Teaching Tips (including Best Practices)

Table of Contents

• There has been a departmental policy that if a student fails a course because of a failed final exam, failed project, or other component of the course that must be passed in order to pass the course, the student's mark is the minimum of the computed mark for the term and a mark of 45. (This is the usual policy; however, it helps to put this statement in the course outline, to avoid any misunderstandings. Remind your students about this rule towards the end of the course.)

• Joyce Poon and the "TA coordinator" elected by CSGSA (see http://www.cs.ubc.ca/spider/csgsa/representatives.html#Other) will select the TAs for you. If you want TAs with particular backgrounds (e.g., TAs who have done well in specific courses (as evidenced by their transcripts)), or if you don't think that your currently assigned TAs are well suited to your needs, then contact Joyce or the TA coordinator as soon as possible!
• It helps to have a brief meeting with your proposed TAs, to get an idea of their strengths (or lack of them!) for your particular course. Consider the following aspects of your course, when determining how well-suited a TA is to your course:
  • Marking
  • Giving Labs
  • Giving Tutorials
  • Holding Consulting Hours
  • Answering Discussion Group (Bulletin Board, Newsgroup) Questions
  • Programming
  • Creating Assignments
  • Creating Solutions
• It is strongly advised that you put each TA's responsibilities in writing. Mention that the TAs will be evaluated at various stages in the course by the students and the instructor. Hopefully, this will encourage TA responsibility.

Pedagogy

Encourage Thinking

• Encourage open-ended thinking and assignments, especially in 3rd and 4th year courses.
• Expose students to (some) research in 4th year courses.
• Teach higher-order skills (e.g., how to construct an argument), rather than tailoring your teaching to satisfy the popular question: "Is this going to be on the final exam?"
• Avoid spoon-feeding (unless a particular topic is best served by spoon-feeding). By spoon-feeding, we mean: showing students the step-by-step solution to a problem that they could reasonably figure out on their own. For example, to reduce their workload, and to avoid reading the textbook or the course notes or looking up other resources, students often post or e-mail questions. Some instructors, TAs, and fellow students are all too happy to oblige, and some students rely on this method to complete their assignments.
• Beware of students that come to office hours and want the "answer" to assignment questions. Help them to learn to help themselves.
• We need to get students to take charge of much of their own learning.
• Train students to become independent problem solvers.
• Assume that students have the proper prerequisites for a course, and that they are doing the assigned reading in the course. Then, the lecture time can be spent more profitably.

Encourage Reflection

• It would be good to have students reflect upon what they've learned, and thereby answer questions like:
  • How do these pieces of the course fit together?
  • Why is this material important?
  • What have I gained from this assignment, in exchange for the hours that I've put in?
  • What new ideas/concepts can I take from this course and apply to my next co-op work term, my career, a research topic, an idea for starting my own company, etc?
  • In what ways has this material sparked my interest into further exploration of this topic (on my own time)?

Examinable Material

• Emphasize to the students that any material that is taught (but is not examinable) is still beneficial to their learning.
• Since there's often far more material in a course than can be reasonably covered in a final exam, consider putting some questions (that you don't intend to ask) in a "sample" final exam. This will encourage students to learn that material.

Workload

• It is true that the amount of coverage for a typical computer science course today is far greater today than it was 10-20 years ago, but recall that students today have Google, online course materials like lecture slides and tutorials, far better textbooks (usually), etc. Still, be careful not to overload the students. As a rule of thumb, the amount of homework should be about 2-3 hours per lecture hour.
• Before adding new material to a course, think about what should come out to make room for the material that you plan to add!

Textbook Room

• Current textbooks (and some old textbooks, and some useful reference books) are in the Textbook/Supplies Room. Please keep the room reasonably organized, by keeping together those books related to a specific course.
• Don't forget to sign out any books that you are borrowing. The sign-out book is managed by the receptionist at the Main Office's front desk. Unless you are teaching a course, please use discretion on taking books because we sometimes run out of textbooks for TAs and instructors, and this can be very frustrating at the start of the term. Re-orders are time-consuming and expensive (and students indirectly foot the bill).
  • e.g., At one time we had 10-15 copies of a database book (worth up to $140 a copy); yet we still ran out of these books for the few TAs we had for a database course. The former TAs said they returned their copies, and there was no record of signout for the other copies.

Other Resources

• There's a great set of resources for undergrad teaching at https://secweb.cs.ubc.ca/local/views/ta.shtml, including the UBC Computer Science Instructor Manual
• The Faculty of Science's teaching page can be found at http://www.science.ubc.ca/index.htm?http://www.science.ubc.ca/teaching.htm
• Course scheduling for the following winter (no graduate courses are offered in the summer) starts in February. As it is extremely difficult to find large size classrooms, instructors are encouraged to submit their course scheduling requirements for the following year as early as possible. Contact Joyce Poon if you want to schedule a grad course.
• You can use https://ssc.adm.ubc.ca/fsc/servlets/SRVFSCFramework to give you a classlist for the classes you're teaching, or you can simply use the command "classlist [classnumber]" to give you a quasi-up-to-date listing. Classlist's database is refreshed nightly at the start of a term, and sporatically thereafter.

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