Can We Build an Excellent Undergraduate TA Program? Crowdsourcing a TA Training Curriculum

Computer Science enrollments grew rapidly for many years and have since remained at historically high levels. Due to the large enrollment, especially in introductory courses, the need for excellent teaching assistants (TAs), has remained extremely important. In response, numerous CS departments have turned to their expanding pool of undergraduate students to recruit Undergraduate Teaching Assistants (UTAs) to help scale instruction. These Undergraduate Teaching Assistants (UTAs) not only provide help with grading, but are also responsible for developing course resources, running lab sections, and mentoring both students and newly hired UTAs. Ultimately, UTAs have a significant role in affecting course climate, with a particular emphasis on building community, which has a positive impact on underrepresented student populations. Computer Science departments struggle with the challenges of finding, hiring, and training large numbers of teaching assistants. In both 2023 and 2024, this Birds of a Feather (BoF) session drew more than 75 participants, sparking lively discussions about the challenges of hiring and training effective teaching assistants. The first session centered on identifying shared challenges across institutions and exchanging ideas. In the second year, we shifted focus to gathering data from attendees' institutions and building a shared database on TA hiring and training practices. This year, we plan to take the next step by addressing a key challenge identified in previous sessions: developing a crowdsourced repository of best practices for TA training, with the long-term goal of using it as the foundation for a comprehensive TA training curriculum.