This page is for assisting departments in starting a TA training course. If you are a current TA taking the TA practicum, you want the TA practicum website instead.

1 About this document

This document is an effort to share the contents of the TA training course we have developed in the Computer Science department at the University of Virginia. The training course is required of all first-time undergraduate TAs and has enrollments between 50 and 70 each semester. Its contents are still being refined, but have reached a sufficiently stable state that we feel it worth documenting and sharing them.

There are no slides for this course. One of our goals is to have an open, discussion-encouraging experience and slides convey the impression we are on a preplanned path and diverging from it is not encouraged. Thus, we run the course with a white-board and a lot of conversation. That said, we do tend to follow the same structure each time, so that structure is outlined below.

This document is an early draft, an effort to get as much content online as quickly as possible. A more organized and readable version with more citations, etc., is anticipated in the future.

2 Topics

• Course mechanics – not a session, more meta-information about running the course
• Course philosophy – not a session, more meta-information about how I structure sessions
• 1. Logistics and ethics
• 2. Learning and teaching
• 3–4. Diversity
• 5. Problem students
• 6. Grading
• 7+. Other sessions

An example implementation, inclusing videos and notes, can be found in UVA's Fall 2021 CS 2910 course.

3 Citation

If you wish to cite this set of notes, please use the following meta-data:

author

Luther A. Tychonievich

title

Training Course for Teaching Assistants in Computing

url

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/luther/ta-training

publication version date

May 2017

An example citation might be