Enhancing TA Teaching Competencies
Teaching assistants (TAs) are essential partners in creating meaningful learning experiences for students. They often bring strong disciplinary knowledge but may have limited experience in teaching, classroom management, or inclusive practices. Supporting TAs in developing their teaching competencies benefits everyone: students receive better instruction, TAs gain confidence and transferable skills, and instructors build stronger, more cohesive courses.
Professional development for TAs should go beyond basic orientation. It should encourage them to see teaching as a collaborative, reflective, and evolving practice. As an instructor, you can play a pivotal role by creating opportunities for TAs to learn, practice, and grow.
This resource outlines four key strategies for fostering TA teaching development:
- Treat teaching as a team sport: Help TAs navigate resources and feel part of a teaching community.
- Engage in professional development: Encourage participation in training and professional development opportunities.
- Organize teaching observations and mentoring: Provide feedback and peer learning opportunities.
- Encourage reflection and documentation: Help TAs reflect on their teaching and build a teaching portfolio.
These strategies are practical, adaptable, and designed to fit within the rhythm of your course. Below, we explore each in detail.
Treat Teaching as a Team Sport
Teaching is not a solo act—it is a collaborative effort. When TAs feel like valued members of a teaching team, they are more motivated, confident, and effective.
How to support this:
- Get to know your team: Conduct a needs assessment with your team. Get to know their interests, needs, and teaching approach.
- Create a shared vision: Explain how tutorials/labs complement lectures and assessments, and invite TA feedback on your design approach. You can start the term with a collaborative planning meeting where you review course goals and brainstorm strategies for tutorials.
- Share your teaching philosophy, values, and preferred teaching approaches.
- Introduce TAs to key resources: Each campus at the University of Toronto offers a complex landscape of student resources and supports. Direct them to Resources and Supports for U of T TAs.
- Model teamwork: Share your own teaching strategies and challenges. Encourage TAs to bring forward observations about student learning. Create a shared document for lesson planning so TAs can exchange ideas, practices, and resources.
Encourage Professional Development
Teaching-related professional development helps TAs build confidence and competence as educators. Encourage them to take advantage of structured opportunities both within and beyond your course.
How to support this:
- Promote opportunities through the TATP: Highlight mandatory and optional sessions offered by the Teaching Assistants’ Training Program (TATP). Direct TAs to:
- Job training options (typically also confirmed by departments)
- Seven thematic certificate programs
- Various events hosted regularly throughout the year
- Numerous (100+) resources such as guides, tip sheets, podcasts, videos, and much more
- Suggest additional training and PD opportunities: Flag for TAs other training opportunities related to:
- Intercultural competencies: Intercultural Fluencies in Teaching and Learning
- Unconscious bias: Unconscious Bias Education Modules
- Responding to students in distress: Identify, Assist, Refer (IAR) asynchronous online training
- Preventing and responding to sexual violence: : Sexual Violence Education and Prevention Module
- Identify departmental and divisional opportunities.
- Normalize PD as growth: Define teaching as a craft that can be enhanced through professional development. Frame PD as an investment in their future careers, not just a job requirement. Share examples of how teaching skills translate to academic, alt-academic, and non-academic roles.
Organize Teaching Observations and Mentoring
Teaching observation and feedback are among the most effective ways to help TAs grow as educators. Observations allow TAs to see good teaching in action, receive constructive feedback, and reflect on their own practice. Mentoring adds another layer of support by connecting TAs with experienced peers or instructors who can share insights and strategies.
How to support this:
- Invite TAs to observe your teaching: If TAs are not mandated to attend your lectures, invite them to join one class. Seeing how you structure lectures or manage discussions provides valuable modelling.
- Observe their teaching: Consider offering to observe your TAs in their tutorials/labs, or provide an opportunity for them to give a short guest lecture. You can offer informal or written formative feedback to help support their growth as a teacher.
- Facilitate peer mentoring: Pair new TAs with experienced ones for informal guidance. Encourage sharing of lesson plans and teaching tips. You can organize a short peer observation cycle where TAs visit each other’s sessions and share one positive takeaway.
- Host check-ins: Organize a midterm check-in meeting where all TAs share strategies that worked well, challenges they faced and how they addressed them. Use this as an opportunity for peer learning and to troubleshoot common issues.
Encourage Reflection and Documentation
Reflection is one of the most powerful tools for professional growth. It helps TAs consolidate what they’ve learned, identify areas for improvement, and develop a deeper understanding of their teaching practice. Documentation creates a record they can use for future teaching dossiers, job applications, or graduate school portfolios.
How to support this:
- Promote reflective practice: Suggest that TAs integrate reflection and student feedback into their practice. They could engage in a range of reflective practices like journaling, post-tutorial quick reflections, midterm reflection, or end-of-term reflection. They could also collect informal feedback from students to get yet another perspective on their teaching.
- Offer a reference letter: Offer to provide a reference letter that captures their teaching contribution to your course.
- Encourage portfolio building: Recommend saving various tutorial-related documents (lesson plans, feedback examples, observation notes, etc.). Encourage them to create a teaching dossier through the TATP’s Exploring and Documenting Teaching Experience Certificate.
- Recognize teaching excellence: Explore a range of teaching awards offered at your department, division, campus, and institutionally and support TA nominations. The TATP, for example, adjudicates three awards: TA Teaching Excellence Award, BIPOC TA Teaching Excellence Award, and CI Teaching Excellence Award.