CAT’s TA Training Program provides teaching support to graduate students and post-docs through a variety of workshop opportunities throughout the year. In addition, we also host an annual TA Conference each fall to prepare incoming and continue TAs get ready for the new new school year. Navigate through the tabs below to see our current workshop offerings, see recordings of past workshops, and read more about our other offerings.
Each quarter, the TA Training Program offers teaching workshops useful to both North and South Campus graduate students and post-docs. All of our workshops are held in small-group settings, with hands-on activities and lots of time for questions and discussion. Whether you are a current TA or would like to TA in the future, please join us to learn new strategies and skills for the classroom.
Please visit our CCLE site or click on one of the workshops in the calendar below to register.
Held Remotely via Zoom
Each year the Center for the Advancement of Teaching’s TA Training Program organizes our annual TA Conference, designed to provide pedagogical training and resource information for both new and continuing TAs. Currently in its 47th year, this event is open to all graduate students, whether or not they will be TAing during the upcoming school year, in preparation for future teaching assignments.
This year, recognizing a heightened need for support in the shift to remote learning, the annual TA Conference focused on best practices for remote teaching. The format was expanded from two days to two full weeks of participatory workshops offered over Zoom to accommodate participants’ schedules and limit workshop group size. Attendees were able to select sessions from a variety of specialized workshops and expert panels on topics ranging from creating inclusive classrooms remotely to developing and proctoring remote assessments. Attendees all had access to a plenary lecture by expert faculty, our panel of Distinguished Teaching Award-winning faculty and teaching assistants, and the opportunity to connect with fellow graduate students and a variety of resources across campus.
The aims of the conference is to give you the opportunity to:
This series of five 90-minute workshops is designed with the novice teacher in mind. Each workshop provides an introduction into key concepts and strategies for developing an evidence-based teaching practice. All first-time teachers are encouraged to attend this series.
The five workshops that comprise the series are:
How Students Learn
This workshop will offer an overview of how students learn and teaching techniques that will help your students achieve their goals. You will examine why material you’ve learned has stuck with you and the best ways to help your students hold onto the content you teach. Through activities and discussion, you will learn how to build on students’ prior knowledge, help students organize new knowledge, tap into students’ drives to learn, and use activities to encourage students to set goals. Our focus will be on the practical application of student-centered instruction.
Creating Inclusive Classrooms
In this workshop, you will learn strategies to proactively set norms supportive of an inclusive classroom. Through self-reflection, you will develop an understanding of your own identities and how these identities appear in the classroom. You will practice using active listening techniques to troubleshoot difficult moments in and outside of the classroom. This workshop focuses on proactive strategies rather than on confronting bias. You will practice inclusive strategies to apply in your own classrooms.
The Nuts and Bolts of Lesson Planning
This workshop will serve as a model for effective lesson planning, focusing on formulating measurable learning objectives and aligning teaching strategies to them. With guidance, you will break down the process of creating effective lesson plans into manageable steps and tailor these steps to the needs of your discipline. You will practice creating a sample lesson plan and receive constructive feedback on it from your peers.
Active Learning Strategies
Choose from three options, depending on your needs:
Assessment and Grading
How is assessment different from grading? Do you know when students have learned the knowledge and skills required to introduce new material? Is it possible to gauge your own effectiveness as an instructor prior to formal evaluations? In this workshop, you will discuss the difference between assessment and grading, the importance of incorporating assessment into your approach to instruction, and various assessment techniques to gauge student learning. You will learn to identify appropriate ways to evaluate student growth, develop a system for measuring your effectiveness in the classroom, and learn ways to more fairly grade your students.
While each workshop is a self-contained unit and it is not necessary to attend the workshops in any particular order, the order above is suggested in order to provide the most support to novice teachers’ learning.
In addition to the Foundations Series, we also offer other workshops throughout the year so you can continue to build your skills for the classrooms. Keep an eye on the schedule and sign up for our newsletter to be notified of new workshop offerings.
Getting Midquarter Feedback on Your Teaching
Mid-quarter feedback is a quick way for instructors to gain important insights into how students are feeling about their progress and to learn what is and isn’t working in a class so that you can make adjustments. In this one-hour workshop, you will learn why you should ask your students for mid-quarter feedback, review some best practices for collecting information, and discuss what to do with feedback once you get it. You will leave the workshop with a toolkit for implementing mid-quarter feedback, including some templates for CCLE and Google Forms.
Giving Feedback and Assessing Student Writing
Students are often asked to communicate what they have learned in writing, but strengths and weaknesses in their writing can boost or hinder their ability to communicate what they know. During this workshop, you will learn how to identify which writing issues to address and ignore; how to preempt plagiarism and grade complaints; how to empower your students to effectively edit their own work; and how to better manage their writing time.
Interrupting Bias to Cultivate Inclusivity
This workshop builds on concepts and strategies learned in Creating Inclusive Classrooms to help you develop knowledge and skills for interrupting bias and managing hot moments in the classroom. In this workshop, you will engage in and practice vulnerability, active listening, recognizing intent versus impact, and strategies for confronting bias. You will walk away with a deeper understanding of the impact of bias from the perspectives of both students and instructors, as well as concrete tools for troubleshooting friction in the classroom. Note: We highly encourage you to take Creating Inclusive Classrooms before participating in this workshop.
Leading Discussion Sections Remotely
The aim of this workshop is to help further develop your confidence in your ability to teach remotely by exposing you to a variety of active learning strategies in digital environments. We will help you begin developing a toolkit for engaging your students effectively during an online discussion section, with opportunities to practice these tools.
