The Teaching Staff Roles For My 200+ Student Class

This is also posted on medium.

This is post #2 of a 5 post series on how I organize the teaching staff for my 200+ student class. I have seven different roles in my teaching staff organized into a three-layered hierarchy. This post drills down into each teaching staff’s role by outlining their tasks and responsibilities. I close with some general thoughts.

The other posts in this series are as follows (I’ll update with links as I post):

  1. Overview
  2. Teaching staff roles (You are here)
  3. How I communicate with my teaching staff
  4. How I track the to-do list
  5. How I run the head staff meetings

Here’s the organization chart from the overview post again as a reminder of all the TA roles. My TA+ is a full-time staff member of the department (not a student) assigned to my class. The TAs are graduate students. UTAs are undergraduate students. Most UTAs teach a lab in pairs with about 25 students per lab. One section of the course includes one lab and two lectures per week. If I have multiple lecture sections, I teach multiple lectures but still run the class like a single unit. The rest of my UTAs are graders, with about 35–40 students per grader. Altogether, this boils down to about 30 UTAs a semester.

TA+

My teaching associate (TA+) is more next to me than directly under me. My TA+ is my right-hand person. We have two TA+’s, both of whom have a master’s in computer science (CS). We hired them with the expectation they would use their degree to support the class. Their more in-depth understanding of CS would let them help to the point of substitute teaching the class, designing course material, or teaching a summer session of the course.

My TA+’s responsibilities are far and wide. I can’t praise her enough for helping make my job easier. I delegate many things to her so that I can focus on the class’s content and structure. My TA+ handles logistics that include exam administration, special exam circumstances, grading, scriptwriting for grading, and website management. She also attends lecture and monitors our lecture backchannel, which is a post in our class forum (we use Piazza ) where students can ask questions during lecture. She either answers the questions herself or flags me during lecture to answer the questions for all to hear.

I share my TA+ with at least one other class. Both TA+’s are assigned at least one large class (mine is considered a large class) and one medium-sized class each semester. However, it varies on the department’s needs and each TA+’s workload. They also handle one-off tasks from other courses, like proctoring special accommodation exams.

TAs

I have two graduate TAs for this class. They are typically master’s students, but I have also had Ph.D. students. There are no requirements on how many years they’ve been a graduate student. The TAs’ primary responsibilities have to do with grading. This responsibility is partially due to Duke’s requirement that a UTA cannot see the entire gradebook. Between the two of them, they collect and put grades into the gradebook from our many class materials. These materials include peer instruction forms, reflection forms, and grades on our problem set server. They also handle regrade requests across all of these grade sources.

A related duty has to do with the autograder for our assignments. We use Gradescope to auto-grade the assignments, which are not the same as our problem sets. Each semester the TAs maintain, troubleshoot, and update the tests in the autograder. This responsibility also requires they monitor the class forum for issues with the autograder.

Finally, they hold office hours, mainly during business hours.

UTAs

A UTA, typically, has taken the class in a prior semester or has some programming experience. The head UTAs interview anyone that has not TAed before. I make hiring decisions based on their performance in the class, if they’ve TAed before, and the interviews for the new UTAs. Whether they are a major or intended major does not matter. I have had a head UTA that was not a CS major.

Head UTAs have TAed before and are usually picked and trained by the prior head UTA. So far, I’ve been lucky in how excellent my head UTAs have been that I want them to stay until they graduate or decide to step down themselves.

Since there are different kinds of UTAs, the first section is the general duties of all UTAs, and subsequent sections are for each type of UTA.

General Duties

All UTAs must spend at least 30 minutes a week on the class forum to help answer questions. They also must have at least one 2-hour consulting hour shift. Consulting hours are what we call the UTAs’ office hours, and they are from 7:30 pm to 11:30 pm with 2–3 UTAs per shift. For safety, we try to book a room that is near a bus stop. At Berkeley, these kinds of hours were during business hours, but this was the expectation when I got to Duke, so your mileage may vary on this one.

Finally, they all are involved with supporting exam administration or grading. Exam administration duties include coming to class at the beginning or end to help pass out or collect exams and staying during class to help me monitor the students and answer questions if I can’t get to the student in a reasonable time. We also have them help scan all of the exams and upload them to Gradescope. For grading, we have a 3-hour “grading party” that always involves a meal. They must spend at least an hour at this party to learn how to grade a problem and then can finish grading that problem later. Usually, most stay the entire time, and we finish by the end of the party.

Head Lab/Class Forum UTA

At the beginning of the semester, this UTA assigns lab UTAs to lab(s) and who will be each lab’s backup UTA. They are also the main point of contact for when a UTA can’t make a lab, and neither can the backup. Each week I make a copy of last semester’s lab (they are in google docs) and write notes on how I want it to be updated. The head lab UTA then updates the lab per those instructions. Finally, they run two weekly lab UTA trainings, where they go over the lab material, answer questions, and point out common ways students may struggle with the lab.

The head lab UTA is also in charge of the class forum. We use Piazza. This added responsibility is mainly due to historical reasons. The class forum responsibilities are small enough to be tacked on to any head UTA’s duties. Ours happens to be with the lab UTA. At our weekly meeting, this head UTA reports: (1) how many questions there were, (2) how many students versus TAs answered those questions, and (3) whether the response rate is reasonable. They also check the class forum throughout the week to ensure that questions are being answered within a reasonable time frame and for quality. When needed, the head class forum UTA flags or escalates questions that they cannot answer, or I need to respond directly.

I also check the class forum every day. Knowing that the head class forum UTA is in charge gives me a lot more flexibility and confidence that things will be fine if I miss a day. I usually just scan through to get a sense of the questions, rather than feel like I must respond to every unanswered question myself.

