• Introduction

• Content of the Learning Community

• Structure of the Learning Community

• Rationale for the Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Model

• Compatibility of Teaching and Learning Needs

• Recruitment and Selection of the Teaching Assistants

• Preparation of the Teaching Assistants

• Roles and Conflicts

• The Teaching Team

• Evaluating the Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Model

• The Experiences of the Teaching Assistants

• The Pedagogic Value of the Model

• Printable Text of Article

© Copyright 2000 by Kimberly Eby (keby1@gmu.edu) and Paula Gilbert (pgilbert@gmu.edu). The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author.

We aimed to select teaching assistants by March 1998, five months before the next offering of Violence and Gender. We initially sent a letter to twelve students who had performed exceptionally well in the learning community and who had subsequently deepened their understanding of violence and gender (e.g. continuing to volunteer on or off-campus, taking 
a related course, continuing to read about the issue). In the letter, we explained our interest in developing an undergraduate teaching assistant model, discussed some of the responsibilities we imagined the TAs would fulfill, and asked them to contact one of us within two weeks. We were 
pleased that all twelve students were interested and ten scheduled an interview. 

We had already decided that we would select five students. Our rationale was that five students would be able to share the work effectively without overwhelming them with responsibilities, that five additional students constituted the limit we wanted to add to our classroom setting, and that we would not be able to supervise effectively more than this number of students in this role. We conducted one-hour interviews with each student, consisting of a set series of questions: their interest in becoming a teaching assistant; their strengths and weaknesses; their desired TA responsibilities; and their ability to commit to the job. This was an agonizing decision because we were fortunate to have a strong pool of 
candidates. 

In the end, we considered multiple factors in the composition of our final teaching team. A first factor was an individual candidate's strengths and weaknesses and her/his fit with the responsibilities we needed to fulfill as a whole. Not all of the candidates were equally strong in the areas of writing, research, group facilitation, organizational skills, and technology. Thus, we needed to be sure that we had strengths in each of these areas well represented on our team. We also felt strongly about having broad demographic groups represented by the TAs, if possible. Finally, since we had the advantage of knowing these students and wanted an effective working group, we considered who would work well with us and with the team as a whole. In the end, we selected a diverse group of students: an Islamic woman; a male student; a returning adult female student; and two Caucasian female students, all with a variety of career goals and interests.

Next Section: "Preparation of the Teaching Assistants"

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