At Scale: Leverage Teaching Support

Sometimes things you want to do for pedagogical reasons can be infeasible for practical ones - very often because you cannot supply the amount of labor that would be required to complete the corresponding work. Consider one-on-one meetings. These can be a great way to get to know your students, to help them feel connected and supported, and to provide assistance tailored to exactly what each student needs. In a class of a few hundred students, meeting one-on-one with every student, even if for only about five minutes (relatively short as far as these meetings go) would be utterly impractical.

If you can expand your instructional team, however, then this level of direct support for your students becomes much more feasible. With enough teaching assistants (or learning assistants), every student could reasonably meet one-on-one with a member of the instructional team when that was not previously possible. The same is true for all kinds of other goals you might have while teaching a large course. Providing feedback on student work, facilitating group activities in class, supplying in-depth responses to emails - these all become feasible when your instructional team is made up of more than just you.

Instructors of high-enrollment courses are often fortunate to have the assistance of graduate teaching assistants. When this is not the case - and even when it is - it is possible to recruit highly-qualified undergraduate students to serve as undergraduate teaching assistants (often called learning assistants). Learning assistants can provide enormous benefit to both students and instructors, while offering the assistants themselves a unique and highly valuable experience.

For background on how learning assistant programs work, and for answers to all manner of logistical questions you might have about developing one, visit the CTT's website for recordings and materials from a five-session workshop series on Developing a Learning Assistant Program.

• First point of contact for students: Set your Learning Assistants as the first person students can contact if they face challenges understanding a difficult concept.
• Hold weekly study sessions and student hours/office hours: Your Learning Assistants can hold regular study sessions for students to get just in time help.
• Rubrics: Design rubrics to make grading criteria understandable and consistent for TAs and GTAs. Have a kickoff meeting and use the rubric to grade examples together and then calibrate grading across GTAs.
• Consider strength areas for each Learning Assistant or TA: Can they lead a discussion? Deliver any class content? Run review sessions?
• Section responsibilities: Be clear with your TA with what you expect of them, their duties, and if they will be helping you grade material, the rubric that you'd like you to follow. It's always easier to know what to expect from your TA if you know who they are. Build rapport with your TA to figure out how they can best assist both you and your students.
• Regular meetings: Whether it's for grading, lesson plans for sections, handling complaints, or just touching base, communication is key. The best way for both you and your Learning Assistants and TAs to thrive is by keeping an open line of communication with each other and feeling comfortable enough to address when any issues arise. It can help if before the semester you have a system in the back of your mind of how frequently you'd like to meet with your TA and how you would require their services. This way, you can be transparent with them from the beginning.
• Roles: If you have multiple GTAs, think about breaking them into roles rather than splitting students among them. Here's how an instructor at the University of South Florida created a more "personal touch" in a large-enrollment course.