Teaching Assistant Responsibilities: Supporting Learning Processes

1. Teaching Assistant Responsibilities: Supporting Learning Processes Peter Hollenbeck, Biological Sciences Matthew Ohland, Engineering Education

2. Strategies for creating and maintaining effective relationships with students and faculty supervisors Learn their names if you can – pronunciation matters. Ask their names, names / photos, seating charts, say their names whenever you can. Eye contact is also important. If you can’t learn their names, ways to make them think you did Managing faculty expectations: Discuss early, attend classes with faculty member, make sure you are on the class email list. Review syllabus and assignments. Managing student expectations: Students are concerned about grades – they don’t need a guarantee, but they want to know what is required. Let students know you’re human. How relationships vary by race and gender and person to person

3. Strategies and appropriate practices for facilitating effective communication with students Stop, listen, respond. If you don’t have time, schedule a time. Particularly with minorities. Email when appropriate, because you can choose words carefully and keep a record. Never violate a student's confidence. Remain respectful. Trust, but verify – “I need this for my records so that others know that I am treating all students fairly” “If this is the only time this happens…” If you’re not comfortable answering, get back to the student later… but don’t do this too much.

4. A student says: • I’d like to change sections • I missed class (or lab). Can I attend another one and get credit? • I’m thinking about changing majors, who should I talk to? • Susan’s homework matches mine, but I got 5 fewer points.

5. A student says: • A friend of mine in another class has an easier TA. • Can you make sure I’m not on a team with any minority students? • I agree that I got this part of the homework wrong, but you shouldn’t have taken off so many points. • Can you please give me an estimate of my grade in the course?

6. A student says: • I’ll lose my scholarship if I don’t get an A in this class, and I’m really close. If I lose my scholarship, I’ll have to leave school. Is there anything I can do to raise my grade? • How do I do this lab task / HW? • Do you have a minute? (and you don’t) • I can’t turn in the homework because Blackboard was down last night when I tried to print it out to do it.

7. A student says: • My room got broken into, and the thief took my laptop, hard drive, wallet, all my IDs, and my school bag. In my bag are my course notes and my homework. The police said that the case may take a while or forever. I requested a report to prove what I say is true, and I may have to wait couple days for it. Could you please give me some advice?

8. A student emails • The homework asks us to calculate the volume of a sphere, but all we’re given is the radius. How am I supposed to proceed?

9. Team issues: • One of the students on my team never shows up for anything. • One of the students on my team always dominates and gets his way. What should I do? • My team can never find a time to meet. • My team never listens to any of my ideas—they constantly interrupt me when I’m speaking.

10. Team issues: • The other people on my team are useless. Can I just work on my own? • My team worked on a solution together, but the person who submitted it changed it first without discussing it with the rest of the team first. The version submitted wasn’t as good as what the team did as a group.

11. Team issues: • I think my teammates are plagiarizing material for part of our project, but I can’t prove it. • My team changed our solution completely after I left our last meeting. I totally disagree with the direction the project is taking now, but the team is sticking with this second approach that’s being pushed by another person on the team.

12. Team issues: • I did not answer the peer evaluation honestly because I thought my team members could see it. I would have been honest if I knew it affected my grade. Could you reopen it for me?

13. Scenarios: • You’ve finished grading homework #4, and now you’re returning it. You don’t have a paper to return to a particular student, because there wasn’t one in the pile of homework you graded. The student says he turned one in. What do you say?

14. Strategies for answering student questions during office hours Why are office hours important? One-on-one interaction is helpful for each student in different ways and for different reasons. Questions often come up during studying, reading, reviewing lecture notes, working problem sets, or doing writing assignments – not during lecture, lab or recitation. Asking questions in large lectures can be intimidating or even impossible.

15. Strategies for answering student questions during office hours Strategies for getting students to attend office hours when they need help. Make sure that time, place and purpose are absolutely clear. Try to get all TAs in a course to hold hours in the same place. Set office hours at times when students can make it. Try an informal poll of students, or the Banner algorithm, to put useful office hours on the weekly calendar .

16. Strategies for answering student questions during office hours Realize that you are there to do several different things You will answer questions about topics, concepts, problems in the course. You might be clarifying material from lecture or lab (so you need to know what’s going on there). You might be helping with problem-solving, so understand the problems very well! You might be calming down a confused/upset student, or providing an essential personal connection in their education.

17. Strategies for answering student questions during office hours Guidelines for dealing with students in office hours Listen carefully and try to identify the core problem is that the student is having. Is it an incorrect grasp of facts? Trouble integrating information? When a student is struggling and not making it clear where they are stuck, ask them to walk you through what they DO understand. A very confused student is capable of confusing you, too! Know the material very well so you can help them to understand it without getting sucked into their confusion vortex.

18. Strategies for answering student questions during office hours Guidelines for dealing with students in office hours Treat every student with respect and empathy, even when they make that difficult for you. (Teaching is a service profession.) There are no stupid questions! You were new to this subject once, remember your experience when you were learning it. Remember your role – you are neither an unapproachable, omniscient being nor the student’s best friend. You are there to help them learn something new, succeed in a course, progress as a learner.

19. Strategies for answering student questions during office hours Some general issues in dealing with students Personal and cultural issues: different kinds of students have different styles of learning – and of asking for help, too! Learn to recognize students who are hesitant to ask for help. Recognize problems that you can’t handle. Students may need to talk to the course instructor about absences, excuses for exams, disability/accessibility issues.

20. Strategies for grading student assignments. Learning objectives – have them and share them with your students. (Examples provided) Rubrics – have them and share them with your students. (Examples provided) Blind grading where possible. Grade all of the same problem together if it is a long complex problem. Policies regarding grade appeals Handling student anxiety and begging

21. Handling / minimizing disruptive classroom and/or lab behavior If assisting, follow the professor’s lead, but maintain eye contact with students and know what they are doing. Have ground rules for classroom/lab behavior. If possible, have the students develop those ground rules and the consequences for not following them. Make sure students know why the rules are in place even if you make them up. If you have to discipline a student in class/lab – particularly if it is severe, you don’t want to create a bigger disruption by addressing the issue – hand the student a note that says, “you are being disruptive in a way that is unacceptable. Pack up your things and leave quietly and see me later.” Have students help enforce in-class behavior through team activity. I will have role playing exercises for this if there is time. 

22. Scenarios: • A student’s laptop starts playing music in class – after you’ve already warned them not to let that happen. • A student’s cell phone rings. They answer it. And have a conversation. • You notice a student playing video games during a team activity. • The professor in my last class kept us late. Can I still turn in my HW? • There is a total technology failure in the classroom.

23. Strategies for connecting the learning activities of labs, recitations, and office hours to broader course objectives Know what is going on in the different parts of the course. Be sure that you understand the overall course objectives, which are often elucidated in the syllabus and lecture. Query the instructor about how the different parts of the course are supposed to work together. In your work with students, use “markers” to point forward, back and across the course.