Gina’s post about David O’Brien’s chapter in The Art of Teaching Philosophy reminded me that I should tell you about the class our department (Philosophy) has for all beginning Teaching Assistants (beginning at Madison, whether or not they have already taught elsewhere). The focus is pretty relentlessly practical: providing them with strategies, techniques, and advice that will enable them to do better instruction in discussion sections. We do readings that we think will help them reflect on their teaching, but discussions of those readings are designed display the strategies and techniques we are trying to teach them. We also spend a fair amount of time trouble-shooting problems that they encounter over the course of the semester. And the instructor observes one section from each TA and gives feedback to them (fire-walled from any evaluation, to encourage honesty and authenticity).
Last week colleagues on the instructional resource team in our college asked me to give them a short document listing the 5 or 6 things I most wanted every TA to know and know how to do by the end of the semester and having written it, I thought it might be useful to post it here: feel free to direct your new, or not new, TAs to it (it should be useful whatever their discipline). Obviously it draws on and links to things I’ve posted here on CT over the years. And it is not supposed to be exhaustive: it’s just what I happened to prioritize when they asked me to give them something. Here goes: