Teaching with TAs can be a very rewarding experience, affording the potential for both collaboration and teaching development. However, by virtue of their diverse roles and responsibilities, faculty and TAs frequently find these teaching relationships to be quite complex. The following is a set of suggestions for maximizing the productivity of faculty-TA collaborations.

Hold a course orientation meeting before the quarter begins. Use this meeting as an opportunity to get acquainted with the TAs and to provide a general overview of your course. TAs benefit from knowing your objectives and goals for the course and the students. TAs also benefit when they are aware of the roles they are to play in helping to achieve your goals. This orientation also provides TAs with a chance to examine the syllabus, to plan ahead for labor-intensive teaching or grading weeks, and to make necessary arrangements for covering other academic responsibilities well in advance. Often TAs can make contributions to materials and activities planned for the course. The "TA Responsibilities Checklist" found on our Resources page may be useful in structuring this meeting. It is a good idea to put important information in writing as well as to go over it verbally.

Know your TAs. Teaching assistants bring various levels of experience to their roles in your course. Many teaching assistants listed as "new" TAs may actually have substantial prior teaching experience from other settings. Such TAs can often offer valuable suggestions and input, as well as effective teaching strategies from past experience. Other teaching assistants, 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 you with a sense of the resources they bring to your course. See the "Needs Assessment Form: Experience, Needs, and Concerns of incoming TAs" for questions you could use to gather information about your TAs.

View your course as one step in helping TAs to prepare for their own future roles as professors. Think of ways to make the teaching experience as meaningful as possible for TAs. For many teaching assistants, 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 goals for the course, teaching strategies, ways to improve student success in the course, and how well goals are being reached allows TAs to view the teaching process from a perspective not available to them in their roles as only lab/discussion leaders. Likewise, working with TAs on preparing and delivering guest lectures for your course can provide a valuable opportunity for them to experience this role.

Meet weekly with TAs to talk about teaching. While most faculty members see their TAs regularly, typical meetings are devoted only to logistics and course organization. Discussing teaching topics during these meetings can be edifying for both faculty and TAs and can enhance the quality of the course. Topics to discuss include objectives for upcoming class sessions, teaching strategies for meeting those objectives, assessment of student learning in the course, and ways to use assessments to inform your future teaching decisions. You might also want to review the most recent class sessions, using questions such as, What went well? What didn't go so well? How could it be improved for the next time we offer the course?

Collect and provide teaching feedback.

Collect feedback from TAs about your teaching. Faculty members often assume that TAs will be forthcoming in providing them with feedback about how the course is going. TAs, however, are typically very sensitive to the power relationship involved in faculty-TA teaching arrangements and are reluctant to provide any negative feedback, even when they realize that students may be struggling with lectures. A regular, open invitation and time set aside to provide such feedback can demonstrate to TAs your openness and willingness to examine and improve teaching. Faculty members can motivate TAs to share concerns, successes and failures by discussing their own concerns, successes and failures in the classroom.

Regularly provide TAs with clear, specific feedback on their job performance, e.g. "The comments you provided to students on their essays were right on target. You were clear about both strengths and weaknesses and provided good suggestions for improvement" rather than "Good job on grading those papers."

Elicit feedback from students. For TAs who are teaching a class or a lab/recitation section, provide an early quarter survey so they can obtain feedback from their students. Although these forms should only be seen by the TA (i.e., not sent to you or other supervising faculty), you can invite TAs to discuss the results with you, their peers, a designated departmental teaching consultant, or a teaching consultant from the Center for Teaching and Learning Services. During a consultation, TAs and consultants may identify the TA's strengths and areas for improvement, brainstorm strategies to use in the classroom, and, finally, select strategies to implement. See our sample Early Term Feedback Form that can be customized to your teaching situation. This form includes instructions on using the results.

Observe TAs as they teach their class or section and provide feedback about classroom performance. Although classroom observations frequently evoke anxiety for both the TA and faculty member, a number of surveys on the topic of TA development confirm that most TAs who have been observed by a faculty member rate the experience as one of the most important in their improvement as a teacher. When observing lab or discussion sections, you also gain insights into student learning which can inform your lectures. Conducting a classroom observation sends a message to TAs and students that you care about student learning. Read the article on Conducting Classroom Observations for guidelines on the process.

At the end of the semester, prepare a written evaluation for each TA under your supervision. A brief, written review that describes the TA's strengths and areas for improvement will ensure accountability and provide direction for improvement. TAs should know how they are being evaluated before beginning their assignment and should also be informed about how this evaluation will be used and who will have access to it. This written review may help you to write letters of recommendation for them later on. You can also ask TAs to evaluate your effectiveness as a supervisor using the form TA Evaluation of Their Supervision Experience.

Share teaching materials. Although talking about teaching is one of the most important keys to developing as a teacher, many TAs-especially new ones-appreciate receiving succinct materials on different aspects of teaching (e.g., active-learning strategies, preparing a syllabus, leading a lab). Such materials are available from the Center for Teaching and Learning Services, and instructors can also be on the lookout for relevant discipline-specific materials to share with TAs. In addition, it's helpful to inform TAs about journals on teaching in their discipline.

Recommend participation in teaching-related events. Many departments offer a class or a series of classes on teaching in the discipline (e.g., Teaching Sociology). Such classes can augment the learning that takes place in individual faculty-TA course meetings. Additionally, the Center for Teaching and Learning Services sponsors university-wide teaching workshops each semester. For more, click on the "Teaching Enrichment Series" link under "Workshops" on the navigation bar to your left.

It is often helpful to suggest a particular workshop you feel is relevant to the specific duties of the TAs in your discipline. Better yet, you can invite TAs to attend workshops with you so you can discuss how the content of the workshop can be applied to the course you are teaching. For the TA who is intending to pursue a teaching career, recommend that they look into Preparing Future Faculty, which is described under "Programs for Graduate Students" on the navigation bar to your left.

Encourage balance among teaching and other scholarly activities. Faculty who work with TAs can help them to balance the competing demands on them in graduate school. Encourage time management strategies (e.g., setting aside blocks of time devoted to teaching, to research, to writing); encourage discussions about teaching (a research study on new faculty indicates that faculty who spend more time talking about teaching with colleagues actually spend less time preparing lectures); and keep yourself informed about the time TAs are investing in teaching. You might do this by suggesting that TAs track the number of hours they work and how these hours are spent. Providing a chart or form with appropriate categories (e.g., class planning, grading, helping individual students outside of class, etc.) could make the task both easier and more useful for the TAs. Refer back to agreements made at the beginning of the semester regarding duties and workload and adjust as necessary. Lessons learned during graduate school can facilitate successful transitions to the role of new faculty member.

Help TAs to begin thinking about assembling a teaching portfolio. Perhaps the most common lament of TAs who have gone on to faculty positions is that they were not aware of the importance of teaching experience and had no sophisticated understanding of the art of teaching until it was too late. You can provide guidance about the teaching process early in TAs' graduate careers by introducing the concept of the teaching portfolio. A teaching portfolio is basically the equivalent of a faculty research dossier. Everything your TAs do-including considering their teaching philosophy, creating course assignments, developing outstanding research papers with their students, and videotaping their classroom teaching-can be worked into a portfolio to help them as they progress toward their future careers. These teaching materials can also be useful when shown to future TAs working with the faculty member on the same course.