Behind the Scenes: How TAs Quietly Hold Courses Together

I did not plan to become “the TA person.”

I arrived in Canada as an international PhD student in Computer Science, assuming most of my identity here would be about research. Instead, over four years, I found myself in more than fifteen courses, across roles that stretched from late-night marker, Head TA and course instructor. Somewhere along the way, I observed a pattern. The courses that seemed more effective, structured, coherent, and humane for students were never held up by one person (i.e., the instructor) at the front of the room. They were often held together by systems, and TAs were often the ones quietly building those systems.

At TA Days, as I shared some of these experiences, I was thinking about how much invisible labour resides within the position of “TA.” This reflection is for anyone who has ever wondered what actually happens behind the scenes, and how small structural choices can change the experience of hundreds of students, without burning out TAs.

My first large-classroom role as a TA at Dalhousie was a foundational programming course with around one hundred students. On paper, my job was simple: run labs, answer questions, and grade the lab tasks (I was also a marker). In practice, the work started long before I met the students. Before each lab, I would run every exercise myself and deliberately “fail” in the ways I knew students probably would. I broke the starter code, misread instructions, pushed the wrong branch. This was not over-preparation; it was survival. It meant that when a student’s code failed in a very predictable way in Week 3, I already had a short, precise explanation and a minimal fix instead of a 20-minute live debugging session that derails the class. It made me look calm and competent. The truth was simpler—I had seen this movie yesterday! That habit became my first rule. If we expect students to take learning seriously, we must take preparation seriously. Not with heroic improvisation, but with boring, repeatable systems.

The same applied to grading. Early on, I learned that if you let ten people interpret a vague rubric alone at one o’clock in the morning, you do not get “rigour,” you get roulette. So, when I stepped into Head TA roles, the very first thing I did was slow everyone down. We wrote detailed rubrics. We tested them on real samples together before anyone touched a full stack of papers. We argued about half-marks in a 30-minute calibration meeting, where TAs graded a few samples together to align on standard, so we did not have to argue with 100 students later. We tracked edge cases in a shared document, so decisions were transparent and re-usable. It was definitely not glamorous work, but it turned grading from each TA’s personal ethics into a shared standard students could trust.

What students saw was “the TAs are fair.” What actually made it fair was process!

As I moved into mentoring other TAs in the Head TA role, I started to see how often we set them up to fail, especially the new TAs. We tell them to “support students” but often without defining boundaries. We give them inboxes full of crisis emails or late-night Teams chats, but no explicit authority to say, “no.” We expect consistency, but do not often give the time it takes to build it. So, I treated Head TA work as coordination. I centralized student questions into an evolving FAQ instead of asking every TA to answer the same email twenty times. I triaged message floods before deadlines so we could respond to what was urgent and ignore what was noise, while keeping policies intact. I encouraged TAs to document patterns—which questions kept returning, where instructions confused students, which tools constantly broke. That documentation loop fed back into instructors’ course design the next term. None of this is discipline specific. A TA in Nursing or History can do the same. Build one good FAQ, run one calibration session, surface two recurring design issues per term—these small actions have disproportionate impact.

When I eventually taught my own courses as primary instructor, I did not abandon my TA instincts; I leaned on them. In our multi-level software projects course, I restructured the class to feel like a working organization instead of a checklist of deliverables. We used professional tools, multi-term projects that carried forward instead of resetting each semester, and “360-degree” feedback, where students gave and received structured input from peers and teammates, so that assessment aligned with real responsibilities instead of box-ticking. Students thought this redesign was bold. In reality, it was built on everything I had learned while watching courses crack under invisible labour. If you do not design systems, people become the system. And people (TAs) burn out!

So, what does all of this mean for how we work with TAs?

First, TAs are not extra hands. They are often the only people who see the full pipeline—instructions, implementation, confusion, and fallout. If they are invited into the course design conversations early, they can flag problems from a unique perspective.

Second, structure is care. Every clear rubric, shared FAQ, and 30-minute calibration meeting is an act of care for both students and TAs. It reduces emotional labour, conflict, and rework. It also sends a message: fairness here is intentional, not accidental.

Third, kindness does not mean saying yes to everything. Over time I learned to be strict about deadlines, academic integrity, and scope, while still being human in how I communicated. When I summarize my own practice, it comes down to three actions that I shared at TA Days: be kind, be clear, be consistent. The order matters!

This is the key message to the TAs who are reading: You do not need a title to lead. If you are noticing the same confusion every week, write it down once and share it. If your marking team is scattered, ask for a short meeting and look at three papers together. If your boundaries are breaking, name it and negotiate. These are small, concrete moves.

To the instructors who are reading: Do not wait until course evaluations or a crisis to find out how your TAs are holding things together. Ask them what patterns they see. Pay them for the time it takes to do this work properly. Treat them as early-career educators, in recognition of the scope of work they take on. When you support that work directly, you strengthen the systems that make the course run well. Behind every smooth course, there is usually a TA (or a team of them) quietly running the systems that let learning happen!

Author bio: Sigma Jahan is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Dalhousie University. She has worked across more than 15 courses as a TA, Head TA, and instructor. Her teaching focuses on clear assessment, inclusive classrooms, and realistic expectations for TAs and students.