Getting Started as a Teacher

Roles and responsibilities

The role and responsibilities of instructors and teaching assistants can vary across disciplines, departments, courses, and modalities. Take the time to understand the goals of the courses you'll be teaching, what your obligations will be, and any outstanding questions you have for the professor and fellow TAs, or for your department if you are teaching your own course. Start organizing your teaching materials and questions, so that you're confident and ready to go before classes start. 

Consider the context of the course, and of its overall intellectual project. What are the goals of the course? What does it assume about students’ prior knowledge? Where might the course fit into a student’s larger program of study? Read the description of your department’s undergraduate major and its requirements. Why should a student choose to spend their undergraduate years in your field or discipline? What does your field seem to be saying about what kinds of material students have to encounter, and in what order, to become expert in it?

If you are a TA, learn the course syllabus. What are the students’ responsibilities, and what might your specific responsibilities look like? Brainstorm your ideas and questions using the Pre-term Planner for Teaching Teams. Use this to start a conversation with the teaching team to clarify who’s doing what and make sure everyone is on the same page. Start this conversation as early as possible, to minimize the chance of miscommunications or surprises after the start of term. If you are teaching your own course, this document is also a good starting point for making sure you have everything covered. What will your policy be on generative AI? Do you have everything included in the syllabus that should be there.

Get excited about teaching! What are your goals for teaching this term? What do you want to learn? Think about what makes a good teacher, and what kinds of strategies you want to employ as a teacher. Make a list of goals for yourself in your role, and your identity as a teacher-scholar. Ideally, these goals will help guide your preparation and professional development during the semester and beyond. 

Start a teaching journal to keep track of your thoughts, concerns, goals and plans as you start teaching. The journal is a tool for reflective practice, and should help you reflect, plan, and stay organized as you navigate the semester. You should use this journal once you start teaching, to take note of how things are going and how you feel you are doing.  

Setting and communicating expectations

Once you know more clearly what your responsibilities are and what form your teaching will take, it will be important to clarify for students what to expect from you and what you expect from them. Be explicit about the course expectations and your role in the course. If students understand expectations in advance, they can consider how they align with their own individual circumstances and let you know what challenges they might have. Be explicit about how flexible you will be and what students should do if they need accommodations. Make sure you understand departmental and institutional policies on this.

Communicating your course and section expectations helps to build rapport and set the tone for the class. It is also one of the most inclusive moves that you can make as a teacher. Consider the explicit and implicit expectations of students that underpin your course, as well as how they are—or are not—communicated to students. 

For example, some questions you may want to ask yourself and the teaching team, to uncover any assumptions or implicit expectations, are: "What kinds of prior knowledge or prior coursework are assumed?" "What kinds of cultural experiences or knowledge might be advantageous?" Determine with the professor and teaching team where course expectations will be posted and how to share them with students. How can you help make more of the course staff’s implicit expectations transparent to students? 

Let students know how to contact you for help. Make sure your students know where and how you want them to ask questions, and set an expectation about how quickly they will get a response. This is always a good idea, but it may be even more important given how many different platforms your class may be using—Canvas, Slack, even WhatsApp, as well as email and office hours—through which they can ask you questions. Are certain kinds of conversations more appropriate for one platform than another?

If you are a TA, this Section Expectations template may be helpful as you think about what to share with students in your class, so that everyone knows how to engage with you, each other, and the course material. 

Getting to know your students

Getting to know your students enhances your ability to create a successful learning environment. In the process of getting to know them, you are building rapport and communicating that you care about them and their success. Additionally, knowing about their backgrounds and interests allows you to tailor your approach. If you know of gaps or particular strengths in their background knowledge or what else they are studying, you can adapt your lessons and activities to make the material more accessible. For example, if you find that there are discrepancies among the students in terms of their background knowledge, you could arrange them into groups to help each other. Moreover, knowing the disciplinary backgrounds of students enables you to draw on their respective disciplines when choosing examples to draw on to teach your content.

Decide what information you would like to know from your students, to better understand where they’re coming from, what they need, and how you might tailor your approach to engage and resonate with them. You might want to ask about their major, previous courses they have taken in the subject, why they are taking the class, or about their extracurricular interests. You could hand out a survey in class, use an online survey (like a Google form or Canvas quiz), or talk to them one-on-one or in office hours at the start of the semester. 

Introducing yourself

Now that you have considered what you’d like to learn about your students, what do you want them to know about you? How do you want to set the tone? On the first day of class, one of your main goals should be to try to help students feel comfortable and excited to be learning from a credible, approachable expert. Even if you may not always feel like an expert, get in touch with your own enthusiasm for the course and what you hope to bring to the material. Tell them your name and what they should call you (which may include your pronouns), what your area of research is, and what you find genuinely interesting about the course. 

