COE TA Panel 2002 Notes
These are notes stemming from the panel for new TAs given by the
College of Engineering during UW orientation, 2002. Thanks to Maria
Siciliano for organizing the panel. Contributions below reflect the
ideas of the moderator, Dean Chen-Ching Liu, and the three panelists,
Marsha Whitney, Charoenchai (Charlie) Khompatraporn, and myself, Steve
Wolfman. However, the opinions expressed are my own; so, don't blame
anyone else!
Resources
- CIDR
- CIDR
is the Center for Instructional Development and Research. From a TA's
perspective, the most important services CIDR can provide are
consultations and assessments on your teaching. You can start by
checking out their web page and focusing on the SGID (mid-course
teaching evaluations), micro-teaching, and similar services. However,
the best way to explore CIDR is just to set up a meeting with one of
their staff and ask them how they can help you. E-mail them
at info@cidr.washington.edu.
- Catalyst
- Catalyst gives you tools to help integrate technology into your
courses. As a CS grad student, I can vouch for the fact that these
tools are helpful even if you know your stuff on a computer, and I've
heard that they're especially valuable if you don't! There are tools
to build web pages, tools to get feedback from students, advice on
integrating technology, etc. I'm personally most excited by the Catalyst
toolbox. You'll need a UW NetID to log in.
- MyUW
- This is a source for all sorts of official university info and
services. Charlie mentioned the ability to set up mailing lists from
here (which I didn't know about!). You can manage various other
aspects of your account and course here. You can also find info about
getting your UW NetID from this page.
- Other resources
- CELT is an
Engineering-specific instructional development and research center
(like CIDR for engineers). PETTT is a
program specifically interested in technology in teaching. They're
research-focused but are definitely interested in establishing
collaborations with various departments and individuals and have lots
of cool stuff in the works. A great resource for starting to
understand the challenges facing underrepresented groups in
engineering—focusing on women in CS but broadly
applicable—is the book
Unlocking the Clubhouse by Margolis and Fisher.
Elaboration on the workshop
Quite a few excellent questions and points came up. Unfortunately,
that also left some other important points unsaid. I've tried to
summarize all the things I wanted to say but either didn't have time
or didn't get an opening to say below.
Before jumping in, let me give one caveat. Some of the advice
below sounds pretty time-intensive if you want to take every piece of
advice, cross every t, and dot every i. Taking this advice to extremes
may not be constructive, however. Try it out and use it to the extent
that it is constructive and not more. (The only exception to this is
taking notes: take that to extremes!)
Key steps to good TAing
We mentioned a few things that you can do to "be a good TA."
Here are the key steps as I see them, with several that didn't get
mentioned in the workshop in boldface with further notes.
- Take notes and reflect: these will come in handy when it's
time for you to teach your next class, write a teaching statement,
build a portfolio, or write recommendations for your students. (Yes,
they will ask you for recommendations!) A good habit is to write
yourself a note or e-mail message after each class summarizing your
interesting successes and failures and exciting student contributions
since the last note. It is absolutely impossible to emphasize enough
how much you will thank yourself later for taking these notes now.
- Know how your TAing relates to your research: your TAing
will get in the way of your research. It may also boost your research.
Understand and discuss with your advisor what the relationship between
your TAing and your research is. As an example, I do educational
technology research, and my observations of my class have given me
inspiration for my research. (OK, that's an easy one.) A friend who
does systems research designed a class to build applications on top of
the distributed system infrastructure he designed. Quite a few people
I know have recruited undergraduate research assistants from the
classes they TAed. Every TA I know uses their research expertise to
inspire problem sets and teaching perspectives for their classes.
- Don't be afraid to experiment, learn, and fail: it's
distressingly easy—especially for engineers—to accept the
idea that teaching is an art or talent and cannot be improved upon or
tampered with. I've even heard the ludicrous statement (sometimes from
accomplished teachers!) that trying to learn about how to teach well
will only ruin your teaching. Both of these sentiments are recipes for
avoiding experimentation and its frequent consequence, failure. You
should always be reading about, observing, and trying new
teaching techniques just as you would never let your
research stagnate. Be prepared for some of them to fail by
treating them like true experiments: set up the parameters of the
experiment beforehand, keep your subjects (the students) as informed
as possible about what is happening and why, and assess (again, with
your students) how the experiment turned out, not just
"determining" success or failure but noting strengths and
weaknesses and constructive feedback for the future.
