(588e) Teaching Assistant Training At University of South Carolina

At University of South Carolina we started to run a training program for our graduate students after attending a teaching assistant (TA) training workshop at the ASEE summer school presented by Dr. Lisa Hwang and Dr. Robyn Dunbar. The main purpose of the training was to provide motivation for the students. The students who are planning to pursue a career in academia are already self-motivated and try to gain as much experience as they can from being a TA and improve their teaching skills. However, most of the students who plan to work in industry after graduation are usually not interested in teaching and do not see the benefit of being a TA for their career. We use the training to emphasize that this experience is part of their professional development and will provide them with other skills such as communication and leadership. In their future job they will likely work in a team environment and need to provide feedback to their teammates or employees. We try to teach them how critical it is to give feedback to the students and tell them what they did wrong and give suggestions on how to do it correctly as opposed to just deducting points while grading. We show them examples of previously graded homework/exams and do a grading exercise where they get to grade a sample exam paper. The key point here is to make sure they are consistent while grading and we discuss how to create a grading rubric before they start grading. Other topics discussed in the training include managing faculty/TA expectations and time management.

The first training session was conducted in the beginning of Fall 2012 for all of our current graduate students and we will continue to do it every Fall for our incoming students. We also started collecting evaluations from the students in class regarding the performance of their TA’s and will use it to address the common issues in the future trainings, which will hopefully improve their teaching skills. More details on the training session and some of the feedback we received from the students will be discussed during the presentation.