Tag: teaching assistants

Categories
Educational Development

Greet, Get, Give, Gauge & Go: a Framework for Student Consultations

As an instructor, it might be tempting to measure the success of student visits by how quickly you can provide a correct answer—but excelling at this particular metric might come at the cost of a student building their own ability to answer similar questions in the future. The 5G framework ((The 5G framework draws its inspiration from a framework outlined on page 53 in Nyquist, J. D., & Wulff, D. H. (1996). Working effectively with graduate assistants. Thousands Oaks: Sage Publications. It was my colleague, Dr. Natasha Kenny, who made me aware of Nyquist & Wulff’s work, so a tip-of-the-hat to her as well.)) for student consultations not only offers a structure for answering a variety of student questions, but is a tool that can be used to build a student’s future success as well as providing a way to measure the outcomes of consultations. It consists of the five following steps:

  1. Greet
  2. Get
  3. Give
  4. Gauge
  5. Go
Continue reading “Greet, Get, Give, Gauge & Go: a Framework for Student Consultations”
Categories
Teaching

Five things a TA should do in their first lab, seminar, tutorial or class

Classics seminar

1. Whatever approach you’re going to take in your classroom, model it.

If you plan to use discussions, case studies or experimental work, model some component of it on your first day. You want students to understand that these approaches are important to their success in the course while also letting them know that they’ll be expected to participate in this particular way.

2. Make a commitment to learn student names. State it in the first class. Hold yourself accountable.

Learning student names is a key (and simple) component to engaging students; research suggests the more positive a relationship a student has with an instructor, the higher the student’s final grade (Micari & Pazos, 2012).

3. Bring extras.

This can include: extra course syllabi; details of your office hours & contact information; extra chalk / white board markers; pencils; scrap paper; and lab instructions. Students are bound to forget any and all of these. Plus, looking prepared is a good way to set a tone of your own professionalism.

4. Write the course name, number and tutorial / lab section on the board.

Allows students to check right away if they’re in the correct room; saves the “walk of shame” when they realize they’re not.

5. Start creating a safe space for learning.

This means different things in different classrooms: in a chemistry lab, it might mean highlighting proper procedures; in a humanities seminar, it might mean talking about the kind of environments that encourage appropriate conversation.

References

Micari, M., & Pazos, P. (2012). Connecting to the Professor: Impact of the Student-Faculty Relationship in a Highly Challenging Course. College Teaching, 60(2), 41-47. doi: 10.1080/87567555.2011.627576

Categories
Strike York

My union (CUPE 3903) is poised for a strike and I’m feeling naked

This time next week, I might be on strike.

Here’s the local media’s take on the potential disruption:

York University faces possible strike (Toronto Star)
York plans to cancel classes in event of strike (Globe and Mail)
NORTH YORK: Strike looms at York U. (insidetoronto.com)

Follow the most recent Google-indexed updates

Optics are big when it comes to strikes and the fact that the union has asked for a 30% wage increase, especially in this time of “financial crisis”, will make winning the opinion war on this strike especially difficult. You’ll read from the comments on the above articles that people are already pointing out that CUPE 3903 employees are “already” the highest paid TAs in the country. While I hardly agree with the logic behind the argument (those students are nothing but GREEDY!), I’m afraid that most people will see it in that simple way.

There are other, in my opinion, important issues that are being brought to the bargaining table, but the wage issue will colour public perception. Part of the problem is that CUPE 3903 represents so many kinds of university teachers: TAs, GAs, RAs and sessional faculty. Each of these groups have different needs — sessional faculty, for example, have significant job security concerns that should be addressed (a problem with being a sessional is that you can work for X years for the university and be “let go” at the end of the current teaching assignment without warning, renumeration or an attempt to turn these long-term sessionals into tenure-track positions). There isn’t one issue that we, as union members, can get behind and offer the general public as an easy-counter position: all of our issues are mired in institutional practice and minutia. People aren’t going to take the time to be interested in it.

Generally speaking, I do not want to walk a picket line or strike. I would rather keep with my day-to-day staus quo. But my prediction if we do strike: it will be long and bitter. The general public will have a hard time understanding what we’re striking about. So, before we picket, I think it would be wise to would drop the 30% wage increase demand and elucidate one, significant issue that would be easy for the general public to understand and (potentially) support. But I’m no union tactician.

Thursday, November 6th is the big date…