You could also share your interests and activities outside of the classroom. Conveying what motivates you and your interest in the course material will help them get interested, too! This is also a good time to provide a “hook”–this could be something like putting up an image that relates to your field, identifying the questions that matter to scholars in your discipline, or connecting the material of the course to everyday life.

Building rapport

Building rapport early can help create a positive and inclusive learning environment, which is one of the most crucial elements of your success as a teacher. It’s important for you to get to know your students, and vice versa, but it’s also important for your students to get to know each other. While it may seem like common sense, research shows that students who are comfortable and engaged in class learn better. 

The first day of class is an obvious time for student introductions, but because it takes time for a group to get to know each other, consider doing small icebreakers or “warm-up” activities for the first few sessions. Choose activities that connect with course content and help both you and the students get to know each other.

For example, ask students to introduce themselves to a partner and then introduce their partner to the larger group. Ask students why they’re taking your course and what they hope to get out of it. Encourage students to use each other’s names. 

These types of warm-up activities can also help ground students as they come into the class from whatever they were busy with before, and help them be ready for the content of the day. 

Planning and teaching your class

As you plan for the start of the semester, and getting the class off on the right foot, think about how you will be organizing the material you will cover in class. As you think about what content to cover or materials to share, a more important question is what you want students to learn. Is the purpose of your class to help students learn course content more deeply, practice skills introduced in lecture, or apply the lecture content to new topics? What should they know or be able to do as a result of a particular class session? How does it connect with course objectives? The answer to these questions should guide and help you plan your planning for each class.

After answering those questions (in conversation with the professor, if applicable), identify and prioritize the week’s most salient points, skills, and concepts to establish a clear organization for you and your students to follow throughout the class session. Then you can consider the best ways for the students to learn these topics and skills, 

Focus especially on creating an agenda for each section and structuring your time with the students. It is important to use time at the beginning to frame the session and manage expectations, and to leave time at the end to wrap-up and make sure everyone knows the main points you want them to take away and what they need to be thinking about for the next session.

You can also consider which active learning strategies will work for your course. Active learning usually refers to in-class activities that engage students with course content in meaningful ways, allowing them to apply their knowledge and better gauge their own understanding, while also allowing instructors to better assess learning. Active learning helps to promote community and connection between students, which can enhance a sense of belonging as well as motivation, and it creates a low bar to participation by encouraging every student to think and do.

You may find this class planning template useful as you plan your classes.  Consider your topic, organizational strategy, and classroom presence. How will you structure your lesson? How will you make sure your students are interested and engaged? Depending on your goals, choose a couple of active learning strategies to incorporate into your plan, to facilitate and check students’ understanding of the material. Implementing an active learning activity always takes time; budget your time accordingly, so that you aren’t rushed at the end or have to skip over an important element. 

Make a plan to collect ongoing, low-stakes feedback from students regularly. One way to do this is to have students fill out an index card or a short Google form at the end of each class, on what they learned, what they are confused about, or any questions they might have. Collecting regular and timely feedback will help everyone as you navigate teaching and learning together. Be sure to acknowledge students’ responses in your next class and how you’ve used their questions and feedback in your planning.

Grading and assessing student learning

While TAs do not usually have control over how students will be assessed, they play a significant role in helping students understand how they are doing in the class. As an instructor, how will you know if an assignment or activity worked well, if students “got it”? What are the criteria for “success”? Is there a rubric for the assignments? Depending on your course’s policy on generative AI, it will be especially important to talk to students about how to approach assignments, why they are doing them, and what it means to do them well.

When we evaluate student work, we always have a rubric, whether it is explicitly spelled out, or something we have in our heads about what we are expecting. The questions are how consciously and consistently we’re applying it, how transparent we are with students about what it is, and how well it is aligned with what students are learning in the course. For example, if you assign a presentation, are you teaching presentation skills, and also assessing students on how well they presented the material, or are you focused on the specific content they are presenting? It is important to consider what skills students need to do an assignment well and how explicitly you are teaching and considering those skills.

Establish clear guidelines (with the teaching team, if relevant) for how work will be graded, and make sure that students understand how grading works and what they can expect from you in terms of feedback and how to use your feedback. You do not want to spend time writing comments that they don’t use (or don’t know how to use). 

Developing your teaching network

Teaching is a collaborative act, and it is important to build and maintain community with your fellow instructors. You should also connect with other resources available to you as you think about your own growth and development as a teacher-scholar, and what you’d like to learn. Find out more about resources available to you in your department or program. 

Consider forming a teaching network with your peers or other instructors in your field. You may want to observe or interview other instructors about their experience, or invite them to observe your class or discuss your teaching. You can learn more about strategies to connect with others and learn about your teaching in the “Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher” guide next.