Head Consulting Hours UTA

At the beginning of the semester, the head consulting hour UTA is in charge of assigning UTAs to shifts. During the semester, if they can’t make a shift, UTAs are expected to first trade with each other and then bubble it up to the head consulting hours UTA if they can’t find someone.

We also use an office hours app, My Digital Hand, an online queue for students. It also has students and UTAs fill out short entry and exit surveys. The head consulting hour UTA is in charge of looking at the statistics from the app and reading through the surveys. They then give me a summary of this information at our weekly head staff meeting. The app’s historical data is also useful for deciding when to increase the number of UTAs in consulting hours during high load times, like during assignments and exams.

Head Grader UTA

The head grader UTA has two primary responsibilities: organize the graders and improve the assignments’ quality. Our assignments are due every other week and have a hand-grading component. The head grader UTA organizes grading these assignments and runs a grading meeting to ensure everyone is on the same page.

To improve the quality of the assignments, the head grader UTA, goes through all the information we have on the assignment. This information includes the assignment itself, class forum questions from the prior semester, the student reflection responses about the assignment, and any other things we noted while the assignment was out last semester. They then write a list of suggested changes to the assignment, such as changing the wording, what is or how things are graded, and tests to update or add. The head grader UTA, TAs, and I discuss these changes two weeks before the assignment is out and decide on priorities. We then spend the next two weeks implementing the changes as best we can and adjust as things arise.

Lab UTA

As I said earlier, most UTAs teach lab in pairs with about 25 students per lab. There is one lab a week, and it covers material that I’ve taught in lecture. Lab UTAs mainly help students work with the lab material I provide. They may also give a small lecture if enough students are confused about a topic.

Lab UTAs must go to one of two weekly lab trainings, teach lab, and grade their lab. There are two lab trainings because a single day can’t fit everyone’s schedule. We grade labs based on attendance and effort.

As a quick aside, we tried an experiment where the grader UTAs also graded lab and reported back to the lab UTAs. But that experiment failed. It did reduce the lab UTAs workload but at the cost of more communication management between the grader and lab UTAs. The lab UTAs also had less of an idea of how their students were doing.

Grader UTA

The graders are responsible for grading assignments, attending their every other week grading meeting, and grading exams. Everyone helps with exams, but the graders must be at the grading party or help more than the others in some capacity.

General Comments

Some brief answers to questions I’ve gotten about this post:

  • Filling time slots — Filling lab and consulting hours is full of time constraints. We hire first and then ask for everyone’s availability. Generally, this works out in the end, with sometimes a UTA not getting their preferred role due to time constraints. I’ve only once had to hire an “emergency” UTA to fill a consulting hour time block, who was then a grader UTA for the semester.
  • In case it wasn’t clear from the organization chart, the head lab UTA is in charge of lab UTAs. The head grader UTA is in charge of the grader UTAs. The head consulting hour UTA is in charge of the consulting hour duties of all the UTAs. The TAs (the graduate students) interact with the UTAs but aren’t really in charge of anyone. The TA+ has almost the same authority as I do to help me organize everything.

Summary

So that’s all of the roles in my teaching staff. Questions or comments? Remember, the top of this post will have links to the other four posts in this series as they go live.

If you have a particular question you’d like me to address, please leave a comment! I have all the posts in this series mostly written and plan to release one a week. This way, I can try to address any questions before I publish each post.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How I track my to-do list

This is also on medium . I use Trello  to track all the things I need to do. Trello, at its core, is just a to-do list management tool. It is versatile to many organization strategies and is great for a single person or a team to organize the tasks that need doing. However, this versatility can be very daunting as a novice because you are just starting to figure out a system to keep track of what you need to do. And a novice rarely does well in an environment where there are many ways to do the same thing, a.k.a. a versatile system. A beginner does not have enough experience to determine what technique is better than another. Moreover, a novice finds it challenging to keep track of the many ways to do the same thing. So, if you are a novice, here are my suggestions for how to use Trello to track your personal to-do list (how I use it to organize my research team(s) and teaching team(s) I'll leave for a different blog post). First, I'll go over the fundamental way I use Tre...
Read more

GPS Syndrome

A term I made up and have been using for a while is "GPS syndrome." And it turns out that enough people have picked up this term that I feel like I need to post an "official" definition. I most commonly use the metaphor when talking about and with teaching assistants (TAs) that overhelp students. So this blog post is mostly from a google doc I wrote for new TAs for one of their training sessions. Definition " Scaffolding refers to a variety of instructional techniques used to move students progressively toward stronger understanding and, ultimately, greater independence in the learning process. The term itself offers the relevant descriptive metaphor: teachers provide successive levels of temporary support that help students reach higher levels of comprehension and skill acquisition that they would not be able to achieve without assistance. Like physical scaffolding, the supportive strategies are incrementally removed when they are no longer needed, and the...
Read more

Revisit: How I organize the teaching staff of my 200+ student class

 When it comes to anyone’s advice on how to run your own course, your “mileage may vary.” So, I thought it would be interesting to revisit my series on how I organize my teaching staff in my 200+ student class . The first post of that series is my most viewed post on Medium. I published that series during the second half of 2020, and times have changed since then (**cough** pandemic **cough**). In addition, I’ve moved on from that introductory computer science (CS1), and I primarily teach an elective data science (DS) course, which has a high variability in enrollment. In this post, I revisit that series from the perspective of what I still do versus do not between my CS1 and DS courses. [ Also posted on medium. ] Current Course’s Context Before I start my comparison, I need to go over how the context is different since it influenced many of the differences between the two courses. My DS class has a semester-long project and no labs/discussions. The class also uses Python, whi...
Read more