Teaching Advocacy: Learn your responsibilities, set expectations, and advocate for change as a TA

The work of a teaching assistant is a balancing act: between responsibilities assigned by the instructor, the needs of your students, your own research, and your life outside of school, it can be difficult to set boundaries on your time and energy. As educators at the same university, it can be helpful to learn from other departments’ best practices around setting expectations for TA responsibilities. This workshop will 1) be an opportunity to reflect on and share your department’s current time and labor expectations for TAs, 2) share university resources for resolving challenges and disputes while TAing, 3) explore how creating a set of TA expectations for your department can promote inclusive teaching and minimize confusion around divisions of labor in teaching, and 4) collaborate on a set of TA expectations that can be adopted across departments and divisions. After this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Concretely assess your rights, responsibilities, and obligations as a TA in your department
• Reflect on challenges with instructor-TA partnerships and identify university resources to resolve them
• Cite other departments practices with regard to how they set expectations with teaching assistants.
• Support TAs at a university level by connecting with students from different departments and sharing information about similarities and differences in your teaching obligations


Questions? Contact amodell@stanford.edu