Friday, August 15, 2008

Teaching Teaching in 2 Hours or Less




Dr. Sanford Aranoff said...

If you want to be a good teacher, you must know how students think. See "Teaching and Helping Students Think and Do Better" on amazon.

David Molnar said...

How about this approach - although it may need several orientation instructors:

First 30 minutes: break up into groups of ~10 each, each group elects a TA, that TA then teaches something in his or her specialty for 30 mins while the others, including an orientation instructor, role-play students. The orientation instructor role-plays a "difficult" student, e.g. disruptive, hasn't done the work, show-off, reading the newspaper, etc.

Next 30 minutes: Discuss what happened in the first 30 minutes. Odds are it will have gone badly. You can then discuss strategies for coping with disruptive students. You can also go over suggestions for improving section technique in general, such as better board use.

Next 15 minutes: Repeat, but with a different person in front of the class. (Shorter this time because everyone knows what's going on).

Remaining 45 minutes: Bring all the TAs together. Have them share their experiences, talk about what problems they saw. Then close with a list of common things to work on and give handouts to which to refer to later.

UC Berkeley has some great TA orientation, and the most helpful thing for me was this kind of role-playing. It's one thing to talk about what to do with disruptive students. It's quite another to actually have one (even a role-played one) loudly insulting you to your face.

Anonymous said...

Most of what I learned as a TA I learned from another guy who was TAing the same course. Assign them "mentors" who are teaching the same courses as them. That will do 90% of the work, methinks.

(Otherwise they would just be too lazy or shy to go ask for help).