Ed's Big Plans

Brief: I got my TA evaluations from BIOL 208 back last week (which I taught with Ariana in fall 2009) and it looks the students liked my instruction. The overall positive response is encouraging but I’m concerned that they’ve actually been too kind. The whole thing was something of a learning experience for me as I’ve never given tutorials before. The written remarks were very informative too. There are two big things the students wanted more of: first, I should increase the depth of my background in the course; second, I should ensure there’s time to take up quiz and workbook questions. The first item is a bit difficult to do actively mostly because it’s hard to proactively decide on what kinds of questions a student will have cooked up based on the readings available for a given week. It looks like it’s a self-repairing problem however — I simply have to TA more in and around the same topic area until the background information is second hand (or at least until all the keywords are loaded into my brain along with hints toward appropriate literature). The second point is important. The amount of time needed to take up questions can be built into the lesson plan — I think the best way to approach this is to reduce the amount that we try to cover in the tutorial slide show. Besides, there’s little advantage to repeating all of the same things as the instructor (particularly if we might say it differently, or explain it in a way that’s even more confusing or worse, disagree with the instructor). It’s thus better to focus on giving the background for the workbook questions. I figure that an average of 25% to 33% less material covered will enable us to focus in on the workbook and allow us to discuss quiz questions (and spurious questions) etc. with sufficient time.

Overall, this was a very enjoyable and instructional experience .