If you’re preparing for your first semester working with a UTA, I recommend completing the following steps (in order):
- Reflect on your teaching philosophy and figure out how working with a UTA will fit in to your teaching style.
- Do you plan out all of your lessons before walking in the door (for face-to-face teaching)? Or do you basically wing it? If the latter, how will you adjust this semester to ensure that your UTA knows what to expect during your classes?
- How do you teach? Do you stand? Walk around? Write on the board? Present slides? Sit in the front? Sit with your students? In short, are you a sage on the stage or a guide on the side? If you’re relatively performative, how will your UTA insert him or herself into your presentations? Or do you imagine that s/he will sit quietly with students when you’re talking?
- When’s the last time you observed a colleague’s class? This would be a great semester to observe a colleague who works with UTAs!
- Write down your semester goals. This step is vital!
- Why have you decided to work with a UTA? How do you imagine a UTA will benefit your students? How will you benefit from working with a UTA? How will your UTA benefit from this experience? What changes do you want to make to your course and/ or your teaching that your UTA could help you implement? By the end of the semester, what do you want to have achieved?
- How are you going to communicate all of this to your UTA?
- Browse the What Do UTAs Do? section to get some ideas about how you and your UTA might work together this semester.
- How do you imagine sharing the classroom with your UTA? Will your UTA sit with you, facing students? What will your UTA be doing while you’re lecturing (if applicable)? Will she be on her laptop? Standing at the computer advancing slides? Chiming in with witty commentary? Monitoring student participation?
- How will you divide the “behind the scenes” labor? Which one of you should your students email with which questions? Who will take attendance? Who will keep track of small weekly assignments? Who will grade what?
- Read the How to Work with UTAs section for sage advice.
- The first two sections are designed to help you help your UTAs feel comfortable in the classroom. Please read these carefully!
- The latter sections are about preparing your UTAs to respond to student writing and grading. They need your guidance on this!
- Read these two documents, which you can find on the Current Instructors page:
- Determine to what extent you want your UTA to be involved with course prep before the semester begins, which is addressed in detail under Collaborating with Instructors
- Contact your UTA to figure out if they are available to help with course prep
- Determine how (and how often) the two of you will collaborate
- Schedule your first meeting to go over the checklist, the goals/ expectations sheet, and any other major items that I recommend in the How to Work with UTAs section.
- Tip: Feel free to have this meeting over Skype or Zoom so that you don’t have to wait until five minutes before the first day of class to see each other.
- Print a second copy of your roster pictures so that your UTAs can learn your students’ names as quickly as possible. Give it to them on the first day of class so that they can take attendance with it.
- Congratulate yourself for laying the groundwork for a fantastic semester.
Image by Jay Wennington