Teaching Mentorship

Mentoring Through Teaching

The classroom can be an important site of mentorship where instructors work with graduate student Teaching Assistants (and, in some cases, undergraduate Teaching Assistants) in teaching teams, and support student learning and development during office hours.

Strengthening Teaching Through Mentorship

The mentoring relationships that can occur in teaching contexts contribute significantly to the teaching mission of UC Santa Cruz and play an important role in promoting student success, accessibility, and educational equity.
Teaching Assistants are key members of the teaching team, and given their varied responsibilities, collaboration and communication are crucial to ensuring positive teaching and learning experiences for instructors, TAs, and students alike.

Mentoring Teaching Assistants

The word “assistant” can lead some to think of TAs as helpers, there to make the current course go more smoothly. However, the experience of being a Teaching Assistant is often an important part of the overall graduate student experience at UC Santa Cruz, and is part of graduate students’ professional development in their field of study, as reflected in many graduate program learning outcomes. Many TAs, whether they are graduate students or undergraduate students, are contemplating (or actively pursuing) a future that involves teaching, and working with TAs offers an important opportunity for mentorship.

While all new TAs are required to complete the Teaching as an Ethical Practice: A Guide for Teaching Assistants (“TA Ethics”) course, and while graduate student TAs in particular receive professional development from department pedagogy courses and workshops and from the TLC’s programs, instructors have a unique opportunity to provide mentorship in teaching by:

Openly discussing their teaching choices and the philosophies behind those choices. These conversations are also a good time to explore the TAs’ immediate and long-term pedagogical goals, strategies, and experiences.
Using time in regular teaching team meetings to explicitly discuss strategies for promoting equity and inclusion in the context of the course, and to support TAs to implement those strategies in their current teaching and in future courses.
Offering to observe the sections/labs that TAs conduct, with the TA’s willingness and consent. The Instructor can discuss the TA’s specific goals before the lab or section and provide feedback after the observation. TLC has several example teaching observation protocols that can support both parties to have a reflective, engaged, meaningful experience. Observations are key if TAs ever need a letter of recommendation about their teaching from the instructor, as it’ll give the instructor firsthand experience to write about.
Giving interested TAs an opportunity to lead a lecture, or part of a lecture, once during the quarter. If this is an option, it should be clearly indicated on the Description of Duties. The Instructor can observe the lecture, take notes, and reflect with the TA on the experience.

Mentoring Students in Office Hours

Office hours play a critical role in student learning and professional development, as they function not just as an opportunity for students to ask questions about course content, but also as a space to build relationships with faculty and discuss career paths and opportunities to engage with course materials beyond the classroom. In order to encourage the use of office hours, consider:

Defining what you mean by office hours and explaining the purpose of office hours in your syllabus and throughout your course.
Recognizing the fact that students may feel intimidated to meet with you one-on-one.
- To address this, consider having various options for office hours, such as group office hours, Zoom offerings, in-person meetings at a more informal location on campus than your office (such as a campus cafe), chat-based office hours using your preferred classroom forum (e.g., Discord or Slack)
- You may also consider renaming office hours to better speak to the purpose of the meeting. Some of our favorites are “Student hours,” “Homework club,” “Café con Profe,” and “Career chats”.
Sharing any changes to office hours with your teaching team in order to build consistency in messaging. This is especially important as TAs are often the members of the teaching team to whom students turn when they need more support in a course, when they experience barriers to their learning or inclusion, or when they experience challenges that make it difficult to keep up with a course.

TLC Guide

Visit the full Guide to Working with Teaching Assistants for detailed information on meeting with TAs and mentoring them throughout the quarter.

Additional Resources