Five Tips for Being an Effective Teaching Assistant

It is not difficult to be an effective teaching assistant in a college setting. However, being an effective or "good" teaching assistant does require effort. In this article, I describe five tips for aspiring teaching assistants or teaching assistants wishing to be more effective.

1. Know the Material
If you don't know the material, you can't help the students very much and you risk losing face in front of them. In order to be a good teaching assistant, do your best to stay current with the material, whether that is by self-study or attending lecture. Relying on memory alone can be dangerous, especially if it's been a while since you took the class. A refresher can do little damage, in other words.

2. Be Prepared
While knowing the material is the foundation for anything else you do as a teaching assistant, you still have to go into any recitation or review session with a plan of what you want to talk about. If you rely on student questions to drive a review session, the material will likely come off as disjointed and you may not cover the most important material in the time allotted. Even if it's not a detailed outline, a rough, logically-sequenced outline of the material you want to cover will improve your review session or recitation enormously. It doesn't take more than five minutes to make such an outline, so why not?

3. Be Available
Your life should not revolve around your duties as a teaching assistant, but you should do your best to be available to assist students outside of recitation. Consider holding office hours for one or two hours twice a week. Try to respond to emails within 24 hours of receiving them. Consider holding an extra review session or two before tests. Students greatly appreciate when teaching assistants put forth extra effort to be available, and it doesn't have to be a big investment on your part.

4. Be Supportive
There will always be students that struggle in college classes, and teaching assistants hear a good number of resulting complaints. Rather than dismissing a student's difficulties, it is better to offer support and give advice on how the student could improve. Students will remember both supportive and dismissive teaching assistants. How would you rather be seen? What would you rather see on a teaching evaluation?

5. Relax and Have Fun
If you're the teaching assistant, you probably enjoy the course material. Let your enthusiasm show when you teach and don't take the material too seriously. Jokes are a great teaching tool, and students like to see that there can be humor in any given subject.

The benefits of being an effective teaching assistant are numerous, from receiving baked goods from students to the satisfaction of having something done well. You won't regret making the effort. If you've been a teaching assistant in the past, feel free to leave your own tips in the comments section below. Thank you for reading!