Teaching Hot Topics
This workshop builds on concepts and strategies from Creating Inclusive Classrooms and Interrupting Bias in the Classroom to help instructors learn how to address hot topics in their classrooms when they arise. Participants will engage in and practice key concepts related to how to use dialogue in the classroom and how to challenge dominant narratives within texts. Instructors will also practice troubleshooting moments in the classroom when challenging content is being addressed. Note: We highly encourage you to take Creating Inclusive Classrooms and Interrupting Bias before participating in this workshop. Additionally, the content and discussion in this workshop will be necessarily engaging with topics related to sexual assault and racially oppressive language. The workshop facilitator will do their best to make this workshop a space where we can engage bravely, empathetically and thoughtfully with the difficult content.
Teaching Humanities and Social Science Writing
This workshop will address how to efficiently and effectively help students with their writing in your specific course. Through writing activities and discussions of best practices, you will learn to incorporate writing activities into your sections without losing time for addressing content.
Teaching Scientific Writing
Writing is a critical part of the scientific process, and you rely on students’ writing to show you what they have learned. Yet, in an already packed syllabus, it can be difficult to find time to help students improve their writing. This workshop will introduce you to strategies for integrating writing pedagogy into science and lab courses, tips for teaching students to write within accepted scientific writing structures, activities to teach students to revise their writing, and best practices for giving effective writing feedback.
Time Management
Being a TA can be challenging. You juggle research, teaching schedules, important meetings, and your personal life. There is no universal roadmap for how to keep all of these priorities balanced and sequenced properly, but this workshop will help you organize your quarterly schedule and prioritize tasks according to importance and urgency. You will learn strategies to achieve balance and identify online and campus resources to support your time-management goals.
The 2020 TA Conference Plenary Session features talks from Drs. Howard and Casey, distinguished UCLA instructors who represent the strength and skill of our teaching community. In this 1-hour session, attendees will learn more about who our students are at UCLA, understand why teaching is an important part of one’s role as an academic, and hear more about recommended teaching strategies and techniques. As instructors with extensive teaching expertise, Drs. Howard and Casey will also offer best practices for being a more inclusive and engaging remote instructor and meeting the diverse needs of the students in your classroom, no matter what else 2020 may bring.
About the speakers
Tyrone C. Howard, Ph.D.
Tyrone C. Howard is professor in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies’ at UCLA. Dr. Howard is also the inaugural director of the new UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families, which is a campus wide consortium examining academic, mental health, and social emotional experiences and challenges for the California’s most vulnerable youth populations. He is also the former Associate Dean for Equity, Diversity & Inclusion. Professor Howard’s research examines equity, culture, race, teaching and learning. Professor Howard has published over 75 peer reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and technical reports. He has published several bestselling books, among them, Why Race & Culture Matters in Schools and Black Male(d): Peril and promise in the education of African American males. His two most recent books, All Students Must Thrive, focuses on equity, race, trauma, and learning has become a must read for all educators. And “No More Teaching Without Positive Relationships ” examines the importance of relational trust between teachers and students to enhance students’ learning. Dr. Howard is considered one of the premiere experts on educational equity and access in the country. Dr. Howard is also the Director and Founder of the Black Male Institute at UCLA, which is an interdisciplinary cadre of scholars, practitioners, community members, and policy makers dedicated to examining the nexus of race, class, and gender of school age youth. A native and former classroom teacher of Compton, California, Dr. Howard named the recipient of the 2015 UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, which is the highest honor provided to teaching excellence at the university. In 2019, Dr. Howard was listed by Education Week as one of the 50 most influential scholars in the nation informing educational policy, practice and reform.
Jennifer Casey, Ph.D.
A California native, Dr. Casey attended California State University of Long Beach (CSULB) where she majored in chemistry and minored in mathematics as a Presidential Scholar. She performed research in organic chemistry with Dr. Kensaku Nakayama and in physical chemistry with Dr. Brian McClain. She received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from CSULB in 2007. After graduation, Jennifer joined the group of Dr. Benjamin Schwartz at UCLA as a physical chemistry graduate student where she investigated the structural properties of the hydrated electron using mixed quantum/classical molecular dynamics simulations. While at UCLA she also acted as a teaching assistant for many quarters, eventually earning the Hanson-Dow Excellence in Teaching Award in 2009. She participated in the NSF GK-12 program where she acted as a resident scientist for local high schools from 2010-2011. She completed her dissertation in 2014. After obtaining her Ph.D., Dr. Casey worked as a visiting-assistant professor at Sonoma State University from 2014-2015. There she worked on developing a Foundational Level General Science Waiver. In 2015 she lectured at Loyola Marymount University and participated in the Center for Teaching Excellence Credential Program. Dr. Casey is currently an Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA, where she primarily teaches general chemistry for life-science majors. She has recently won the prestigious Distinguished Teaching Award for Non-Senate Faculty in 2019, as well as the 2020 Hanson-Dow Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching. Dr. Casey’s work at UCLA also includes chemical education research conducted under the advisement of Dr. Arlene Russell.
CAT and CEILS collaborated to create a workshop for faculty and TAs centered around what TAs wish faculty knew about their experience teaching during this extraordinary time. The session is centered around questions of disruptions and difficulties that TAs are experiencing, how faculty and TAs can best communicate with each other, how to manage work expectations in this time of disruption, and how to function as a team in order to meet students’ needs.
Mid-quarter feedback is a quick way for instructors to gain important insights into how students are feeling about their progress and to learn what is and isn’t working in a class so that you can make adjustments. In this one-hour workshop, you will learn why you should ask your students for mid-quarter feedback, review some best practices for collecting information, and discuss what to do with feedback once you get it. You will leave the workshop with a toolkit for implementing mid-quarter feedback, including some templates for CCLE and Google Forms.