction standards to create optimal learning activities for a highly heterogeneous group of adult learners with different language skills and teaching experience. It also integrates modeling and scaffolding of teaching strategies, experiential learning tasks, project-based activities, and application of knowledge to GOC participants’ teaching contexts and their students’ needs. In this reflection article, we make connections between our DATAW course design decisions and our observations from course delivery. Teaching the GOC across 8 terms to 850 participants from 103 countries revealed significant variation in teaching contexts, class size, workload, pedagogical practices, educational systems, and English language proficiency. These insights guided our iterative revisions at the end of each term, which allowed for continued tailoring and improvement of materials and tasks in response to the contextual possibilities and inhibitors in participants’ global contexts. By balancing theory and research-based best practices with participants’ real-life needs, the DATAW GOC provided a flexible, responsive platform for educators to improve their teaching practices, ultimately cascading their pedagogical knowledge to positively impact academic writing instruction in a globalized educational landscape.

Supporting the professional development of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) is a strategic necessity for both English studies and higher education. At many academic institutions, GTAs represent a significant proportion of instructional staff for first-year composition courses (Young and Bippus 116). These courses serve a crucial institutional mission as an academic entry point for the majority of undergraduate students and have been closely linked with student retention, graduation rates, and academic performance (Garrett, Bridgewater, and Feinstein; Holmes and Busser). Based on a recent national study, Amy Cicchino found most rhetoric and composition programs offer intensive, but condensed, GTA training programs that typically include a preservice orientation, semester-long teaching proseminar, and peer or faculty mentorship (93). Yet, time is a significant constraint—most programs take place over a single semester or academic year and end just as GTAs gain enough teaching experience and confidence to become more interested in composition theory and professional development (Obermark, Brewer, and Halasek; Reid).