How I Communicate With My Teaching Staff For My 200+ Student Class

This article is also posted on my personal blog so it is freely accessible.

This is post #3 of a 5 post series on how I organize the teaching staff for my 200+ student class. This post discusses how I communicate with my teaching staff. I first go over how the semester starts because part of communication is setting the tone for the semester. Then I spend the rest of the post discussing how I center all of my communication in Slack, a chat tool that enables organizing conversations through channels. I discuss who is in which channel, how I use Slack integrations, my Slack philosophy, and Slack etiquette.

The other posts in this series are as follows (I’ll update with links as I post):

1. Overview
2. Teaching staff roles
3. How I communicate with my teaching staff (You are here)
4. How I track the to-do list
5. How I run the head staff meetings

Terminology

Rather than require you to read my teaching staff roles post, here is a quick refresher:

• Teaching Associate (TA+) — A full-time department staff member (not a student) assigned to my class. She serves as my right-hand person with many and varied responsibilities.
• Teaching Assistant (TA) — Graduate students responsible for mainly the gradebook and autograder.
• Head Undergraduate TA — Undergraduate students that have TAed before and are responsible for organizing other UTAs.
• UTA — Undergraduate students that either teach lab in pairs with about 25 students per lab or focus on grading the hand-graded portion of assignments or exams.
• Head staff — TA+, TAs, and head UTAs

Beginning of the semester

At the beginning of the semester, I email everyone to welcome them to the teaching staff. This email provides links, important information, forms they need to fill out, and tasks they need to do. When it comes to communication, two things in that email are: (1) when our all-hands meeting is and (2) that they must accept their Slack invitation and check Slack at least once a day.

All-Hands Meeting

This meeting almost always coincides with the first lab training, except rather than just lab undergrad TAs attending, everyone must attend. This meeting serves the following purposes:

I get to meet everyone. Meeting everyone is important because, after this meeting, I’m not likely to physically meet the non-head-staff UTAs. The most likely place I’ll see them is at grading parties or if they volunteered to help me with something.

Everyone gets to meet each other. I aim to hire at least 3–5 never-TAed-before UTAs every semester. This tactic is to increase my pool of potential hires every semester because Duke students often study abroad for at least one semester and to handle regular attrition. I encourage them to introduce themselves by reminding them that these are the colleagues they may be called on to cover a consulting hour shift or lab.

The graders get to meet each other. Due to the nature of the grader job, they do not meet as often as lab UTAs. The all-hands meeting is an opportunity to give the head grader UTA a chance to meet the graders before their first mini-grading party. Most of it is setting expectations and logistics.

Slack for everything!

As I said earlier, the welcome email UTAs receive from me includes a requirement they accept the Slack invitation and check it daily. This requirement is because all of our communication goes through our Slack workspace. It serves as our central repository of announcements, logistics, and discussion. If someone on the staff needs to communicate with another person, the default is Slack to reduce the risk a notification goes unnoticed. After the first week of the semester, I check to see if any UTAs have not accepted the invite and send a reminder email if they have not.

For those that have never used Slack, I highly recommend it as an excellent middle ground between instant messaging and email. It’s more of an instant messaging app. However, it has features like conversation threading that allows for a bit more asynchronous communication. Moreover, it has some handy integrations if you use other tools to organize your group. We use GitHub and Trello. I organize Slack mainly around channels, which are like group chat rooms, that can be public to the group or private. We organize ourselves by channel, which I will go into detail next.

Channels for Everyone

There are only two channels that everyone must be in, the #announcements and #general channel. I expected everyone to read anything that is posted in these channels.

Channels based on Responsibilities

Below is a list of the channels I have in my Slack. A public channel is one that anyone in the workspace can see and join. A private channel is one only those invited can view and join.

Consulting-hours [public] — As I’ve mentioned in previous posts (TODO: link), the office hours held by UTAs are called consulting hours. Any UTA that does consulting hours (which is all of them) must be in this channel. The primary uses for this channel are (1) asking someone to swap or cover their shift, (2) quick reminders about using our online queue tool, and (3) requests for volunteers to pick up an extra shift for crunch time.

