The TA Development Program (TADP) offers campus-wide training, resources, and consultation services for UCSB’s Teaching Assistants (TAs). We have workshops and certificate programs for new, mid-career, and experienced TAs that develop graduate students’ teaching competencies and prepare them for future careers as faculty. We also frequently partner with the Graduate Division, GauchoSpace, and CITRAL to provide comprehensive support.
This Quarter's TA Workshops on Shoreline TA Certificate Programs
Teaching Assistant Orientation - Fall 2022
TA Orientation will help you get prepared to teach at UCSB! It is required for all NEW Teaching Assistants and Readers who will be a TA or Reader anytime in 2022-23. It consists of online modules and attendance at a live webinar and in-person workshops at UCSB on the Monday and Tuesday before Fall Quarter instruction begins.
- Register for TA Orientation as soon as possible.
- Online modules will be available in early September.
- Monday, September 19 from 6 - 7:30pm: Live webinar with Experienced TA Panel Discussion and Q&A
- Tuesday, September 20 from 10am - 12pm: Workshops on campus

TADP Professional Development for TAs at UCSB
Programs | Early Career TAs | Mid Career | Future Faculty |
---|---|---|---|
TA Orientation |
X |
|
|
X |
X |
|
|
Pedagogy Workshops |
X |
X |
X |
Video Consultation |
X |
X |
X |
TA funding |
X |
X |
X |
|
|
X |
|
|
|
X |
|
Grad 210: College & University |
|
|
X |
|
|
X |
TA Development

TA Community
Join the TA Development Program community on Nectir to give and receive great advice about teaching at UCSB.

Info for New TAs
See here for resources specific to new TAs, including information about TA Orientation.

TA Programs
Attend a TA Training Program to improve your teaching skills or prepare for your future career as a faculty member.

International TAs
Click here for more information about teaching in the American context.
TA Workshops
TA Development Program workshops are open to all UCSB TAs. Please register to attend workshops in advance to guarantee your spot. Please inform us if you cannot attend a workshop so we can offer your spot to someone on the waitlist. For technical training in GauchoSpace, GradeScope, i>Clicker, Nectir and other campus-supported technologies, please see the educational technology help pages or email the help desk.
Pillars of Teaching Assistantship Workshops
There are 6 workshops in the Pillars certificate series. You can attend the workshops in any order. Click here for details about each Pillars workshop and the certificate program.
Being part of an academic community is a hallmark of the UCSB educational experience. This workshop introduces TAs to the values, perspectives, and strategies we use at UCSB to foster a sense of belonging and community in our classes.
Students learn better when they are actively participating in the learning process rather than passively listening. In this workshop, you will differentiate between active learning and passive listening, identify elements that foster active learning, and apply a variety of instructional methods.
Creating lessons is essential, but how can we ensure those lessons are engaging for our students? In this workshop, you will use learning objective taxonomies and a lesson planning framework to design active, student-centered classes.
Much of a TA’s role during section is to formulate generative questions, structure activities that check student understanding, and give effective feedback. In this workshop, you will explore several classroom-based assessment and questioning techniques that are based on the principles of giving effective feedback.
TAs are responsible for creating, implementing, and evaluating assessments. But what makes a good assessment? How can we use assessment to support learning? And what are some reasonable ways to grade student work? In this workshop, you will use principles from evidence-based design to make assessments more focused and impactful, and help you with practical grading strategies.
Good teachers never stop learning how to improve their classes. This workshop helps TAs develop a sustainable plan for continuous improvement and professional development as teachers.
Specialty Quarterly Workshops
Our specialty workshops change every quarter and are designed with the mid-career TA in mind. Below are descriptions of workshops that are offered frequently. Check our Instructional Development Shoreline Events for TA workshops offered this quarter.
Writing a Teaching Philosophy Statement can be a challenge, and is required for most teaching positions. At the same time, examining and articulating your teaching philosophy can help you to become a more effective instructor. You will work through a series of exercises to help you reflect on your teaching, and draft an outline of your teaching philosophy statement.
The session will provide tips on writing the CCUT teaching portfolio, including ways of presenting teaching materials, documenting student ratings, meeting the technology requirement, tone of the portfolio narration, and more. Participants need to have completed at least two of the CCUT requirements. Please note that if you are completing your doctorate degree in Summer, the final date that you may submit your CCUT portfolio is Week 5 of Spring quarter.
In this workshop you will learn how to interpret statistics from your ESCI (UCSB’s student evaluations of teaching) reports, find trends in the data, and strategize about how to enhance your teaching based on students’ feedback. We will also discuss approaches for summarizing your ESCI data for the academic job market.
The session will provide tips on writing the CCUT teaching portfolio, including ways of presenting teaching materials, documenting student ratings, meeting the technology requirement, tone of the portfolio narration, and more. Participants need to have completed at least two of the CCUT requirements. Please note that if you are completing your doctorate degree in Summer 2021, the final date that you may submit your CCUT portfolio is Friday, April 30th.
Contacts
TA Development Program
1130 Kerr Hall
id-tadp@ucsb.edu
805-893-2972