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Bookmark It: Yale Centre for Teaching & Learning

Dear TAs,

I’ve been bookmarking links to share on the blog, and here’s one that resurfaced today just before our Craft of Teaching session:

https://ctl.yale.edu/teaching/graduate-student-professional-student-and-postdoctoral-teaching-development

A few relevant excerpts for when those first assignments are being returned to students:

What to Do When Students Challenge Your Grade

A common scenario: you return students’ papers and, after the usual period of sighing and moaning, a student approaches you with the dreaded “I’d like to talk to you about my grade.” What then?

Wait a Minute

The first thing to do is stall for time. No joke. Don’t be pressured into hearing a case and making a decision on the spot. There will probably be other students around, and you might be in a rush to get out of the classroom. Unless the grade change is truly minor and unquestionable, set up another time when you can give the student your full consideration (within a few days, to be fair). Then, before you meet the student, take some time to remind yourself what your grading standards are. Also, if you have the student’s paper available, reconsider how the paper fits those standards (it’s always a good idea to make copies of your comments for future reference).

Another option is to have the student write out his or her side of the story and turn it in with a copy of the exam or paper. That way, you’ll have time to review the case before meeting to discuss it. If the case really is clear-cut and simple, it won’t take long to explain it, and it won’t take you long to make a decision on the merits of the student’s case.

Let students talk during such conferences. In fact, let them talk a lot. Resist the temptation to jump in with your defense. Shouting, “Zip it! You failed!” will only exacerbate the situation. Many students take getting a bad grade very personally, so don’t escalate things by making the grading process personal as well.

Why do students complain about a grade? There are several possibilities.

  • The student is embarrassed about getting a low grade and is trying to win your approval as a person, or perhaps trying to show you that she is smarter than the grade reflects.
  • The student is genuinely trying to learn how to write better papers or do better on exams.
  • The student is trying to figure out how to get a better grade in the future.
  • The student is just trying to get a higher grade right now.

Dealing with the last possibility can be frustrating, but don’t assume that that’s the reason when in fact any of the other possibilities might be the case. (We don’t have to tell you what happens when you assume, do we?) Always imagine that your student has higher motives, and aim your conversation at that level. You can always give the student the option of having the supervising professor read and re-evaluate the paper or exam. Just be sure to remind the student that the grade could go down even further.

One last thing: if you allow a student to rewrite a paper, make sure that you allow every student that opportunity. In this case, it can’t be only the squeaky wheel that gets the grease. You gotta grease ’em all.

https://ctl.yale.edu/teaching/teaching-how/chapter-5-grading-and-evaluation/grades-and-grading

 

Approaches to, and Techniques for, Grading Fairly

Waiting for Godot

As you begin grading a particular assignment or exam question, read through several students’ answers without marking grades. At the very least, restrict yourself to tentative marks in pencil. This will give you a sense of the overall range of students’ responses before you start inscribing final grades in indelible red ink.

…

Take Two

After you finish grading, review the first few assignments you graded. You will often find that you were much nastier with the red ink at the beginning of the grading process than at the end, and you may be pleasantly surprised to find that some of the first assignments you graded made points other students failed to mention. You will also have developed a more refined sense of a “good” as opposed to an “average” or “weak” performance over the course of your grading, and you may realize that the first assignments you read were better (or worse) than you initially thought. For these reasons, you may not want to mark any grades in pen until you’ve finished with the whole set of exams or papers and are happy with the distribution of grades as a whole.

Grade Blind

If you’ve come to know your students well in section or lab, you may have definite expectations, hopes, or fears about their performance on major assignments. In order to avoid being influenced by what you know or anticipate about a student’s work, you might want to keep the grading as anonymous as possible: just fold back the cover sheet of each paper or exam so that you can’t see the student’s name. (If you want to do this with papers, you should make a point of asking students to include their name only on the cover page.)

Grading without regard to students’ identities does not prevent you from commenting on how students’ work has progressed (or degenerated) over the course of the semester. Once the actual assigning of letter grades is complete, you can always go back to your written comments and praise students who have made notable improvements (or caution students who have done the reverse).

And here’s the link to their “Preparing A Lecture” section:

https://ctl.yale.edu/teaching/ideas-teaching/preparing-lecture

Good luck!

