Challenges of Teaching Assistants

It is common that TAs may meet some challenges. Challenges happen in many citations such as being TA for the first time, assisting instructors in big classes, don’t have enough time to complete some TA duties, become sick or enable to work sometimes, meet unexpected issues with students or face challenges related to pandemic times like COVID.

General Challenges

This section presents the regular and expected challenges TA may face.

Academic Integrity

Includes different integrity violation like cheating, falsification, fabrication, plagiarism

See Difficult Situations

Following Up with Students

Includes checking student progress throughout the semester, preparing office hours for some students whose performance is low and figuring out the ideal extension of submission deadline

Team Work

Includes evaluating groups in which teammates do not work or spend equal efforts. A TA reported that “group members not getting along and not participating “ is a big concern when TA work evaluates students groups

See Role of a TA in an Active Learning Classroom

Student Complaints

Includes meeting with students to solve complaints (e.g. issues with grades, etc.) and coordinating between the instructor and students regarding these complaints

Challenges for International TAs

There are many graduate international students who are required to have TA positions in CCI. International students have some concern about communication and understanding students in US universities. For example, some international students are concerned about their languages and fluency, and students might not be able to understand them.

“The challenge is that I am not sure if I am using the correct "term" when I am talking with students. I just keep learning about how natives describe a certain thing, then I would like to get use to it.”

- CCI International TA

“My mother language is Bengali. But my education language was English. After communicating with international people more, helped me to overcome challenges in language and communication.”

- CCI International TA

Life balance is important for TA to accomplish teaching requirements and maintains academic, research and personal responsibilities. TAs are usually graduate students, either master or doctoral, and they usually work about 20 hours per week in addition to having research, course work and thesis. Furthermore, some of them have families and kids, and this adds more challenges to meet different requirements. There are good practices that help TAs to keep control on teaching requirements and such time management , scheduling teaching and other responsibilities, devoting weekly office hours to solve student problems or finish weekly reports and be in touch with the course instructor. There are many time management techniques that help in life balance for TAs such as Pomodoro technique, to-do lists and others.