Teaching Assistant Training Available through ITSU: Information for Instructors and Coordinators

ITSU offers optional training and resources to help your TAs, especially new TAs, prepare for their teaching roles. Below we have outlined the training and resources that ITSU has available to set TAs up for success this Fall term.

As an instructor or coordinator, you might also be interested in reviewing these resources to help provide guidance to your TAs and share the resources or sections that are most relevant to their roles and responsibilities.

TA Training

Please note: as part of the CUPE 5524.01 Collective Agreement for TAs and RAs, any training that a Faculty, department, or instructor deems mandatory for graduate TAs must be allocated paid hours and included in a TA’s Assignment of Duties form. This does not apply to optional training.

TA Essentials: Starting Strong as a TA: This foundational self-paced, asynchronous module is available for departments, Faculties, and course instructors to offer to their TAs (open to all TAs; both undergraduate and graduate students). Request TA Essentials module for your TAs.
Workshops by request: ITSU staff can facilitate workshops as part of your departmental or Faculty TA Training, by request, in the modality of your choice. Contact Kristin Brown for more information.
LEARN for TAs: During the first month of term, ITSU offers two sessions for TAs to introduce them to various LEARN tools. TAs can select their preferred date for this 2-hour session. Session dates will be listed on the ITSU Events page.

Additional Resources

Fundamentals of University Teaching Program: Each term, ITSU offers optional professional development workshops on a variety of teaching topics relevant to TAs and graduate students. TAs can register and complete individual workshops or accumulate workshops towards the Fundamentals of University Teaching certificate, which requires completing 6 workshops and 3 microteaching (practice teaching) sessions. Upcoming offerings will be listed on the Fundamentals Events page.
TA Handbook: a resource of practical tips for TAs to refer to throughout their time as a TA. We encourage you to share the TA Handbook with TAs in your department, which provides key resources to help TAs prepare for and carry out their role successfully at Waterloo.

TA Essentials: Starting Strong as a TA (CTE1100)

ITSU offers a foundational, self-paced asynchronous module (approximately 1 hour) that Faculties, departments, or individual course instructors can ask their TAs to complete.

Any teaching assistant - graduate students or undergraduate students - can complete this module
By completing this module, graduate students can gain a workshop credit towards the Fundamentals of University Teaching certificate

This module can be used on its own or as a complement to department or Faculty-level TA training programs. If you are interested in offering the module to your TAs, please review and follow the instructions outlined in Process for requesting TA training below.

Module description: This module is designed to orient you to your role as a teaching assistant (TA), connect you with teaching-focused resources on our campus, and prepare you for a successful start as a TA. The module will address topics relevant to all TAs at Waterloo, including an introduction to teaching and learning at the University of Waterloo, instructional roles performed by TAs, tips for success, and useful resources available for developing your skills. We’ll also provide guidance for common situations you may face as a TA, and introduce considerations for professionalism, communicating with students and the course instructor, academic integrity, and artificial intelligence use.

Suggestions for using the online module in your TA training

We designed this self-paced online module as a flexible supplement to discipline-specific TA training, that can be easily incorporated into your departmental/Faculty TA training. You might consider asking your TAs to complete the module throughout the term or at the beginning of the term. TAs will retain access to the module as a resource they can refer back to throughout the term.

Although TAs benefit from going through the standalone module, we encourage you to supplement this module with department-, Faculty-, or course-specific sessions. Supplemental activities can allow TAs the opportunity to engage in discussion with their peers, ask questions about being a TA in your department, and learn skills specific to the departmental teaching context. You might use the reflection questions and activities embedded in the module as discussion prompts, or you can design your own discussion prompts based on your disciplinary needs.

Process for instructors/departments/Faculties to request TA Essentials: Starting Strong as a TA module

We realize that TA training occurs at different levels across campus, whether it is at the Faculty, department, or course level.

If you are a course instructor interested in providing training to your TAs, we encourage you to talk to other instructors or the Graduate Coordinator in your department to determine whether this training should be offered to all TAs in your department. If your department is not interested in offering this training, you can then request training for TAs in your course.

We ask that you do the following to arrange access to the TA Essentials: Starting Strong as a TA LEARN site for your TAs:

Request through the TA Essentials request survey (in Qualtrics).
Once we receive your survey responses above, an ITSU staff member will contact you with further information regarding the logistics of TA registration and access to the module.

Workshops by Request

ITSU can facilitate workshops as part of your departmental or Faculty TA Training by request, in the modality of your choice (in-person or online synchronous).

To get a sense of the topics we can offer workshops on, please see the list of ITSU’s core graduate workshop offerings.
If you are interested in ITSU staff facilitating a workshop as part of your TA training, please contact Kristin Brown.

LEARN for TAs Sessions

This two-hour hands-on workshop will introduce TAs to LEARN (from Desire2Learn), our learning management system for presenting course activities and resources in on-campus and fully online courses. By the end of this session, TAs will: be able to use the D2L environment to communicate with students; have basic knowledge of the tools available within D2L (e.g., enter grades). For more information see the LEARN for TAs webpage. Session dates will be listed on the ITSU Events page.