Sheryda

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Five Tips To Keep Your Hours On Track (from a Poetry Professor)

Dear TAs,

Every week, I read and comment on 20 poems for my advanced poetry workshop (Minor program). This, in addition to my other courses, admin responsibilities, parenting, and my own poem-making. I have managed to get my time down to 10 minutes a poem, and that’s including reading & mark-up. After much trial and error, here’s how I manage this workload so there’s room for creative work, hanging out with friends and family, and generally feeling less over-whelmed about getting it all done.

  1. Read first, comment later. When I approach a set of poems, I take time to read them first without comment . Reading as prep allows me to experience the work without my editor’s hat on. Second time around, I’m reading with pen in hand, but making notes in a notebook and not on the poem. I’m gathering my foundational materials: technical feats, unexpected or surprising language, risks I think the poet has taken. From this material I can make useful comments much faster than starting from scratch.
  2. Work in batches. I am a terrible procrastinator! In the last couple of years, I have endeavoured to be better. I break down the work into manageable chunks, and I schedule it right in to my weekly planner. I swear by the Pomodoro technique (I’m using it right now to write this blog post!), setting a timer for four sets of 25 minutes, and then I take a walk. This has saved me lots of time, and has cut down on distractions.
  3. Cut down on distractions. Nothing beats a good grading run than an email that needs to be dealt with, a quick peruse of Instagram, or a text. I turn of my phone, shut the door, set my web blocker. Whatever you need to do to stay focussed, do it!
  4. Write to the point. Comments eat up the most time, and it’s because it’s hard work to generate things to say about a piece of writing. One astute teaching assistant at orientation pointed out that it’s not always necessary to figure out what a poem is about in order to comment on it. Once I freed myself from trying to figure out what the poem was trying to do, the time I spent commenting shifted considerably. Stick closely to what the assignment rubric has already set out for you in terms of guidelines, borrow that language, and stick to three particular, technical points. Use lines from the actual work to back up your feedback. When you’re not sure what to say, come back to the piece later.
  5. Separate creative work from admin. I’ve made a few productive changes to how I approach administrative work, like checking & responding to emails, grading, or meeting with undergraduate students. First, I acknowledge when I’m most creative, which is the morning, and I protect that time fiercely. Commenting is a creative act for me, so I find I have to be in that creative mode. I don’t check emails for the first hour of the day, if I can manage, and I don’t check emails before bed. When I do set out to check off those to-do items, I set that timer and plough through. While this is a bit woo-woo, I did find this useful: https://medium.com/the-mission/how-to-structure-your-day-for-optimal-performance-and-productivity-dcbf0665e3f3#.f17i4s8yd

BONUS: Treat yourself! Once I hit POST, I’m heading down the street to enjoy the autumn sunshine and to get myself a little treat at the bakery. The timer is about to go off.

*Please make sure that if you’re taking more time than is allotted per assignment that you check in with your instructor! This is really useful information for them to know early on, not so great at the end of term. While you can count on using up all your hours, your instructor will have their own strategies for approaching grading and time management.

You’re also welcome to talk to Roquela, or me, for more strategies!

Have a time-saving tip? Please feel free to comment.

 

Good luck grading, writing, reading!

Sheryda

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Grading: Workflow with Meagan Black

Feeling lost on your TA journey? Try a workflow; they’re like a map for a process or task, that shows you the steps you’ll need to take to get to got to Done!

Click HERE for the infographic: grading chart_merged

Making a workflow for yourself can help you to plan and organize your time. If you’re doing something new or trying a new way to do something, workflows made by other people can be valuable tools.

As a TA Mentor, I’m making workflows for common UBC TAing tasks–including this one, which is for grading, from start to finish. 

What other workflows would be useful for you? What tasks are you worried about, or confused by? Leave a comment with what you want to see. We’re here to help you!

-Meagan Black

 

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Advice from a former TA: Anne Denning

Throughout the semester, we’ll be adding advice handed down from some wonderful teaching assistant’s from time’s past. First up, recent grad and poet Anne Denning:

 

Communicate with your fellow TA’s and your instructor! I found sometimes I’d have a question, and sometimes I’d try to figure it out on my own out of a spirit of independence and also in order to avoid bothering anyone, but I inevitably needed to communicate with my fellow TA’s and instructor. I think there will always be questions (even if you read the syllabus 50 times and listen during TA meetings) and it’s very useful to keep the lines of dialogue open. Chances are your fellow TA’s have the same questions you have, at the same time.

