Teaching Assistant
Responsibilities:
Supporting Learning
Processes
Peter Hollenbeck, Biological Sciences
Matthew Ohland, Engineering Education
Strategies for creating and maintaining effective relationships
with students and faculty supervisors
Learn their names if you can – pronunciation matters.
Ask their names, names / photos, seating charts, say their
names whenever you can. Eye contact is also important.
If you can’t learn their names, ways to make them think you did
Managing faculty expectations:
Discuss early, attend classes with faculty member, make
sure you are on the class email list. Review syllabus and
assignments.
Managing student expectations:
Students are concerned about grades – they don’t need
a guarantee, but they want to know what is required.
Let students know you’re human.
How relationships vary by race and gender and person to person
Strategies and appropriate practices for facilitating
effective communication with students
Stop, listen, respond. If you don’t have time, schedule a time.
Particularly with minorities.
Email when appropriate, because you can choose words carefully
and keep a record.
Never violate a student's confidence. Remain respectful.
Trust, but verify – “I need this for my records so that others know
that I am treating all students fairly”
“If this is the only time this happens…”
If you’re not comfortable answering, get back to the student later…
but don’t do this too much.
A student says:
• I’d like to change sections
• I missed class (or lab). Can I attend
another one and get credit?
• I’m thinking about changing majors,
who should I talk to?
• Susan’s homework matches
mine, but I got 5 fewer points.
A student says:
• A friend of mine in another class
has an easier TA.
• Can you make sure I’m not on a team
with any minority students?
• I agree that I got this part of the
homework wrong, but you shouldn’t
have taken off so many points.
• Can you please give me an estimate
of my grade in the course?
A student says:
• I’ll lose my scholarship if I don’t get an A in
this class, and I’m really close. If I lose my
scholarship, I’ll have to leave school. Is
there anything I can do to raise my grade?
• How do I do this lab task / HW?
• Do you have a minute? (and you don’t)
• I can’t turn in the homework because
Blackboard was down last night
when I tried to print it out to do it.
A student says:
• My room got broken into, and the thief
took my laptop, hard drive, wallet, all
my IDs, and my school bag. In my bag
are my course notes and my
homework. The police said that the
case may take a while or forever. I
requested a report to prove what I say
is true, and I may have to wait couple
days for it. Could you please give me
some advice?
A student emails
• The homework asks us to
calculate the volume of a
sphere, but all we’re given is the
radius. How am I supposed to
proceed?
Team issues:
• One of the students on my team
never shows up for anything.
• One of the students on my team always
dominates and gets his way. What
should I do?
• My team can never find a time to meet.
• My team never listens to any of my
ideas—they constantly interrupt me
when I’m speaking.
Team issues:
• The other people on my team are
useless. Can I just work on my own?
• My team worked on a solution
together, but the person who
submitted it changed it first without
discussing it with the rest of the team
first. The version submitted wasn’t as
good as what the team did as a group.
Team issues:
• I think my teammates are plagiarizing
material for part of our project, but I can’t
prove it.
• My team changed our solution
completely after I left our last meeting. I
totally disagree with the direction the
project is taking now, but the team is
sticking with this second approach that’s
being pushed by another person on the
team.
Team issues:
• I did not answer the peer evaluation
honestly because I thought my team
members could see it. I would have been
honest if I knew it affected my grade.
Could you reopen it for me?
Scenarios:
• You’ve finished grading homework #4,
and now you’re returning it. You don’t
have a paper to return to a particular
student, because there wasn’t one in the
pile of homework you graded. The
student says he turned one in. What do
you say?
Strategies for answering student questions during office hours
Why are office hours important?
One-on-one interaction is helpful for each student in different ways
and for different reasons.
Questions often come up during studying, reading, reviewing
lecture notes, working problem sets, or doing writing assignments –
not during lecture, lab or recitation.
Asking questions in large lectures can be intimidating or even
impossible.
Strategies for answering student questions during office hours
Strategies for getting students to attend office hours
when they need help.
Make sure that time, place and purpose are absolutely clear.
Try to get all TAs in a course to hold hours in the same place.
Set office hours at times when students can make it.
Try an informal poll of students, or the Banner algorithm, to put
useful office hours on the weekly calendar .
Strategies for answering student questions during office hours
Realize that you are there to do several different things
You will answer questions about topics, concepts, problems in
the course.
You might be clarifying material from lecture or lab (so you
need to know what’s going on there).
You might be helping with problem-solving, so understand the
problems very well!
You might be calming down a confused/upset student, or
providing an essential personal connection in their education.
Strategies for answering student questions during office hours
Guidelines for dealing with students in office hours
Listen carefully and try to identify the core problem is that the
student is having. Is it an incorrect grasp of facts? Trouble
integrating information?
When a student is struggling and not making it clear where they
are stuck, ask them to walk you through what they DO
understand.
A very confused student is capable of confusing you, too!
Know the material very well so you can help them to understand
it without getting sucked into their confusion vortex.
Strategies for answering student questions during office hours
Guidelines for dealing with students in office hours
Treat every student with respect and empathy, even when they
make that difficult for you. (Teaching is a service profession.)
There are no stupid questions! You were new to this subject
once, remember your experience when you were learning it.
Remember your role – you are neither an unapproachable,
omniscient being nor the student’s best friend. You are there to
help them learn something new, succeed in a course, progress
as a learner.
Strategies for answering student questions during office hours
Some general issues in dealing with students
Personal and cultural issues: different kinds of students have
different styles of learning – and of asking for help, too! Learn
to recognize students who are hesitant to ask for help.
Recognize problems that you can’t handle. Students may need
to talk to the course instructor about absences, excuses for
exams, disability/accessibility issues.
Strategies for grading student assignments.
Learning objectives – have them and share them with your students.
(Examples provided)
Rubrics – have them and share them with your students. (Examples
provided)
Blind grading where possible.
Grade all of the same problem together if it is a long complex problem.
Policies regarding grade appeals
Handling student anxiety and begging
Handling / minimizing disruptive classroom and/or lab behavior
If assisting, follow the professor’s lead, but maintain eye contact with
students and know what they are doing.
Have ground rules for classroom/lab behavior. If possible, have the
students develop those ground rules and the consequences for not
following them. Make sure students know why the rules are in place
even if you make them up.
If you have to discipline a student in class/lab – particularly if it is
severe, you don’t want to create a bigger disruption by addressing the
issue – hand the student a note that says, “you are being disruptive in
a way that is unacceptable. Pack up your things and leave quietly and
see me later.”
Have students help enforce in-class behavior through team activity.
I will have role playing exercises for this if there is time.
Scenarios:
• A student’s laptop starts playing music in class –
after you’ve already warned them not to let that
happen.
• A student’s cell phone rings. They answer it. And
have a conversation.
• You notice a student playing video games
during a team activity.
• The professor in my last class kept us late. Can I
still turn in my HW?
• There is a total technology failure in the
classroom.
Strategies for connecting the learning activities of labs,
recitations, and office hours to broader course objectives
Know what is going on in the different parts of the course.
Be sure that you understand the overall course objectives,
which are often elucidated in the syllabus and lecture.
Query the instructor about how the different parts of the course
are supposed to work together.
In your work with students, use “markers” to point forward, back
and across the course.