The Role Of Teaching Assistants

To help create a supportive learning environment for students, teaching assistant must collaborate daily with parents, teachers, and other professionals. Effective communication is an indispensable tool for helping to ensure that all parties understand how they play an essential role in a student’s development. The ability to communicate effectively becomes particularly critical when faced with an oppositional, unsupportive, or adversarial colleague.
Whether it is a controversial IEP meeting, professional development workshop on a difficult topic, or an informal consultation on a difficult case, it is almost guaranteed that teaching assistant will eventually meet a staff member who challenges their ideas, unintentionally (or intentionally)
Proactively communicating their role is the first step to preventing or lowering potential obstacles with colleagues. Discussing their role and expertise with colleagues, and how they might be able to help them individually, can go a long way to putting potentially contentious relationships at ease. Teaching assistants should think of themselves as a resource to the entire school, not only to special education students and teachers. They should make sure professionals within the school community feel comfortable approaching them with issues that may impact their effectiveness with the students. Teaching assistants should offer to meet with staff to find out specifically how they might help them during the year. When colleagues categorize teaching assistants within a specific role, it has the potential to limit their effectiveness on a team. If a person demonstrates a lack of understanding of their comprehensive training and role or ability to use their skills, teaching assistant could consider spending time one on- one with that individual to problem-solve a situation they have with a student so that person can see, first hand, their ability to help analyse the situation and present possible
E-mail and other forms of electronic communication are tremendous tools at work. They make it possible to communicate remotely, quickly, and to more than one person at a time. However, the always-present danger with technological communication is that people cannot read nonverbal cues or tone, or even know for certain when the message was delivered. Additionally, some people simply are not comfortable communicating through cyberspace. These issues must always be considered, and particularly when communicating with challenging colleagues. Electronic communication is rarely effective when trying to resolve a disagreement or work through complex issues. Electronic communication is best used to ask and answer questions, query how someone is doing, provide a quick update, share a resource or simple suggestion, offer to help, or schedule some time to meet. A rule of thumb that seems to help is to keep e-mail communication to a paragraph or two. Longer e-mails likely require a face-to-face meeting to discuss