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Training Course Evaluation by Attendees

The following are summarized end-of-quarter comments from the new TAs in the 2003-2004 Training Course (run by John Beavers and Peter Sells).
  • Inviting undergraduates to give their advice works best when the undergraduates are more forthcoming about what they like and don't like. The most immediately useful suggestions the undergraduates gave were how much they appreciated email office hours and the TAs preparedness.
  • The workshop on teaching portfolios is unfortunately by its nature not going to feel relevant to the students in the workshop since they're all in their second year, although conciousness raising is always a good thing.
  • This quarter John gave out but did not discuss in great detail a list of online, departmental, and CTL resources available to students (how to check things out, how to set up web pages, how to set up newsgroupds, etc.). However, there was a LOT of interest in the online resources in particular, and it was suggested that perhaps devoting an entire workshop day to this would be good. Likewise, general questions about who to talk to about different resources was a bit obscured and could be made more prominent.
  • In general, guests and outside the department people were a good idea and tended to bring fresh perspectives.
  • Spend more time on how to do and use midterm evaluations. In this workshop we only discussed their usefullness, and gave out blank sample evaluations, but didn't discuss in great detail how to interpret them. It was suggested that maybe bringing in someone's real midterm and/or end term evaluations and going over them and discussing how to interpret them might be a good idea.

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Last updated July 29, 2004