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Working with Teaching Assistants and a Teaching Team

Designing Your Course

Large enrollment courses at Cornell often involve a teaching team of faculty, graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants, postdocs, and course administrators. Communication is crucial to ensuring consistent policies and fairness for students, as well as maintaining a positive experience for all members of the teaching team. For example, it is unfair to students if there is one teaching assistant who is an "easy grader," accepts late homework, and provides an exam review sheet, when the other teaching assistants do not. Strive to provide consistent guidelines, communication with students, course resources, and grading expectations. The techniques below are just a few strategies that instructors have used to collaborate effectively with teaching teams.

Foster Collaboration and Communication

  • Spend time at the beginning of the semester discussing common goals and learning outcomes for the course. Ask the team for input on course design, learning activities, or policies.
  • Establish regular meeting times and communication channels with the teaching team throughout the semester. Ask team members to block off time on their calendars for meetings, exam proctoring, and for grading. Let people know about grading deadlines at the beginning of the semester.
  • Spend time during the first week of class introducing the teaching team to your students and highlighting the strengths that they bring to the course (e.g., research specializations or experiences). Consider providing photos and short bios, which can be posted on Canvas or included in the syllabus.
  • Let students know the appropriate contact person for different types of questions. For large courses, consider setting up a course email account.
  • Ask for frequent feedback from team members, or set up a system for them to let you know what is going well in the course, what students are confused about, or concerns about specific students; often they may be aware of issues with students that need to come to the attention of the team.

Highlight Expectations Early

  • Communicate clear roles, tasks, and timelines.
  • Set expectations for your teaching assistants about how they should interact with students in a professional and fair manner.
  • If working with multiple teaching assistants, ensure the division of work is fair. Check in to see how long tasks are actually taking compared to how long you expect them to take. Adjust tasks and expectations accordingly.

Establish & Maintain Clear Grading Guidelines 

  • Review or create rubrics together. 
  • Consider using Gradescope for grading since it makes it easy to coordinate grading among multiple graders without needing to exchange physical paper copies. This can also make it easier to adjust grading if you need to change the criteria or rubric after grading has started.
  • Calibrate graders by grading several assignments as a group and comparing them.
  • Provide guidelines on how much and what kinds of feedback to give.
  • Monitor for grade disparities between graders by reviewing and comparing a selection of their assignments.
  • Ask graders to report on the time it takes them to grade and handle student inquiries about grading. If time exceeds expectations, work on decreasing the time required for tasks.

Mentoring Graduate Teaching Assistants

  • Help your incoming graduate teaching assistants prepare for their teaching responsibilities by asking them to participate in CTI’s Teaching Assistant Online Orientation and in our graduate student teaching institutes.
  • Arrange meetings at the beginning and throughout the semester to:
    • Discuss pedagogical approaches.
    • Share effective teaching strategies.
    • Reflect on potential or common problems with students in classes and office hours and discuss appropriate solutions.
    • Review best practices in asking and answering questions to promote student learning.
  • Conduct classroom observations to provide feedback. 
    • Schedule a class observation and meet briefly for a pre-observation session to discuss what they would like you to observe.
    • Observe and take narrative notes.
    • Meet with them within 48 hours to debrief.
  • Introduce self-evaluation techniques such as keeping a reflective journal or notes that will help graduate students develop their teaching practice and perhaps create a teaching portfolio.
  • Encourage teaching assistants to solicit feedback on their teaching by asking students to write something that has been helpful for their learning and something that would improve their learning in this class.
  • Arrange for teaching assistants to do peer observations of each other for peer feedback.

Selected Resources