The Effective, Happy Teaching Assistant

Aretta believes teaching assistants should work independently to demonstrate competency. She thinks she must prove she can do all the work of her assistantship alone.

A more effective mindset: Good teachers develop with support.

Becoming an effective teacher is a developmental process that requires support. When new teachers try to go it alone, they isolate themselves and fail to create a network of teaching mentors and resources.

Teaching, like many aspects of an academic life, is most successful when we approach it as a collaborative effort. Just as faculty need colleagues to critique a new project idea, to provide feedback on drafts of grant proposals, or to consider a good way to navigate a conversation with a Dean, highly effective faculty also look to their colleagues and to support staff to develop their courses and their plans for teaching.

Because you have never really been behind the scenes at a teaching institution, you may not know that it is not only typical but also encouraged for instructors to get support from departmental colleagues, from the institution’s Teaching and Learning Center, and by consulting the research on teaching and learning.

It might surprise you to know that there are books and research journals on teaching in higher education; some books and journals are even dedicated to teaching in your specific discipline!

As you consider the kinds of challenges you might face as a new teaching assistant - everything from planning a course to handling a difficult discussion in the classroom - it’s important to know that there are experts who are happy to help you think through these issues and develop your teaching abilities.

Aretta thinks that she might be a born teacher.

A more effective mindset: Teaching is a skill that develops over time with practice and feedback.

There is a great risk in believing that teaching ability is innate: when things get difficult (which they inevitably will!), teachers who hold this belief might decide teaching isn’t actually for them and simply give up.

Teachers aren’t born - rather they develop. The research on teaching suggests strongly that teachers improve by trying approaches, reflecting on the outcomes, and then gathering new ideas from the research on teaching and adjusting their approaches accordingly.

This is much like the way we approach research! Just as our research develops through cycles of investigation, teaching is an ability that improves with work and reflection.

Evidence from research on teaching suggests that a productive way to think about teaching is to see it as a skill that grows over time and as a field of study in and of itself, with a scholarly tradition that can support that growth with the application of evidence-based teaching practices.

Aretta’s preparation to teach began with her considering all the things that students should know or understand.

A more effective mindset: Teaching is staging learning experiences that require students to do meaningful work. 

When new teachers think of teaching, they tend to focus on what should be covered in a course. This focus on content usually leads new teaching assistants to start looking at topics on syllabi or chapters in a textbook. While each discipline at a university could be reduced to a list of facts, topics, or themes, students who are simply required to memorize or know a lot about a discipline are deeply disadvantaged.

To begin with, a focus on foundational knowledge is boring; beyond that, when students are asked to memorize or retain a lot of information, they are robbed of the opportunity to do meaningful and motivating work in the discipline.

While undergraduate students aren’t necessarily ready to do the doctoral-level work you are doing, it’s important to challenge them to do aspects of the kinds of analysis, application, or evaluation that make your field of inquiry really exciting. Requiring students to do real work is what will allow them to learn in your class and will make you a more inspired teacher (who does less work while they do more!).

Like many institutions of higher education, the University has resources to help you develop your teaching skills and to tackle the work of your teaching assistantship. 

CATLOE offers one-on-one consultations to take you from your first steps as a TA through your first semester as a grader, discussion leader, or instructor of record.

We offer workshops and academies to help you with your teaching in a collegial atmosphere where you can learn with and from other instructors. We also offer courses on college teaching, preparing for a career as a professor, and the process of creating a teaching portfolio.

Our website offers many written resources that will guide your thinking about teaching. You’ll also find information about the services we offer that help you get feedback on your teaching, such as an early semester survey for your students and non-evaluative, confidential classroom observations.

Your department may also offer classes, guidance, and mentoring to support your work as a teaching assistant. CATLOE can help you consider what your supports are and how to make the most of them. Never feel hesitant to reach out to us. We are always here for you.

Like any skill, teaching improves with time, practice and feedback. As you explore the supports that are described above, or meet with instructional consultants and other instructors, you will hear how you can develop your teaching and learn how others have done so.

Browsing scholarly journals about teaching and learning or exploring the titles in the CATLOE Resource library that focus on learning to teach can be inspiring: you will start to see that learning to teach takes time and is a process. Relax a little, reach out for support, and see that this is the beginning of a learning journey. You can move as quickly or as slowly as is necessary as you balance learning to teach with finishing your graduate studies.

As you shift into the mindset that teaching means giving students realistic, disciplinary work, consider the kinds of work you do that is exciting.

What do you do when you read a text, analyze a study, streamline coding, create research questions, interpret a text or data, code field notes, run an experiment, annotate a primary document, clean up data, or compare two critical texts?

Consider that you are an expert who does a lot of complex thinking and that as a teacher, your task is to invite novices into your discipline and apprentice them into these new and complex ways of thinking.

Make an appointment with one of CATLOE’s instructional consultants and work with them to generate ideas about how you can ensure that your students do meaningful, disciplinary work, even as novices. Thinking in this way can help you plan productive and exciting discussions, activities, reflective work, feedback, or assignments for your students. This is true whether your first teaching assistantship is as a grader, a discussion leader, a lab instructor, a guest lecturer, or an instructor of record.