About the AiiCE Teaching Assistant Professional Development Course

What is the scope of this course?

This course has been developed within the context of AiiCE, the NSF-funded Alliance for Interdisciplinary Innovation in Computing Education.  The purpose of this course is to expose Computer Science Teaching Assistants to concepts that will help them contribute to a more inclusive and supportive learning environment. In consideration of what supervisors could realistically require their TAs to complete, we kept our coverage of each topic to a brief introduction in the hopes that many participants will be curious and learn more on their own. We have provided a list of resources, sorted by topic, to encourage further exploration.

This course will be most effective if it is accompanied by small group discussions that will help TAs reflect on the material and consider it from other people's perspectives. Since the logistics of TA work vary significantly between institutions and between different TA roles, this course should always be supplemented with training to cover institution-specific topics like how to get paid, when and where they are expected to be, what exactly they are expected to do, and (most importantly) who they should contact with questions and/or concerns.

Our approach to the content is shaped by the assumption that this will primarily be used in US colleges and universities. If you are working at an institution outside of the US and have suggestions for changes to make the course more relevant to where you are, we would welcome your input!

Course Topics

• Mindset: Understanding the value of a growth mindset and why it’s important to create a learning environment where it’s okay to try new things and make mistakes.

• Emotional Intelligence: Cultivating self-knowledge and awareness of others makes it easier to have the impact we intend in any sort of interpersonal interaction.

• Effective Feedback: Learning strategies for giving feedback that will be both useful and motivational.

• Identity: Developing awareness of the different identities that shape our experiences and how others perceive us, and understanding how those identities can influence our learning experiences within higher education institutions.

• Belonging: Understanding the impact belonging can have on our learning and how it shapes who enters and stays in a field like CS.

About the Course Content

This course is adapted from the work of the Mount Holyoke College Computer Science Department and Dr. Becky Wai-Ling Packard.

All of the ideas you will find here are based on the scholarship of others, such as bell hooks, Ximena Zúñiga, Paulo Freire, and Beverly Daniel Tatum. Regardless of where we first encountered them, most of the ideas can be traced back to the scholarship of Women of Color. We do not claim any ownership or rights to this knowledge. If you find the way we present this content to be useful, please feel free to share it. We just ask that you remember and credit the groundbreaking scholars who made this work possible.

How to Get Started

If you are supervising TAs and would like to share this course with them, please complete this survey:

https://duke.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_aUWTifjNKUOsLlk

Once you complete the survey, you will receive an email containing a link to give you access to the course site and some suggested language for introducing the course to your TAs, including the link they should use to begin the course.

If you are a TA interested in taking the course, please complete this survey to get started:

https://duke.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9QrZgT33xhC6mFg

Once you complete the survey, you will be taken to the course site.

More information about AiiCE, the Alliance for Interdisciplinary Innovation in Computing Education

To learn more about AiiCE, the Alliance for Interdisciplinary Innovation in Computing Education, please visit the AiiCE website.