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Help With Your Teaching

Teaching Assistant Development

Some Guiding Principles for Working with TAs

Opportunities to work with TAs at Queen's can be rewarding experiences for faculty, affording the potential for both collaboration and teaching development. However, by virtue of their diverse roles and responsibilities, many faculty and TAs find these teaching relationships to be quite complex. The following list of ideas is a set of guidelines for maximizing the productivity of faculty-TA collaborations.

1. Plan a pre-term course orientation. Use this meeting as an opportunity to get acquainted with TAs and to provide a general overview of your course. Faculty are almost unanimous in endorsing the importance of pre-term planning. TAs benefit from knowing professors’ course objectives and goals for students, and the role they are to play in helping to achieve those goals. A pre-term orientation also provides TAs with a chance to examine the syllabus, to plan ahead for labour-intensive teaching or grading weeks, and to make necessary arrangements for covering other academic responsibilities well in advance. Often TAs can make contributions to the materials planned.
2. Know your TAs. Graduate students bring various levels of experience to their roles in your course. Many graduate students listed as "new" Queen's TAs may have substantial prior teaching experience from other settings; such TAs can often offer valuable suggestions and input. Other graduate students, including those well along in their graduate programs, may have never set foot in classrooms as teachers. Gathering information about TAs= teaching histories, at preliminary planning meetings, can provide a much better sense about the resources they bring to bear on your course.
3. View your course as one step in helping TAs prepare their own future roles as professors. Think of ways to make the teaching experience as meaningful as possible for TAs. For many graduate students, your course may provide their only teaching experience prior to assuming roles as faculty members themselves. While TAs certainly have something to learn about grading papers and leading labs, discussions or field trips, these activities alone are not sufficient to prepare them for future teaching careers. However, TAs can learn a great deal about course design, delivery and instruction through discussions with faculty instructors. Regular opportunities to discuss together goals for the course, teaching strategies, ways to improve student success in the course, and how well goals are being reached allow TAs to view the teaching process from a perspective inaccessible to them in their roles as lab/discussion leaders. Likewise, working with senior TAs on preparing and delivering guest lectures for your course can provide them with valuable experience in this role.
4. Meet weekly with TAs to talk about teaching. While most faculty members see their TAs regularly, meetings are typically devoted to logistics and course organization. Seldom are such meetings used to actually discuss teaching in the lecture and section or lab. Discussing teaching topics during these meetings can be edifying for both faculty and TAs and can enhance the quality of the course. Faculty can model teaching techniques for TAs by using the techniques in their weekly discussions, for example. One instructor, interested in using discussion sections to hold a formal debate on a controversial topic in his field, presented the idea in the weekly teaching meeting. TAs debated, researched and, together with the instructor, ultimately developed a successful format that the instructor now uses each time the course is offered.
5. Collect and provide teaching feedback. One of the mistakes that faculty members make is assuming that TAs will be forthcoming in providing them with feedback about how the course is going. TAs are typically very sensitive to the power relationship involved in faculty-TA teaching arrangements and are reluctant to provide any negative feedback at all, even when they realize that students may be struggling with lectures. A regular, open invitation and time set aside to provide such feedback, perhaps supplemented by the mid-term classroom evaluation, can demonstrate to the TAs the faculty member's openness and willingness to examine and improve teaching. Faculty can motivate TAs to share concerns, successes and failures by discussing the risks they take and their mistakes. Similarly, to the extent that faculty can create opportunities for constructive feedback to TAs (e.g., via classroom observation, peer observation, video consultation or self-reflection), TA teaching development will be further enhanced.
6. Share teaching materials. Although talking about teaching is one of the most important keys in developing as a teacher, many TAs -- especially new ones -- also appreciate receiving succinct and helpful materials that can provide guidance in different aspects of teaching (e.g. role-playing, buzz groups, simulations). Such materials are available from the Instructional Development Centre, though instructors can also be on the lookout for and collect relevant discipline-specific materials to share with TAs. TAs can also be made aware of journals on teaching in their discipline.
7. Recommend participation in teaching-related events. Many departments offer a required orientation session for new TAs and some provide advanced teaching seminars for experienced TAs. Such seminars can augment, though not replace, the learning that takes place in faculty-TA course meetings. Additionally, the IDC offers a course on teaching each year and other regular events highlighting different facets of teaching. Faculty members= knowledge of teaching-related events can broaden the opportunities available to TAs to learn about teaching.
8. Encourage balance among teaching and other scholarly activities. Most new faculty, unprepared for the demands of teaching, end up spending the majority of their time on preparation for classroom teaching. However, ‘quick-starting’ junior faculty actually spend less time preparing lectures but more time talking about teaching with colleagues. Faculty who work with TAs can help them to begin balancing the competing demands already facing them in graduate school by encouraging time management strategies (including setting aside blocks of time devoted to teaching, to research, and to writing); by encouraging discussion about teaching; and by staying attuned to the balance of time invested in teaching. Lessons learned during graduate school can facilitate transitions to the role of new faculty member.
9. Help TAs to begin thinking about assembling a teaching dossier. Many graduate students who go on to assume faculty positions complain that they were not aware of the importance of teaching experience and a sophisticated understanding of the art of teaching until it was too late. Faculty who teach with TAs can provide guidance in thinking about the teaching process early in graduate careers by introducing the concept of a teaching dossier. A teaching dossier is basically the equivalent of a faculty research dossier. Records of everything your TAs do -- including thinking about a teaching philosophy, course assignments they create, outstanding student research papers they help develop, and videotapes of in-class teaching -- can be worked into a dossier to help them as they progress toward their future careers. These teaching materials can also be of help to future TAs working with the faculty member on the same course.

Centre for Teaching and Learning, Queen’s University --