The Value of Being a TA: Communication Skills, Teaching Experience, and Career Enhancement

1. The value of your being a TA: for you and the students Julie E. Buring, ScD January 22, 2018

2. Why valuable for you? Gaining a skill set • Reason 1 : Will hone your communication skills. Need for qualifying exams, thesis, seminars, career. • Never truly understand material until you can teach it. Cements knowledge; skill to be able to break something down into its parts, communicate at the appropriate level of your audience, think on your feet to develop numerous examples addressing an issue. • Often to heterogeneous groups, including those without background or any understanding of field (colleagues in other fields, media, public). • Whether your career will involve formal teaching or not - whether career is academics, industry, government - effective communication crucial.

3. Why valuable for you? Teaching as part of career • Reason 2: If you think you even possibly will want or need teaching to be a part of your career, then this is right way to start. • Can experiment with explaining new ways, flexible, develop more examples, think on feet, learning to say I don’t know (find answer and back to student). No-one looking over shoulder. • Safe (backup Head TA, TAs, faculty), small size, lots of time. Will be issues – difficult seminar group, unorganized professor – but will have each other. • Jump-started my love of teaching and inclusion in career.

4. Why valuable for you? Enhance CV • Reason 3 : Will enhance CV, and thus applications (postdoc, position, career development awards, etc) • Keep comments from course evaluations– use them in your letters of application, and show to recommenders to use if needed. Ask for a letter from the course instructor for whom you TA’d. • Include in CV every skill set: breadth of forms of teaching experiences (flipped, integrated, online, hybrid); ran seminars, leadership as head TA, wrote exam questions or exercises or seminars, any lectures you gave.

5. Why TAs valuable for a course? • Teach in limited time blocks. Especially for big course, no time for them to ask questions, can’t learn names. • TAs, seminar groups critical to course – ask anything, no matter how small, specific questions about own work; safe environment, know them individually. • TAs critical to course director – first alert to pulse of class, problem areas, speed, etc • Evaluations always refer to “Dr Buring and TAs” – without good TAs, class will never succeed. • Faculty members know this; thank their TAs every day.

6. What students most appreciate about TAs • Comments from the evaluations … • First and foremost, well prepared, augmented what course covered • Answered questions clearly and simply, could approach different ways • Involved whole class, facilitated discussion • Approachable, patient, respectful, brought snacks • “More than simply showing up and running through the exercises in the lab session, the TA engaged the class, made the material interactive, and did not leave anyone out.”

7. What students least appreciated about TAs • Was not well prepared so could not facilitate discussion: did not read in depth, know where all pieces of information are located, verified calculations; anticipated possible questions and problems. DO NOT WING IT. • Was not aware of the context of the class, what exactly was covered before seminar: used different terminology, answered with information beyond the specific class; could not answer questions in simpler terms; had not attended class or watched videos or gone over slides. THIS IS KEY TO DO. • Could not keep session on course; could not redirect class if one person is causing problems for the group.

8. Bottom line… • Serving as a TA – and learning to communicate well to heterogeneous groups - will be of immense value throughout your career…whatever you choose for your career. • You will never regret doing this!