Barriers and Gaps in Teaching Assistant Development

Graduate Teaching Assistants (TAs) are critical to student success and retention in higher education. However, the extent to which TAs receive training and ongoing support for their instructional positions varies across academic departments, leaving many feeling unprepared for their classroom responsibilities and future job market prospects. By interviewing TA Coordinators and Directors of Graduate Studies, we seek to understand the challenges TA coordinators face when preparing graduate TAs to be effective teachers and determine the gaps that exist between academic departments and educational developers as it relates to training TAs for their teaching assignments.