Lab [public] — All lab UTAs are in this channel. This channel is for announcements specific to labs, mainly centered around discussing when the grading lab material is available.

Graders [public] — All the grader UTAs are in this channel. It is mostly used for logistics around each assignment and exam for grading.

Head-staff [private] — This channel has only my head staff. It is private because we have discussions involving other UTAs or students that would not be appropriate for anyone to see. I use it to remind the head staff of things, discuss ideas, and get their opinions on specific matters.

TA+-grad-ta [private] — This channel only has my TA+ and grad TAs. Due to Duke requirements, there is certain information that undergraduate students cannot be privy to. That information and those discussions happen in this channel. We rarely use this channel.

Grading-* [public] — We have a separate channel for each significant grading “event.” So each assignment and exam gets its own channel. This channel separation is to make it easier to find and contain those discussions.

Tutoring [public] — After the first midterm, we organize small tutoring groups for students run by UTAs. This channel is for them.

Auto-grader [public] — This is for all staff that work on the auto-grader for the assignments. It’s also a channel for the other UTAs to ask questions about the auto-grader and point out class forum posts about it.

Slack Integrations

Slack has many integrations. We use two, GitHub and Trello, with private channels. The GitHub integration is with our website repo. The Trello integration is with the head staff’s Trello board that tracks all of our tasks.

The main reason why the channels for these are private is to control how information gets out. Sometimes a commit message has something in it we wouldn’t want all the teaching staff to know, like specific links to resources that we haven’t released yet. Or a Trello card has something that we would not want everyone to be aware of (e.g., which UTAs we do and do not want to rehire next semester).

GitHub [private]

This integration is between my TA+ and me. All commits to the master branch appear here, along with links, the commit message, and who made the commit. It’s a great way to know when she’s updated the website with my latest change requests. We also use it to message each other about specific commits.

Trello [private]

This channel is only for head staff and is all the notifications generated as states change in the Trello board. I’ll talk more about how I use Trello with my head staff in a later post. My main uses for it are:

1. Check how tasks are evolving on the Trello board.
2. Start a thread and @ someone on a notification to make sure they are aware of it. For example, I may make a card in the middle of the week that is a task I’d like a head staff member to get done before the next meeting.

My Slack philosophy

I believe in transparency. Therefore, I do my best to have discussions in as public a channel as appropriate. This philosophy is so others can stay on top of what is going on. The last thing I want is to discuss something that affects others in a too private channel and then repeat myself in another channel. I summarize these discussions at times, but I’d rather my staff feel that I trust them with the appropriate information. One way I try to do that is with transparency. A concrete example is in my head-staff channel, I often discuss with a single head staff person about a topic (like how to change an assignment) because if anyone else has an idea or opinion, I want them to feel free to chime in.

One type of conversation I do not have in a public channel is when I’m correcting a staff member’s behavior. Those are in direct messages to that person or in person. In those situations, I want to enable them to correct their behavior without damaging everyone else’s opinion of them.

Slack etiquette that is mostly unspoken

• The #random channel has everyone in it by default, and it truly is for random stuff. We barely use it. I usually post fun or informative things there. The informative things are not relevant to the UTAs being teachers but may apply to a subset when it comes to being a student. For example, a summer program some of them may find interesting.
• Use reactions (placing an emoji on a message) rather than responding in a thread to reduce the need to read responses. Reactions are most often used as an acknowledgment with a thumbs-up emoji that you’ve read something. We’ve also used reactions to vote on things like what food to order for grading parties.

Summary

In summary, I have some startup communication activities with my teaching staff, and then we quickly go into a steady rhythm centered around Slack. Questions or comments? Remember, the top of this post will have links to the other four posts in this series as they go live.

If you have a particular question you’d like me to address, please leave a comment! I have all the posts in this series mostly written and plan to release one a week. This way, I can try to address any questions before I publish each post.