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发信人: haven (避风港), 信区: AdvancedEdu
标 题: HOw to be a good TA(5)
发信站: BBS 水木清华站 (Tue May 12 21:48:09 1998)
4 The "nuts and bolts" of running a section
4.1 Time management: Working 9 to 5 (and then some)
Many TAs find that their biggest time-management problem is the
sense that they are never "done" with teaching for the week. If you
are teaching for the first time, you will probably feel like you need
more time to prepare, or even to over-prepare, in the beginning.
You can take comfort in the fact that most TAs find a balance
between teaching and the rest of their lives after the first few weeks
of the term by setting clear goals and boundaries around the time
they spend teaching. This section offers some strategies that TAs
have found useful in managing their time.
Make weekly schedules
This may help you organize your responsibilities. Detailing lecture
and section times, weekly meetings (if you have them) with the
professor and/or other TAs, time set aside for preparation, and your
office hours may help you break your teaching duties down into
manageable blocks of time. It is also useful to chart at the outset of
the course your responsibilities over the course of the semester,
noting paper or lab report due dates, dates of exams and/or quizzes,
spring break, and the final.
Know your goals
Simply knowing your responsibilities will not, however, eliminate the
sense that your work day is never over. There is always one more
reference to check, one more comment to make on a paper or lab,
one more student to chase down, etc. There is no sure way to avoid
this feeling. However, being as clear as possible to yourself and to
your students about each week's goals, and those for the semester
as a whole, will help. (See "Setting Pedagogical Goals," above.)
Clarity about this may make it easier to focus your preparation and
decide when you are "done."
Understand the course material
The largest and most significant demand on your time as a TA may
be simply understanding the course material well enough to feel
comfortable teaching it. As much as you may want to be an expert
on every topic being discussed, this is difficult if you are teaching a
class you have never taken, or working on material you have never
studied. It is not realistic to think you can read all of the assigned
work and the outside material in detail. Instead, it may be useful to
concentrate on areas in which your knowledge is the weakest, and
to simply refamiliarize yourself with remaining areas. Also, if any part
of the lecture is unclear to you, it is useful to study that material in
particular-if it is unclear to you, it is likely to confuse your students.
4.1.1 Last resorts
The above strategies may not sufficiently help you control the time
you spend on teaching. The following are some of the various
artificial boundaries TAs often set.
Limit your time. If you are teaching a section, try limiting the
time you spus contingencies
as you make your lesson plans. Be ready to roll with the
punches-have ready a close reading, a relevant piece of
current events, be prepared to talk about the lecture, etc. If
few have done the work, humor is usually the best antidote.
Acknowledge student comments. Try not to let students'
comments go without some response-either by you or by
another student-even if this means an obvious rephrasing of
what has been said. This will help to make it clear that you
are listening.
If you are a language TA, try making it your students'
responsibility to correct one another.
Give students time to answer. There will be moments where
no one speaks at all. Intervening too quickly against silence
will take away opportunity for reflection, and grimly insisting
on an answer to one question phrased one way may simply
aggravate them. If your students are stumped after what you
think is a reasonable time, you may want to suggest
alternative ways of thinking about the issue at hand, or a new
wording of the question. Rephrasing a question, or taking
another angle on the same question, can often provoke new
insights and thoughts from students.
Approach students outside of class. Almost every section will
have a few students who seldom or never talk. You may
encourage them to participate if you know why they are
holding back. Are they bored or shy? Are they intimidated by
the material? You should talk to them about this outside of
class, and, based on their explanation, you can choose to talk
to them regularly in office hours, require other forms of
written participation (such as weekly response paragraphs),
or ask them direct questions in section. If you find out what
they are interested in, you will be able to ask them "safe"
questions in class-ones you know they will be able to answer.
Conversely, almost every section will have one or two
students who dominate discussion. Again, it is wise to talk to
them about it individually. You can tell them you appreciate
their participation but that you want to make sure other
students have a chance. If they consistently interrupt others,
ask them not to. Alternatively, you can make sure that every
student speaks by calling on them or going around the room
and asking each student to address a question. This is
especially important in language classes, where oral
participation is essential. While this method can con dynamics of your class, presented
to you by one of your students from his or her perspective? How
able are you to identify how you might favor some students as
opposed to others? Among the preferences you might identify for
yourself, how likely are you to have enough distance and objectivity
to point to gender, language, sexual preference, race, nationality, or
other such causes? Becoming aware of your attitudes, spoken and
unspoken, toward your students, is an important part of teaching.
