A case study of the development of CS teaching assistants and their experiences with team teaching

Teaching assistants play a vital role in lab-based teaching at large institutions, with a large impact on students' success in CS1. How do TAs develop as teachers? We extended existing models of teacher development for our context of teaching CS labs in pairs. We found practice, teaching multiple courses, mentoring, effective staff meetings, team teaching, and feedback all contributed to TAs' development. Team teaching was a positive experience for our TAs, and allowed them to learn from each other. While teaching labs, TAs learnt mostly from partners who had more course-specific experience, rather than general teaching experience.