Promising Practices

Remember you're a member of a teaching team. One of the most challenging aspects of working as a teaching assistant is understanding your role in the faculty-teaching assistant team endeavor. Not only will you need to elicit guidance and supervision from the faculty member you are working with, but often more importantly you will need to negotiate and coordinate your work with fellow teaching assistants. This is particularly important when teaching large survey courses (250+ students) that require the team to focus on creating common lesson plans, course reviews, and grading standards. When teaching assistants fail to coordinate their work -- undergraduate students quickly notice this situation, become confused about the course, and often respond with anger because they believe their particular teaching assistant is "harder" than another student's teaching assistant. The bottom line: communicate, plan, and act like a team to avoid teaching missteps.