It is important , too, to be aware that your own background,
gender, and racial identity necessarily delimit your approach to the
material in any given course. While the limitations of your own
perspective may not be readily apparent to you, they may be all too
apparent to certain members of your section, some of whom may
feel inhibited from contributing to a discussion for this reason. You
may find yourself occasionally or consistently teaching sections in
which your own background is significantly different from that of the
majority of your students. This can be one of the most difficult as
well as one of the most rewarding aspects of teaching, since you
may feel challenged by or alienated from your students at the same
time that your "difference" from them can inform your teaching in
positive and exciting ways. Discussing problems that arise in your
section with other TAs who have taught under similar circumstances
might prove helpful in this situation; remember too that your
overseeing professor is always an important resource when you face
problems in teaching. While it is not possible to change one's class
background or gender for the purposes of class discussion, it is both
possible and desirable to become more sensitive to the dynamics of
your classroom and the ways in which you contribute to them. One
way of achieving this goal is to vary your teaching methods in order
to elicit participation from the largest possible number of students.
Section 4.3.5 contains many suggestions for varying the format and
activities in your section. Another means of becoming more aware
of the ways in which you unwittingly control the perimeters of
classroom discussion is, quite simply, to relinquish some of that
control to the students in your section by having them give
presentations, formulate questions for discussion, etc.
You may find, however, that the problems you face cannot be
solved methodologically. No one teaching method can replace your
continued open-mindedness to your students' varying perspectives
and a willingness to learn from your mistakes and from the ideas and
contributions of your students. Your students may challenge you to
provide more equal access in a variety of ways. Some may
challenge you to speak loud enough for those in the back of the
room to hear. Others may challenge some of your points during the
first week of class that caused you to marginalize or estrange
them-consciously or not. Still others may more directly challenge the
way they feel you relate to them, inside or outside the classroom, as
women, people of color, etc.
There is no strict regimen for safeguarding against these problems.
As with other teaching situations, the better you prepare yourself for
such challenges the better you can address them. The following are
some suggestions.
Reflect ahead of time. How open minded will you be if, for
example, a student tells you he or she felt excluded by
recent classroom dynamic and pinpoints how he or she felt
your behavior influenced or contributed to the situation? If
you take the time ahead of time to evaluate how you might
want to respond to this and related sorts of scenarios, you
may be better able to do so if and when the time comes.
Whatever you conclude about your own behavior, however,
is less important in the end than taking the student's challenge
seriously and giving her as much credence as you can.
Thinking ahead will help you to be more receptive to student
challenges, so that you can address them point for point
patiently and respectfully. You can also consult with your
lecturer or fellow TAs in trying to figure out how to address
your student's concerns (preferably in confidence). Keep in
mind that for every student who approaches you in this
manner, there are perhaps ten who never will.
Issue an invitation. You may want to offer your students an
open invitation to voice their concerns about the dynamics in
their class-either in public or in private, as you prefer-thus
arranging an ongoing mechanism for stimulating self-criticism
that can regularly remind you that, as their TA, you are not
infallible. Students may be more likely as a result to bring to
your attention behavior that might otherwise escape your
notice. For every overt problem you may be aware of, there
are probably many more subtle and less detectable ones that
escape your attention. Enlisting your students' help in this way
may enable you to address such problems.
Keep a log. You may also want to keep a "log" during class,
keeping track of who speaks and how often, and who you
call on and how often. You can then review it and speculate
more concretely about your in-class behavior.
Invite a visitor. Finally, if you think there are problems that
you are not specifically aware of, and that your students are
not willing or able to bring to your attention, you may want to
ask someone to visit one of your classes. (If there is no one
you can reasonably ask, someone from Working At Teaching
will be happy to help.) You may want to consult ahead of
time with your visitor so that she keeps track of the class
according to criteria that you will readily understand and find
most useful. This might be done by taking a class list and
annotating numerically each name according to certain
behavioral criteria (for example, 1/open-ended question,
2/closed question, 3/asked question prior to calling on
student, 4/waited for complete answer, 5/interrupted
student's answer, 6/did not call student by name, etc.). This
exercize can be quite useful in understanding your in-class
behavior. This is not to say that you will not want to "debrief"
with your visitor more impressionistically as well.
As a teacher and member of an academic establishment, do you
allow all your students the same access to you and your talents?
While your class is but a small portion of the intellectual terrain at
Yale, it is one of the most vital, and the more you think ahead about
the above sorts of questions, the more self-conscious, creative, and
flexible you will be able to be in handling the interpersonal, political
and academic aspects of your role as a teacher.
--
世情推物理，人生贵适意，想人间造物搬兴废。吉藏凶，凶藏吉。
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