1. How do you currently utilize LAs and TAs in your classes?

2. How do you plan to use LAs and TAs in the future?

3. What strategies do you find most effective for integrating LAs and TAs into your teaching?

4. What challenges have you encountered or anticipate encountering with the use of LAs and TAs in large classes?

5. How do LAs and TAs impact student learning and engagement?

Your reflection should be thoughtful and detailed, demonstrating a clear understanding of the roles of LAs and TAs in large classes and how they can enhance the learning experience.

In the future, I'm thinking of letting preceptors design some activities or materials, hold office hours, write questions, and maybe have additional review sessions. I haven't done any of that so we'll see. I generally let preceptors and TAs decide if they want to hold office hour or not because attendance is, for my classes, generally nonexistent.

Challenges can arise when the instructional teams get bigger and bigger so that communication and clear assignment of the various roles is essential. Everyone should have an idea of what the other people do and what their role is and who to ask first. Challenges can also come when you are assigned or picked a preceptor or TA who isn't fully understand the material or their duties, which can happen.

I think that preceptors and TAs can have a huge impact and students' learning. Some have taken the class themselves and can give first-hand experience. Others are able to explain things in a non-instructor-explained-thing which is always helpful too.

Where I most need help is with the grading workload. I am in the process of updating some assignments so that they require less knowledge to grade. I cannot do this across courses, but my goal is to reconfigure grading so that discussions and short answer quizzes can be graded by a UTA based on an assignment guide.

When I could get higher GAs from related fields, they were a great plus to my students' learning and development, particularly in business research skills that require one-to-one help. I have only be able to do this when I found grant funding for it. And that requires a lot of effort and work on my part. It is not sustainable for me.

I will say that when it comes to grading, the instructor and TAs always grade on a rubric. These rubrics do help keep grading consistent, and help the TAs to know what they are looking for when grading.

I think in the future, I would like to see TAs take a bigger role in meeting with students as it relates to the signature assignments in our general education classes. Perhaps we can build this into the beginning of the semester, where students must sign up for a certain amount of "working" sessions. These can happen over Zoom, and can help promote beginning the work on the signature assignment early.

One problem I foresee of course is timing in a large fully online class - some students may be taking the class from across the world, and are free at different times. Perhaps instead of requiring Zoom sessions, we could use another way to communicate in a semi-synchronous way, such as a discussion board that is open for 36 hours. It is still time sensitive, but a little more flexible.

I have weekly meetings with my teaching team to make sure we are all on the same page, and that is very helpful. We doing grading calibration throughout the semester to ensure we are using equitable practices across the board.

Some challenges I have come across include that sometimes students will wait to get their question answered by me instead of their LA, which can be tricky especially if the LA does not know the answer to the question. It can also be hard to have groups of LAs in class together, because I've had the experience before where it feels like if too many LAs are in attendance, I feel like I'm managing them as a separate class in the middle of my actual content course (like two classes running at once).

I have always been grateful for LAs who provide students with positive support. They often seem more approachable than instructors, and that is so valuable. I also appreciate that they can share their firsthand experiences with courses and/or undergraduate/career experiences with students. I think it is also powerful to have LAs from diverse populations, as it's important for students in my courses to see that there is room for all in our discipline.

When students are working in groups on solving engineering problems, the preceptors and I float around the room, checking in with groups, answering questions, posing questions, and looking for issues to clarify with the entire class.

It is pretty apparent that there are a lot of logistical considerations to take in mind with running a large class and I cannot imagine how some of these classes could run without a teaching team. However, managing a large teaching team also comes with its own logistical challenges. Weekly meetings and maintaining shared documents (which we can all edit) has been one of the more effective ways of keeping everyone on the same page. Despite this, on occasion, we have had TAs and Graders that have left mid-semester and that sometimes means others in the group have to take on the extra workload until a replacement is hired or someone's position is adjusted to increase their pay to reflect the increased workload. This can be hugely disruptive in a class where there are already so many moving pieces.

The benefits of having TAs absolutely outweighs the drawbacks. Students receive more individualized attention and feedback by having a designated TA assigned to them and it helps us to ensure students have clear expectations and know where they can go to get help with the course. In turn, it helps to foster engagement.

To manage the dynamic scaling, our approach is to always have a core team of TAs (usually 2-3) that are carry-overs to the next semester, and the experienced TAs train the incoming team. The TA manage operational tasks such as distributing papers to the graders, collating the grading feedback for posting to D2L, and reviewing grade appeals and off-cycle (i.e., late) paper submissions. Faculty create the project assignments, the grading rubrics, training of the graders, and other exceptions to the grading process.

One driver of this process is the university requirement to provide feedback within 2 weeks of submission for 2000 papers (in the fall). Our grading rubric is detailed and objective. This helps with training of the graders and also allows students understand how their papers were assessed. Our team-based grading allows us to provide individual personalized feedback on over 12,000 papers over the course of a semester.

Finally, since graders may know students in the class, we also rotate grading assignments, so that a grader never knows whose paper they will grade, and never sees the same students in their workload across the assignments in the semester. This helps manage bias in grading and ensures a student will not get either an easy or hard grader for all their assignments.

Teaching assistants and learning assistants obviously play a crucial role and offer significant benefits to both faculty and students, by providing support for students with more personalized attention, facilitate learning, provide feedback and grading assistance, and enhance classroom dynamics.

2. Roles and Responsibilities

While I do not have LA’s and TA’s available, I do rely heavily on volunteers. I recruit faculty to be panelists, and facilitators at events. A couple years ago I added internships who perform similar tasks to the LA’s and TA’s. Doing so has allowed me to delegate several tasks, and the department tripled the number of events we could offer. The downside is the need to train new interns annually; my department could use another staff. The interns provide support through research assistance, client contact, review content, data management, assistance with grading/attendance and provide post-event feedback. Faculty are recruited to lead events, be panelist, facilitate small groups, keep groups on task, provide support and build connections during events, and provide post-event feedback.

Challenges arose when I didn't communicate a clear expectation for the LAs: what area of the room each would facilitate; how long I thought students should work before the LAs started checking in with them; and how much time, total, I expected the activity to take. I got better at this, too, over time. Realizing I couldn't monitor the comings and goings of 6-10 people while also managing and using my "biology brain," I began identifying one LA who would take attendance and ensure the other LAs were engaging effectively in each class. I also began using LAs who were very interested in teaching to help me review in-class work and identify patterns of thinking I could use to make day-by-day changes to my teaching.

The benefits of near-peer learning assistants have been dramatic in my classes, even when not so big. Students communicate more openly with them about challenges; the LAs, in turn, are closer to them in their understanding and can relate tips or share empathy about topics/concepts/skills they found challenging. The LAs grow in their content understanding and their ability to communicate with people earlier in their studies, and they also build leadership skills that will help them in whatever area they hope to move into next. Some discover/deepen a love of biology, and some find they enjoy helping people overcome their learning challenges.

I worked with colleagues in Chemistry/Biochemistry and Chemical Engineering (and a large number of instructors in many departments) on an NSF-funded project focused on using an instructional team to support active learning in large STEM classes. Here's our project website, which has training links as well as a description of the different roles we put our learning assistants into to help us manage the complex large-class environment: https://sites.google.com/view/arizonainstructionalteams/home.