In the first week of my Ph.D. program, I nervously tapped my feet as I waited for my class to start. But I was not the student—this time, I was the teacher (gulp). As a teaching assistant for a US history survey with over 100 students, I led two sections of discussion every week. To prepare, I had only been given a stack of course readings and about two hours of orientation training. I looked up from the syllabus I printed off for everyone, and twenty faces stared back at me—I am probably no more than three years older than most of my students. The clock hit 12:00 PM, time for class to start. I wondered: how do I even begin to do this?
When I started teaching my own classes two years ago, I found it difficult to know where to start. You may not acquire the materials for the course until a couple of weeks, or even days beforehand. Cooperating professors will expect you to teach a wide array of periods and subjects, regardless of whether they are within your realm of expertise. You will have to teach, guide, and mentor undergraduates, despite still being in school yourself. To prepare for these hurdles (and others), it is important to start preparing to teach your first class sooner rather than later to give yourself time to ask questions, plan, and hype yourself up.
Meet with the professor and consult with fellow graduate students
Your cooperating professor wants to help you! They have likely taught the class before and are used to mentoring new teachers. Do not be afraid to ask them for advice on things you feel nervous about or strategies for how to approach the content.
Fellow TAs and older graduate students in my program who had taught the same course before were by far the best resource to me during my first-semester teaching. Your colleagues can answer questions or they might be willing to share resources. Ask to see their syllabus from when they taught the course. Were there any great activities they used to facilitate discussion for a particular reading? Skill and material sharing is a wonderful way to learn and get new ideas to try out. Your university and department may also have resources put together for new TAs. Scour the websites of the Graduate School, or the Office of Student Learning, and reach out to members of their staff or your Graduate Program Director, to find any available guides or strategies for approaching teaching.
Familiarize yourself with the course—but don’t overprepare!
If you are anything like me, I tend to overcompensate when I’m nervous. While it is not a bad idea to skim the readings before the semester, you should not agonize over reading everything to the letter months in advance. In fact, if you do this too far out, you likely will not have things as fresh in your mind for class each week. Spend most of your pre-semester prep ensuring you know the course structure, policies, and the ropes of any online teaching tools you will be using like Sakai or Blackboard. A former mentor gave me the following great advice about teaching: “You don’t have to know everything; you just have to read faster than your students.” If you can stay a week or two ahead of your students, you’ll be in good shape. This also helps you stay flexible in your planning and fresh on the content.
Craft a syllabus and schedule.
Your professor will have a full syllabus for the course, but I found it useful to make my own syllabus for my discussion sections. A separate syllabus will clarify the goals and expectations you have for your students. For example, you can include policies specific to your teaching style and classroom environment such as how quickly you’ll respond to student e-mails, how you’d like to be addressed, and how students can meet with you outside of class. In my own syllabi, I lay out my expectations in a direct way, but learn where to be flexible throughout the semester. For example, I have a strict 48-hour e-mail reply policy in place for the weekend, but in practice, I may respond sooner if a student is clearly in need of major or immediate help. I find it helpful to be stricter on paper, but flexible in practice, to ensure my course has clear expectations that can be adjusted as needed.
In addition to planning a schedule for your students, it’s important to ensure you have enough time to prepare for teaching each week. Consider charting out a schedule for when you plan to get teaching work done each week. Balancing your own coursework and research with the needs of your students can be a challenge, so anticipate blocking out time for everything in the week.
Think about how to set the tone.
Plan out your first class in a way that will help to establish the tone of your teaching. Ask yourself: what kind of teacher do you want to be? Who were your favorite professors in undergrad and why? What classes or classroom activities in your own education stick out to you? Reflecting on these things will help guide you into cultivating good relationships with your students and crafting meaningful learning experiences. Spend time doing introductions, going over class policy, and talking to your students about the larger themes of the course. You can engage students to set collective goals for the class or ask them about the prior knowledge or assumptions they have about the subject you’re teaching. For more great tips about how to approach the first day, take a look at this great article from Northern Illinois University
Trying and Failing
Once you’ve got the first week under your belt, you’ll start diving into the course. Your class will likely include some kind of discussion component. Other articles (like this one) can give you some strategies for facilitating effective discussion, but with all the prep in the world there will still be days when students just don’t want to talk. When this, or any other teaching hiccups happen, try to be patient with yourself and your students. The good news is that trying things and failing is exactly how we learn. Starting a teaching journal to reflect on each class can be a good way to grow your methods. Write down what went well and what didn’t and how you would like to do things differently next time. Don’t be afraid to switch up your formula too and try something out of the box to keep students interested (lots of unique ideas about classroom activities to try out can be found here).
Cultivating Confidence and Finding Support
The final, and most important tip, for being a good TA, doesn’t have anything to do with students or classroom techniques. To be a great teacher, you must take care of yourself. Being a new TA is hard. Students may take their frustrations out on you. Some days you may flub a lecture or say the wrong thing. This is okay and is part of the process. Learning how to handle difficult interactions with students and classroom management are skills as valuable as content mastery. It is worth noting that the power dynamics of a classroom can also be intimidating when learning how to teach—especially if you are a TA who is young, female-identifying, or BIPOC. Learning to cultivate respect from your students comes with time, but if something arises that you feel unprepared or afraid to handle on your own, you can and should ask for support from your supervisory professor. They will have your back and can be an asset in mediating difficult situations.
On the hard days, trust yourself that you were selected for this job for a reason. If a student asks a question, you do not know the answer to, it is okay to simply say: “I actually don’t know, but I can find out!” It is okay to set boundaries with yourself and your students. Set a cut-off time for answering student e-mails. Make sure you have a day set aside each week to do something restful and fun, unrelated to anything academic. Being a good TA doesn’t mean having all the answers but using your experience in learning and research to guide and support your students.
Confidence as a teacher comes with time, and trying remains the best way to gain it! Plan where you can, seek advice and support widely, and ask questions, but most of all, don’t be afraid to get out there and dare to try and fail. From one new teacher to another, I know you can do it—happy TAing!
Featured Image: Credit to Nathan Dumlao
Clio and the Contemporary 