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Sample topics for the Workshop

  • Role of the TA : What a TA is responsible and not responsible for, the TA's relationship with the professor and with students; the TA as a link between the professor and the students.

  • Running effective sections : Usually a panel of experienced TAs facilitating a discussion on planning and leading sections.

  • Communicating with your classroom : A panel of undergraduate students discuss their experiences with TAs, their expectations, and suggestions.

  • Grading : How (and how not) to do it, how to work with the professor on grading, consistency and how to achieve it.

  • Common classroom problems : Dealing with problem students, other issues that sometimes come up

  • Midterm-evaluations and other classroom and self-evaluations : Ways to monitor how you're doing as a teacher, and how students are learning the material in the course

  • Leading discussions : Techniques for leading quality discussions that help all students engage with the material

  • Building specific teaching strategies : Includes leading discussions, but also covers other techniques.

  • Teaching linguistics : Helping students learn core linguistic concepts, argumentation in linguistics, etc.

  • Helping students build critical skills : How do students move from summarizing to analyzing? How do they learn to fit the problem set into into broader issues in theory or methodology?

  • Building teaching portfolios

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Last updated September 24, 2003