Through the continuum of the course and afterward, faculty can leverage TAs most effectively by holding them accountable to the teaching team and the students, by creating a community to decrease isolation, by sharing power and letting them lead, and by processing, reflecting, and sharing feedback through ongoing discussion.
Generate Accountability
The Practice
Set clear tasks and goals for teaching assistants and hold them accountable for their work.
The Principle
To be held responsible for your work is to have your work be valued. Teaching assistants need to know what they are expected to do and how they are expected to do it. They also need to know that their work is important to their team and their students and that with this importance comes accountability – which will be measured against established team standards and the opinions of peers.
- Use an inverted pyramid of responsibility: Jorrit de Jong gives his teaching assistants responsibility for governing themselves. "I don't prepare the meetings, I have the [teaching assistants] organize the meetings, create the agenda, create the framework for action items. I always believe in putting the responsibility for getting things done at the lowest level possible in the organization, so I start by saying “You’re now responsible for a city, and all it’s citizens…you’re also responsible for [your] students" who have high expectations for their learning experience and deserve a high-quality education.
- Teaching assistants training teaching assistants: For Marshall Ganz, the on-boarding and training of new teaching assistants is a critical part of his teaching process - and it is a part he mostly leaves in the hands of his teaching assistants. For each new cohort, trainings are divided into segments, with a different teaching assistant having responsibility for designing and delivering each segment. "I'll have a part in it, but they're actually managing the training themselves....It's just how we do it...it's – giving people ownership – right away."
Impede Isolation
The Practice
Create work processes and structures of support that prevent or discourage teaching assistants from working in isolation.
The Principle
Teaching is an inherently collaborative practice. Experiential learning can be mentally, physically, and emotionally challenging for all involved, including instructors and teaching assistants. It is important, for this reason, that not only students, but the teaching team be encouraged to collaborate, to share, and to support one another through the experience of pushing the limits of their knowledge and their competency.
- Hire peer partners: Brian Mandell hires his teaching assistants in teams of two. "I try to bring people on in pairs because just hanging out with me or sitting [around] doing work by yourself doesn't generate enough brainstorming [and it doesn't reinforce the] social aspect of the job." He notes that it may require more work and coordination, but in return he "gets a better payoff [in the end]."
- Support the buddy system: Ron Heifetz doesn't assign his teaching assistants a peer counterpart, but he encourages them not to work alone. He suggests to his teaching assistants that they "buddy up during the week so that they’re not all alone." He notes that "10 or 15 hours grading questionnaires" alone can be both lonely and less effective than "doing it in company, so they can ask each other questions and use each other as sounding boards.”
- Peer coaches: Marshall Ganz has created a system of peer coaching for his teaching assistants that supports not only their teaching, but their personal and professional development. "Each [teaching assistant] has a peer coach – we pair them at the beginning [and say] 'when you're in trouble this is who you go to.' [It's] another way that we try to build [systems of] interdependence [and support]."
Share Power
The Practice
Minimize hierarchy within your teaching team and encourage democratic decision-making.
The Principle
Effective team leadership is an interdependent practice. Rigid hierarchy can stifle the kind of free and open exchange necessary for teaching teams to work, to create, and to reflect as one. Providing teaching assistants with the power to share in the shaping of their work and their working environment strengthens both individual commitment and team identity, as well as the effort needed to make experiential learning succeed.
- Supervise, don't dictate: Ron Heifetz suggests that "you have to supervise [teaching assistants] because they are operating at the frontier of their own competence." However, supervision does not need to be a strictly hierarchical relationship. "I take a primary role in supervision...[but ultimately] it is group supervision," it is about peers providing support across the teaching team.
- Set head teaching assistants up to win: Most of the faculty we spoke with have one teaching assistant who takes on the role of Head Teaching Assistant. Some, like Jorrit de Jong, leave the decision of whether or not to have a Head in the hands of the teaching assistants themselves. Others, like Brian Mandell and Ron Heifetz, assign this established role to a particular person of their choosing. Regardless of their method for selecting or assigning a head teaching assistant, the faculty we spoke with work to build systems and structures of power that encourage team members to see the head teaching assistant as their ally, not the superior.
- Encourage autonomous initiative: Marshall Ganz encourages teaching assistants to find and develop their own task significance. Assigned significance - although important - cannot carry the same weight with an individual or a team, as significance that is cultivated from within. He tries, in his work with teaching assistants, to "design a real team [that is] interdependent. If you look at motivation task design literature on what it takes to design motivational tasks – task significance, task identity, skill diversity, feedback and autonomy – we try to do that in the way we design things." Giving teaching assistants enough structure and support to know their role and enough freedom and trust to find their own path to significance in this space.
Talk About It
The Practice
Establish open and transparent systems for gathering, giving, and implementing changes based upon team feedback.
The Principle
Effective feedback is honest, informed, and constructively offered and accepted. It also offers insights into different opinions and different perspectives. In creating an effective experiential learning environment and an effective team to lead it, Professor Ron Heifetz notes the importance of giving teaching assistants the space to speak and to be heard. "In the practice of going back and forth from action to reflection – you're always improvising [and for this] you need partners. You need people who can help you see things that you can't see, you need people to debrief with. I need teaching assistants to tell me what is really going on."
- Adapt in time: Karen Brennan and Ron Heifetz both emphasize the power that can be brought to a team and its work when its members feel heard. To bring the reflection process full circle, the insights and ideas that teaching assistants offer should - where possible - be acted upon immediately.
- Learn from 'teaming': The literature on 'teaming' has had a particularly strong impact on the work Brian Mandell and Jorrit de Jong do with their teaching assistants. It has shaped their approaches to gathering and giving feedback and directed their attentions towards action-focused ideas, clarifying questions, and - above all - constructive feedback. de Jong notes that he "applies almost everything" from the teaming literature to his work with teaching assistants, "setting norms, creating a flight plan, leveraging diversity, making sure that information stays live, modeling behavior, [and] most importantly, taking time to critically reflect on the team process." This process of giving and receiving feedback, he suggests, lies at the root of everyone's development.