Teaching Assistants: Mentoring Our Future Colleagues

A Review of The Professional Development of Graduate Teaching Assistants, edited by Michele Marincovich, Jack Prostko, and Frederic Stout, Boston, MA: Anker Publishing Company, 1998.

Jan Smith, Co-Director
Center for Teaching and Learning
University of Minnesota

Almost all faculty at research, doctoral, or comprehensive universities will, at some time, find themselves working with a teaching assistant (TA). The circumstance may represent a fortunate and much needed addition to the teaching staff, or a puzzling supervisory challenge. The sole factor unifying all faculty and TA arrangements is that one generation is granted the opportunity to mentor the next in acquiring or polishing skills to promote effective teaching and learning.

Where is the faculty member to turn for guidance in the all-important task of shaping the next generation of college teachers? Many universities offer centralized TA development efforts, as do numerous academic departments. These efforts range from half-day orientations to teaching observation and consultation to full-fledged graduate courses on teaching and learning. If your institution or department offers these amenities, you're lucky, and I urge you to take full advantage of them. Still, even with the best support, it falls to faculty to consider their role in mentoring future colleagues and to make a success of it.

Michele Marincovich, Jack Prostko, and Frederic Stout, a crack team of faculty and teaching assistant developers from Stanford University, offer easy-to-comprehend theory and techniques for supporting the professional development of TAs in an all-inclusive and practical 300-page volume. Their work reminds us of the attention and care to our own teaching development that so many of us would have valued early in our academic careers, but usually didn't get. This compendium of tightly organized and focused chapters represents two decades of the very best thinking in TA development: creative and carefully-considered content from six national conferences and countless publications on the education and employment of TAs. The list of chapter authors reads like a who's who in TA development. Faculty from any discipline can easily reap the benefits of the very best thinking in the field by accessing this one collaborative resource.

The volume begins with background on the origin of teaching assistants, charting the history of our attention to this emerging resource that currently represents 40% of the instruction in North American comprehensive and research universities. It continues with an intriguing chapter on the development stages that most TAs pass through, beginning with senior learner and culminating in junior colleague. Several chapters provide advice on setting up centralized or departmental programming for TA development, including the creation of graduate courses on teaching and learning. Crucial to the faculty member charged with mentoring TAs under his or her supervision, however, are the wonderfully rich sections on teaching, which explicate ways to help TAs make instructional decisions, respond to classroom diversity, use technology to enhance learning, and improve undergraduate writing skills. Additional chapters lay out techniques for faculty to observe and evaluate TA classroom teaching and offer strategies to introduce our future colleagues to peer review through the development of teaching portfolios.

One overriding benefit of perusing this book is a reacquaintance with goals for student learning and ways of promoting that learning, a renewal experience for the mentor who introduces the joys of teaching to TAs. We can come to a place where our choices as teachers no longer give us pause to reflect and reconsider. Mentoring a TA as he or she explores the challenges of teaching offers a new and fascinating look at what may have become habit. Our undergraduates have changed radically over the years; here is a uniquely structured occasion for us to change with them.

The only disappointment for me in this collection is the lack of guidance on the language difficulties of international teaching assistants (ITAs). The authors of the one chapter on ITAs do a superb job of alerting us to the cultural challenges facing international instructors. They recognize the impossibility of also attending to the linguistic needs of ITAs within this collection. Faculty who carefully observe the difficulties ITAs have in clearly and appropriately communicating course content to undergraduates will recognize the importance of seeking assistance from colleagues in English as a second language. Many universities have extensive programs to prepare ITAs for the classroom. If your university has one, again I advise making full use of it. If it does not, there may be faculty in language, linguistics, or speech communication departments who can assist you in improving ITA pronunciation and expanding ITA understanding of the intricacies of the culture of North American classrooms as they are played out in language.

The teaching assistants assigned to us today are our opportunities to provide a legacy for teaching and learning in years to come. What wisdom and experience will you pass on? Who will you help succeed you in the grand enterprise of higher education?

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