TEACHING ASSISTANT EVALUATION
Being a teaching assistant is a shared learning experience. Your teaching will be improved, and in the long run your students will benefit if some form of evaluation of TA performance is made. There are many ways to achieve this goal. You can be evaluated by your course director, your thesis advisor, your chair, your fellow TAs and graduate students, and by your own students themselves. You should also be doing regular self-evaluations.
SELF EVALUATION
Are you achieving the goals set out in your course outline, syllabus or lesson plans? Are you finding that you are running out of time? Do you think that your students are understanding your lectures? Are you more self-assured with the passage of time? Perhaps you could consider video-taping your class performance, or voice-tape yourself. The Learning and Teaching Centre can help to arrange this (phone 8571).
One way to see if you are making yourself clear to students is by asking some of them for copies of their notes. Are your main points coming across or just details? Is there evidence of boredom? Are you talking so fast that the notes are hasty and sketchy?
STUDENT EVALUATION
You can judge your own performance by gathering "mid-term feedback" by distributing a short class questionnaire which you have compiled. Make sure the questionnaires are anonymous and cannot affect student grades so you get honest feedback. State your purpose: to evaluate your own performance so that you may improve in the rest of the semester. What do your students like or dislike about your course? How can you improve? Ask three or four brief questions. You do not have to submit these questionnaires to your course tutor, but you might wish to notify him or her you are asking your students for comments on your performance.
Many departments have a formal year-end student evaluation and it is a good idea to do a second evaluation of your own at this time. This will let you know if the students noticed any improvement and will give you some ideas for your next teaching assignment.
PEER EVALUATION
Often it is less nerve-racking to ask a friend or fellow student rather than the course director to sit in on your class, and to give you feedback on your presentation. Ask for comments on your appearance, posture, command of the subject, teaching style and ability to communicate.
EVALUATION BY FACULTY
It is helpful for future employment prospects if your course director can evaluate your performance and twice is better than once. Improvement can only be noted if the professor returns to your class later in term. What they should be evaluating should be mutually agreed upon. The professor should look at your class style, the accuracy of your lecture, student response and overall performance. These evaluations can be informal and not part of anything kept on file, or, you can ask for a formal evaluation to be kept on file for future reference. If your department keeps records on your teaching performance they will be kept completely separate from your own academic file and strictly confidential. You may have access to your personnel file by contacting the Chair of your Department.
For further information on performance review, see Article 22.02 of the CUPE 4163 Collective Agreement.
FEEDBACK
If the mid-session evaluations prompted you to change something about your teaching tell your professor or the students who have helped evaluate you. This will communicate that you have read or listened to comments, are working on improvement and appreciate their help. If the evaluations suggest an aspect of your teaching that might be improved, contact the Learning and Teaching Centre for advice.
TEACHING DOSSIER
The Learning and Teaching Centre recommends that all faculty and TA's keep a Teaching Dossier containing their teaching evaluations, achievements and workshops attended over a period of years. This allows teachers to spot recurring patterns, check for improvements, and to have their evaluations available for inspection when applying for teaching positions. Copies of a Guide to the Teaching Dossier are available from the Learning and Teaching Centre.
GETTING THE MOST OUT OF YOUR
TEACHING ASSISTANTSHIP
If you plan on becoming a teacher there are several ways to increase what you can learn from being a teaching assistant. One is by observing your course director and other teachers with an eye to adopting those techniques that work and avoiding those that do not. If you are sitting in on a lecture course that you think you might end up teaching, use it as an opportunity to build an outline for your course.
You may want to enlist your course director or even the department to become actively involved. Are you getting tips on teaching? Are faculty helping you with suggestions? Have they evaluated your performance? Invite your course director to one of your classes. The teaching assistant has to be an initiator of discussion, not just with students, but with the course director and department as well. All faculty development programs and workshops are also open to TAs at the University of Victoria. If you are not routinely made aware of these programs, ask the Department Secretary to put any notices of events in your mailbox.