Let’s go around and have everyone answer the following. We’re going to split into about 4 groups that you’ll be working with each week to come up with things to present that we’ll talk about later, so think about who you might be interested in working with each week (maybe people with similar interests).
Why did you decide to be a TA/IA, and what’re you interested in from a teaching perspective?
Something you wish you'd had in your intro programming course when you took it
Hopefully everyone got a chance to do the readings on Self efficacy, Sense of Belonging, and Hidden Curriculum
Can someone summarize each of them?
What was new to you about these concepts? Were there parts you already knew or didn’t?
Do you think learning about these concepts will change the way you’ll approach teaching?
Who have you interacted with who didn’t feel at home in a class (can be you, or others you've seen)?
What factors made this experience better or worse?
What are concrete things we can do starting day 1 of the class to make this better for students?
Aim to have your interactions structured this way. Students should know to expect this–they should not expect us to simply provide answers for the most part. Sometimes, especially at the very beginning of the class, you might find that there is factual knowledge that they are missing and you’ll need to simply provide the information. It is definitely a judgement call, but when possible, err on the side of helping the student figure it out themselves rather than providing them information. You can also always help by encouraging them to look at certain material.
Expectation setting: Let the student know that we’re going to help them learn together and understand what they need help with. This means you won’t be giving them answers, and it might take longer than expected and have parts that are frustrating. Ask them to let you know if you’re going too fast or slow.
Pre-reflection: What have you done so far? What is your program doing, and what do you want it to be doing?
Troubleshooting: Various teaching strategies. Elaborated in sample dialogs.
Post-reflection: What did we do? What helped? What will you do next time a problem like this arises?
Double check on all students: Sometimes during busy office hours, we may forget where each student is in their progress. You may tell a student to read a particular resource and come back to you when they’ve read it, or look at a particular practice problem–which is a great strategy, since teaching staff shouldn’t have to re-teach the class. However, we do want to make sure that your last interaction with a student wasn’t “Go do ___” with no follow up. Check in on them, and see if they’re able to follow your suggestion. Are they stuck? Confused? Could they benefit from more 1 on 1 attention?
During the pre-reflection and troubleshooting phases, if it sounds like a student is bringing you LLM generated code that they don’t understand, you’re welcome to ask them (kindly!) where they got the code. Remind them that it’s perfectly fine if they used online resources and/or LLMs.
The steps of asking “What is your program doing, and what do you want it to be doing?” actually don’t change much! No matter where their code is from, we want them to understand what it should be doing and what it is doing.
What may change, though, is:
You’ll need to remind them of the importance that even if they use LLMs, they should understand their code.
(If you want, and if the student is already comfortable using GenAI–many have personal qualms about it and that should be respected) You can suggest that they ask a GenAI agent to explain what’s wrong with the code. You can even suggest helpful learning prompts like “You are a tutor, and I am a novice programming student. Help me understand what’s wrong with my code…”
Extra attention to “Double check on all students:”--the last thing you say to a student should not be “Try asking GenAI”. Make sure that you’re encouraging the student to learn from GenAI rather than copy pasting, and you’re actively collaborating with the student on their understanding.
Let’s take a look at this document, and we’ll have two of you volunteer to read “Debugging - Loop” aloud: Teaching Staff Training: Sample Dialogs
What did you learn today that was helpful?
What mistakes do you think you’ll avoid based on what you learned today?
What wasn’t very helpful from what we did today?
Decide on your groups: 4-5 people
Find a way to be in contact with each other–maybe a Slack chat, whatever’s easiest for you
Read the materials in the sample dialogs page (Teaching Staff Training: Sample Dialogs)
With your group, write about (can be bullets, paragraphs, anything you like):
Things you learned from the sample dialogs
What you’d like to improve on in teaching this quarter