To help the semester go smoothly, it’s important that you and your supervisor are on the same page, whether you are a first time or experienced TA. Your supervisor will probably provide you with a lot of the information you need to understand the course and your role, but they may not know what you don’t know. These questions can help you identify what more you need to know to be a successful TA. Keep in mind that not all questions will apply to all types of TA assignments.

About the Course:

• What are the learning goals and objectives in this course?
• How is the class organized (especially with respect to discussion or lab sections, if relevant)?
• What concepts and/or assignments have students struggled with in the past?
• What did students really like about the course in the past?
• What aspects of the course have students been less enthusiastic about?
• What resources are available to get up to speed on the material?

A useful first step seems to be exposing students to the learning process, the rationale for feedback, and feedback itself. Inside the classroom, this can take the form of simple exposition alongside low-stakes writing activities and other active learning strategies that encourage students to see how feedback fits into the larger learning process.

• Discuss with students the general pedagogical worth of feedback and its place in the learning process so that students better value feedback (Pokorny and Pickford, 2010). Students, especially first and second year undergraduates, need to be made aware of the importance of consciously reflecting on feedback (Agius and Wilkinson, 2014).
• Manage expectations of students to ensure that they make the most of the feedback. Guiding students on the purpose of feedback, and how it can used in conjunction with other campus and learning resources to improve student performance and the add to the learning process, is crucial. Without this, many students may view feedback as being a singular avenue offering all the answers to improving their performance (Robinson, Pope, and Holyoak, 2013).

Define office hours and review sessions

Office hours and review sessions are additional meetings held outside of regular course meeting times where TAs provide guided support for students to review material and reinforce learning. Office hours tend to occur regularly throughout a quarter or semester. Review sessions typically occur shortly before an assessment and are explicitly dedicated to helping students prepare for the assessment.

The purpose of office hours and review sessions is to:

• Guide students to identify key concepts.
• Spend time with an individual student or in small groups to learn how you can assist and guide them.
• Facilitate deeper learning for students by sharing advanced resources and engaging in critical dialogue.

While You Are Grading

Grade while you are in a good mood.

Grade with company! In addition to being more fun, the other GSIs are a resource for grading questions. Also, if you are grading a large lecture course, it can streamline the grading consistency checks. To ensure consistency, exchange a few papers in each score range with the other GSIs, and grade them independently. Compare the scores and take corrective action if necessary.

Time yourself. Try to limit how long you spend grading each assignment (e.g., I want to grade on average 20 problems per hour or, I want to spend at most 15 minutes per essay). If you find yourself puzzling over a particular paper, set the paper aside to grade last, when your sense of all of the students’ work has been fully developed.

Principles of section planning

Before the course begins, identify the goals of the discussion section with the course instructor. Discuss with the instructors what the role of the discussion section is with respect to the lecture or other course components. 

First, identify learning goals for each week’s discussion section, perhaps in coordination with any other course components (e.g., lecture, assignments). Then, design activities and discussions to help students reach those learning goals. You may also want to identify any administrative tasks that need to be addressed during the section.

For the first section, make sure to have everyone introduce themselves, and collectively set and agree to norms for the classroom with the students. 

For all sections, it is helpful to incorporate a variety of activities to facilitate student participation and engagement. For discussion activities, formulate easier discussion questions and harder discussion questions aimed at the learning goals of the section. When planning a section, plan to split time between you doing things or talking and students doing things or talking, so that you do not dominate section time and students can be actively engaged. 

All GLAs in inquiry-based laboratories share some common roles across disciplines. In each of these roles you have the opportunity to contribute to the success of students by impacting their laboratory learning experience. Further, there are evidence-based best practices that you can use to increase your effectiveness in your role. In this resource we break this role into four distinct (albeit overlapping) parts: the GLA facilitates learning, manages operations, directs behavior, and encourages student motivation to learn.