Setting a Tone for Students

While your influence on the overall tone of a learning environment will vary depending on your particular role as a TA, you will contribute to that tone no matter what role you are in.

The Problem with the "Sage on the Stage" Model

When we think about teaching in higher education, we often imagine a person with knowledge and authority standing behind a lectern, delivering a prepared lecture. The students passively absorb the teacher's knowledge by listening and taking notes.

This is sometimes referred to as the Sage on the Stage style of teaching. While some students have been successfully trained to learn under these conditions, years of research indicate that many students with the capacity to learn the material struggle to do so when it is presented in this form.

Not only does this model not work for many students, it creates a dynamic where the teacher is supposed to be the ultimate authority on the material and the primary source of knowledge. This means that if the teacher gets something wrong, even if they simply misspoke in the moment, faith in their authority is broken. This sets up the teacher to maintain an inhuman level of perfection and accuracy, and provides an unrealistic image for students of what mastery of the material should look like.

The Lifelong Learner

Have you ever been in a CS class when the instructor provided an example by live coding? Unless the program was "Hello World" there's a good chance that instructor had to fix a few syntax errors before the code would run properly. While it can be an extremely stressful experience for the instructor, it actually models productive debugging for students and reminds them that it's not reasonable to expect their code to be flawless from the beginning.

In contrast to the Sage on the Stage, educators who think of themselves as Lifelong Learners can openly acknowledge that they do not know everything and are eager to learn more. They create a far more flexible role for themselves that allows for both personal growth and more meaningful connections with students.

Adopting the mentality of a Lifelong Learner will serve you well in your career, whether you intend to focus on teaching, research, or industry. No matter how long you study Computer Science, there will always be more to learn. Not only is it a vast and varied field, it is also a field that is constantly growing and changing. The same is true of teaching. Someone dedicated to education is never done learning how to do their job and understands that they can learn from their students just as their students can learn from them.

As a TA, being able to say, "I don't know. Let's look that up together," shows students that it really is okay in that space to not know things. Modeling a desire to continue learning helps to set a tone that will make it easier for them to ask questions and seek feedback.

What you do when you don't know something shapes what you have the potential to know in the future.

A Mutually Beneficial Process

Not only can students learn from you in your role as a TA, you can also learn from them. Looking at other people's code can show you other ways to solve problems, which can expand your thinking and make you a more dynamic problem solver. Students you work with might ask questions that never occurred to you, opening new doors of learning. And, of course, the best way to improve your understanding of something is to try explaining it to someone else.

If you approach students as though you see your interactions with them as mutually beneficial, it will help them feel valued in the learning space you create. When a student feels valued, it becomes easier for them to be vulnerable and open to learning.