Chapter 1
Introduction

In the end, inspired teaching keeps the flame of scholarship alive. 
 - Ernest Boyer, 1990

Graduate teaching assistants must be versatile. More than just a graduate student but not quite a member of the faculty, you are a vital part of the University of Pittsburgh’s teaching mission. Although the specific role that you are expected to fulfill may vary from hour to hour (student, teacher, researcher, or administrator), as a teaching assistant you are, more than any one thing, an educator in the broadest (and now archaic) sense of the word. You nourish. You nourish your own career ideals and aspirations in graduate classes; you nourish your disciplines’ body of knowledge when writing or researching; you nourish the minds of your students in the classroom; and, as a primary source of academic support for undergraduates, you nourish the well-being of your students during office hours.

Typically, each of your roles as a graduate teaching assistant will fall into one of three broad categories: instructional, administrative and institutional.

The instructional role you fill willvary depending on your actual assignment. You may be assigned to teach your own class, or to assist a classroom instructor by leading a lab or recitation. Depending on the class and subject matter, you may be required to lead discussions, present information in a lecture-type setting or solve problems on the blackboard under the scrutiny of your students. As an instructor, you may be given sole responsibility for setting assignments and you will certainly be required to grade and comment on tests, quizzes, papers, projects, lab reports and homework.

To students whose skills in a particular area are noticeably deficient, you become the final safety net; it is up to you to spot these students and either assist them yourself or refer them to assistance. Yet your role as referral agent does not always begin and end with purely academic matters. Throughout your career at the University of Pittsburgh, you will come into contact with students who have deeper, often personal problems. While it is important to listen to students, you should avoid the role of psychotherapist since you are probably not a trained counselor. It is instead your responsibility to direct these students to an appropriate source of assistance.

Administrative roles will also vary according to your instructional assignment. You may be required to plan the day-to-day details of your class, lab or recitation. This may entail setting reasonable deadlines for the completion of assigned work, ensuring that lab equipment is working properly, preparing handouts, maintaining posted office hours without exception and keeping accurate records of attendance and grades. Though administrative duties may be somewhat tedious, their careful and consistent execution will be essential to the success of your instructional efforts.

As a teaching assistant, you are considered part of the faculty of your department and, therefore, play an institutional role as a citizen and ambassador of the University and of your department. This means that a high degree of professionalism is expected from you when dealing with students and faculty. It also means that basic guidelines and regulations will be scrupulously observed—from the profound to the banal (from a fair unbiased evaluation of student performance to compliance with the rules governing the use of the department photocopy machine).

This web handbook is divided into twelve chapters with each chapter building on the last. We start with your first day of class, move on to leading a recitation, improving your teaching, grading papers and eventually teaching your own class. In between, we talk about instructional style and learning theory, teaching with technology and holding office hours, classroom management and international students. We believe this web site can serve as both a resource handbook to be consulted in a crisis, and a readable and reliable guide to the career of a teaching assistant. We hope that it inspires you to think about teaching and that reading it is the beginning of a long career as a University instructor.

 

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