- Make your instructor do his or her job: there should be
some things that are your responsibility and some things that are the
instructor's responsibility in a class. Know who is responsible for
what and hold the instructor accountable for her aspects of the
class. An excellent example is handling cases of academic
dishonesty. In CSE, this is almost always the responsibility
of the instructor. If you note a case of dishonesty, you report it to
the instructor, and she handles it. Furthermore, remember that, like
the captain of a ship, the instructor of a class is ultimately
responsible for every aspect of that class. So, for any
aspect that you can't get working smoothly, the instructor should be
one of the resources available to help you make it work.
- Think from your students' perspective: take some time to
think about your class, the material, and your relationship with
students from their perspective and make notes about what they might
need.
A good and simple example of this is telling your freshmen students
what to call you. Previously, their teachers were mostly Mr. or
Ms. (or Mrs. or Miss or some honorific in a foreign language!), and
now they're faced with faculty who are socially much closer because
the students are now adults yet also much farther because of those
new, intimidating honorifics: Professor and Doctor. For your part, you
are an entirely new beast to them: what is a graduate
student? An important social first step is knowing what form of
address to use with you. Just making that clear can make interacting
with you more comfortable. Plus, you can tell them what to call the
instructor! (BTW: I recommend using your first name with students
although class-inspired nicknames can be fun.)
- Prepare!
- Form community
- Get feedback
- Find and use resources
- Manage your time
- Get to know your students
- Get to know your instructor/staff members
Think about what you want out of teaching
It's important that you understand, going in, what you want to gain
from your teaching experience. Funding is an acceptable answer, but be
aware that it may not be (and probably isn't!) your only answer. The
satisfaction of teaching students is another good but usually implicit
answer. Other goals you might consider include: a teaching portfolio
to get teaching jobs later, enough experience and understanding of the
issues involved in teaching to write a strong teaching statement for a
research position, connections with faculty and students (esp. for
grad courses!) that will later further your research interests,
opportunities for experimentation with new techniques to make you a
stronger teacher, or even users/partners for your research projects.
All of these are reasonable and (usually) positive goals! Recognize
the goals that matter to you, and make your time TAing contribute to
accomplishing them!
Drawing lines
Drawing lines came up a couple of times during the workshop. Setting
boundaries on your teaching times and responsibilities will save you
from losing track of your other responsibilities: classes, research,
home-life, and service. Still, it can be difficult to draw those
lines: students may not understand when you need to be doing something
else or may be resentful of your "inattentiveness."
The key to making your boundaries stick is to manage
expectations. Make clear (to yourself and students) what you'll give
to this class and how you'll indicate your status. The "open-door
policy" I mentioned is an example of this although it's a bit
impractical in 15 person offices. Consider other ways to make this
work: post not just office hours but "do not disturb" hours (e.g.,
"Thursday and Sunday are my days off from class"), make an IM account
just for teaching and have its availability status reflect your
status, put a sign on your lab's door with a spinner showing your
availability, buy a hat with "TA" on it and wear it when you're
free... Whatever works!
A key trick: "double-billing"
Did you ever have an engineering course requiring a design project at
the same time that a humanities course wanted an eight-page paper and
a research paper was due and wonder if you could get away with turning
the same thing in for all three? Well, if you can find that sort of
"double-billing" opportunity in your teaching, coursework,
service, and research, you should usually do
it!
There's nothing wrong with making an overlap between research and
teaching work for you as long as you invest some time to make sure
that the interests of the other parties (your advisor, your students,
your instructor, the university, society, etc.) are addressed. Using
your current research to inspire problem sets for students or having
students build on a system you constructed for your research or for a
graduate class are good examples of this.
Created by Steve Wolfman
September 23, 2002
Copyright 2002
Copying is permitted as long as: this copyright notice is included,
citation is maintained to the organizer, moderator, and panelists, and
a link to this site is given. Fair use is allowed as always. Parodies
are especially encouraged.