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Preparing to Teach: Building Confidence, Clarity, and Community through CETLI’s TA Training

Locust Walk, University of Pennsylvania, filled with students under a canopy of green leaves turning orange in early fall.

30Jan’26

Feature Stories, Spotlights

January 30, 2026 by Erin Bartnett

Here’s the scenario: you have hundreds of new TAs entering classrooms across the University of Pennsylvania. Those TAs will go on to teach recitations and labs, connecting with thousands of Penn students, and to support faculty in their classes. How do you prepare them for the first day, for the semester, for teaching through their careers?  

One way you might go about this task, is to have a team of highly experienced, award-winning, and passionate Penn TAs lead the way.  

Last year, CETLI trained TAs and LAs from across the university in five trainings and orientations. The largest training CETLI organizes each year is the three-day event for doctoral students in August. Over the course of those three days, new TAs learn about Penn students, explore relevant support resources, and participate in teaching workshops and demonstrations related to their disciplines run by a team of graduate TA Trainers who are hired and trained months in advance.

Clarifying Teaching Values

Demo day is a really nice time to get to be in a small community of people. It’s usually vastly different people from your department or discipline.
Taylor L. Smith
Taylor L. Smith
Annenberg School for Communication

When Taylor L. Smith of Annenberg saw the flyer to become a CETLI TA Trainer, she took note. She had gone through the CETLI training herself and had won a departmental teaching award with her co-TA. Through CETLI Graduate Fellows in her school, she participated in departmental teaching workshops and found those useful. She enjoyed teaching and had become familiar with CETLI. She decided to apply. 

Going through TA training as a trainer gave Smith a new perspective on the program’s value for building community. The second day of TA training, also known as “Demo Day,” when new TAs get an opportunity to practice a 10-minute teaching demonstration, became a personal favorite. “Demo day is a really nice time to get to be in a small community of people,” she says. “It’s usually vastly different people from your department or discipline.”  

It also provided an opportunity to reflect on one’s pedagogical values. From the beginning, Smith recalls, “the thing that Ian and Karen kept saying is ‘Be meta, be meta’. I think that was the biggest switch between being a TA or even, a good or great TA, and becoming a TA trainer. It’s learning how to be meta, how to explain intention behind choices.” Being a TA trainer, she realized, was about more than orientation: “You’re helping [new TAs] start on this introspective process about their teaching.”  

Becoming a TA trainer was its own introspective process. As the TA trainers worked through their own teaching scenarios—drafting workshops, going through rehearsals for their teaching workshops, and facilitating those workshops and demo days for their trainees—they realized they were also clarifying their own teaching choices.  

Learning to Design, Test, and Refine Teaching Practices

Preparation for TA training begins months before that first August morning. CETLI opens TA trainer applications the spring semester before the training. The newly minted TA trainer cohort gathers later that spring for an initial introduction, both to each other and to CETLI staff, Ian Petrie, Karen Lagasse, and Whitney Howell, and the graduate student coordinators, Sasha Zborovsky and Pia Bhatia, who are returning, experienced trainers themselves. 

Then, each trainer meets one-on-one with their CETLI staff member and coordinator to begin drafting the workshop. Sam Layding of Engineering, who would go on to become a CETLI TA trainer twice, found the one-on-one support invaluable. While they had experience as a TA, both at their undergraduate institution and Penn, they hadn’t gone through the CETLI TA training, so didn’t know what to expect. “That individual attention,” they say, helped them improve their workshop from the jump. “A different person came out of that first meeting that I had with Karen than the one who went into it. She really showed me how to organize my thoughts around a workshop in a way that I think would be hard to derive on my own.” 

Next, through the month of May, the TA trainers meet for run-through days, where each trainer presents a draft of their workshop for the whole TA trainer group. The cohort of accepted TA Trainers includes graduate students with a wide range of experiences— some have gone through the TA training themselves, but some, like Layding, are entering the training for the first time as trainers.  

For Emma Kocik of Earth and Environmental Sciences, going through TA training had been her first experience at Penn. It was where she met her cohort for the first time, too. While participating as a trainee had been useful, preparing to be a trainer put that initial experience into a new perspective: “What was shocking to me was just how much work went into the preparations,” she says. 

Indeed, workshop run-through days are long, bonding days. “It takes a couple of full days of commitment,” Layding acknowledges, “but it’s worth it because it makes the finished product so much better for the people we’re trying to train.”   

Building Confidence as an Instructor

After these three days, [participants] will go back to their department and they will basically be a TA, having gathered all the experience and knowledge from the trainers. It’s such a great feeling.
Oualid Merzouga
Oualid Merzouga
School of Arts & Sciences

You would think that Oualid Merzouga of Mathematics would be unfazed by the first day of CETLI TA Training, because he has been through the Math Department’s own TA Training four times—twice as a TA, and twice as a trainer. But when he saw the room filled with nearly 300 new TAs on that first day, he was “a little bit surprised by the scale of it. I heard all those numbers,” he says, “but when you’re faced with the huge amount of people coming to the program, that’s a different story.”   

He was struck by the significance of the moment: most of the new doctoral TAs at Penn were sitting in one room. “And everything that they’re going to learn is going to come from our team, the TA trainer team. After these three days, they will go back to their department and they will basically be a TA, having gathered all the experience and knowledge from the trainers. It’s such a great feeling,” he says. 

After the Welcoming Plenary, TA trainers conduct their well-honed workshops on topics that will be relevant for TAs to prepare for, based on their discipline. Topics include grading, teaching problem-solving recitations and labs, and leading discussions. 

“I don’t think we give people the ‘correct’ way to be instructors,” Smith says. “What we are really attempting to do is give people strategies, processes, and techniques to reflect on to get them to build their own confidence as an instructor.”  

For Merzouga, the small group discussion of possible scenarios was an experience that highlighted how good teaching can often feel very collaborative. He asked his group to consider this: A TA is holding office hours but closes his door. There are students lining up outside, knocking, but the TA doesn’t open the door because he wants to get work done. What do you do? “The whole room was brainstorming,” he says. “Nobody was left to their own devices.”  

What's Next?

TA training is over. The TAs are prepared. What happens next? 

Merzouga shared his CETLI grading workshop with the faculty in the Math department, who wanted to implement it for all the PhD students in the department. Smith and Kocik became CETLI fellows, which gave them the opportunity to run teaching workshops tailored to the graduate teaching concerns for members of their respective departments.   

Layding says doing all that work to articulate their own teaching choices paid off. After being a TA trainer, “I felt way more prepared. I enjoyed giving lectures and running recitation sections, and even just having office hour conversations with students.”  

Apply to Be a TA Trainer

TA Trainer applications are are open now, and will close on Friday, February 13 at 5pm.

So here it is, the final scenario: you read this story, you see a flyer, you get the email. Should you apply?  

“From my 7 years here at Penn, this was the absolute best experience in terms of how much you’re going to learn in a very short amount of time,” Merzouga says. “It’s going to require a lot of work, but the satisfaction is just through the roof.” 

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