Also, the more you talk and share with your fellow TA’s, the richer your experience will be! I learned so much from my Instructor and fellow TA’s in our casual emails and conversations about teaching, marking and ideas for writing exercises and how to make class more engaging. I’m currently teaching at a community centre and I’ve often found myself thinking back to people I TA’ed with as inspirations when I’m heading into class.

I’m sure this bit of advice gets beaten to death but nonetheless: leave as much time as possible for marking assignments! The times when I managed to start leave myself more time for marking I enjoyed the process so much more. Switch up locations and have marking get-togethers with fellow TA’s in coffeeshops/mix it up when you have lots to mark and don’t feel like starting on your marking (or finishing it, for that matter).

Don’t go crazy writing lengthy heartfelt novels of advice in your marking! You’ll have more than one chance to give a student feedback within the space of a course so keep an eye on your hours and make sure you’re not going over them while writing feedback. I never got down to 3-4 sentences, but I found a happier medium wherein I felt like I was offering the suggestions the pieces needed but not driving myself crazy.

Enjoy the interactions with students during office hours! I found that students often are feeling pretty vulnerable or don’t know what to expect when they come to office hours, so I really tried to be warm and encouraging in response to any questions. Once they relaxed a bit I found students often have lots to say and are really excited to get to have a TA’s undivided attention. Enjoy the gift that the students are and what you can learn from their questions, comments and work.

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Crafting Your Lecture: Strategies and Resources

If you’re thinking about preparing a small craft talk or lecture this semester, here’s one strategy to get you started off on the right foot. An excellent resource I’ll be drawing from:

Here’s what Norman Eng advises:

  • Open a lesson by connecting and engaging with your audience: Ask a question, offer a statistic, anecdote, quote, or an analogy. Generate ideas around a few of these possible openings, and choose the one that would be most appropriate for your subject matter, the course, and your learners.
  • Build in an activity: a discussion, debate, survey, or a case study in small groups. This shifts the focus from listening to actively participating in the learning. You, y’all, we (aka Think-Pair-Share) is an easy to plan yet effective learning tool to try out at the 15 minute mark.
  • End your lecture or craft session with either an opportunity for learners to share or an opportunity to assess their own learning. A “one-minute essay” on the subject and how it relates to their own writing practice, or three main points they gleaned from your lecture will reinforce what the audience learned.

Further resources:

Presentation Style, Performance:

 https://hbr.org/2013/06/how-to-give-a-killer-presentation

Instructional Skills:

Back to Basics: A Review of Mike Schmoker’s “Focus”

Episode 10: In Praise of Think-Pair-Share

Writing Prompts 

A writing prompt is a great activity for the mid-section of your lecture! Even a 5 minute warm-up or free write can be really satisfying for students:

Poets & Writers website has weekly writing prompts, and an excellent archive:

https://www.pw.org/writing-prompts-exercises

Brian Kitely’s 3 AM Epiphany and 4 AM Breakthrough collect a wonderful range of fiction prompts:

If you need any support or are interested in tracking down resources, let us know!

Happy crafting!

 

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Grading: 5 Tips for Time Management

Sitting down to grade pieces of writing can be daunting. Here’s five ways to ensure you’re not left scrambling:

  1. Familiarize yourself. Go over the parameters of the assignment and the rubric before beginning (with the instructor and fellow TAs is ideal), so you gain clarity right away. Knowing the instructor’s expectations of an assignment is key to good grading practice.
  2. Avoid Agony. Find an efficient method that works for you: establish a working session i.e. Pomodoro Method; schedule your grading (batches of 10 assignments a day for 5 days); keep a grading notebook; use small cue cards to keep the length of your comments reasonable.
  3. Find the sweet spot. If you’re new to grading, or even to a particular genre, read through a stack of assignments before even starting to assess the work. Having a sense of the quality of the work before grading saves you having to go back and adjust later.
  4. Switch it up. Changing location mid-way through a batch of assignments or organize a mark-a-thon with fellow TAs. Take breaks!
  5. Prioritize your creative work. If you have a story due in your own workshop the same week as grades need to be in, get an hour in on your own writing before you even sit down to grade.

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