teacher assistant duties

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teacher assistant duties
By Cathy-Dee

I think it is important to find out what your role is within the school and your district. Every province and state has different ideas and it is important to define those ideas.

In Alberta a teaching assistant is there
for the students not the teacher. In other words although I can ask my teacher assistant to help with a bulletin board or marking, those things can only be done during times where she is not able to work with the student(s) she was hired to work with. In some cases she (or he) may not need to be with their students, like gym or library. In other cases they need to be with their child

full-time and not be able to do any marking, etc.,

I would just ask your administrator if there is a book or guidelines printed that outline some of the duties you will be excepted to perform. If he/she asks why, you can just say that you want to make sure you are doing everything you can within your classroom to help the teacher and the students. And it may not even hurt to say that you just wanted to clarify a few things because you only seem to do marking, etc., and you wondered if you should be doing more or not because you didn't want to overstep your role. In this way you are not accusing the teacher of anything and yet opening the admininstrator's eyes to what is happening.