Campus-wide Teaching Assistant Awards

The University of Wisconsin–Madison provides over 2,000 teaching assistant (TA) opportunities to graduate students across a wide variety of disciplines. The contributions of TAs in the classroom, lab, studio, and field are essential to the university’s educational mission.

In order to recognize excellence on the part of TAs across campus, each year the Graduate School, with administrative and financial assistance from the College of Letters & Science and the Morgridge Center, sponsors awards for exceptional teaching by graduate students. These awards are open to all UW–Madison master’s and doctoral students appointed as TAs.

The campus-wide TA Awards recognize student excellence in six categories:

The Early Excellence in Teaching Award recognizes outstanding and inspirational performance on the part of TAs with fewer than four semesters of teaching experience.

The Exceptional Service Award recognizes TAs who, in addition to their regular duties, perform exceptional service related to the educational mission of their department and our university (volunteerism, committee work, mentoring, etc.).

The Innovation in Teaching Award recognizes TAs who bring extraordinary creativity to their work and have developed or adapted teaching methods or techniques in new and innovative ways.

The Capstone PhD Teaching Award recognizes TAs who have performed as outstanding teachers throughout their UW–Madison tenure. This category honors TAs who are dissertators at the end of their graduate program and planning to defend their dissertations by the end of the academic year.

The Dorothy Powelson Teaching Assistant Award recognizes outstanding performances by TAs in the natural sciences.

The Excellence in Community-based Learning Teaching Award recognizes TAs who have demonstrated outstanding instruction using a community-based learning approach.