Six Techniques for Being a More Effective TA (guest post)

How can you facilitate more lively, interesting, and educational discussions in your classroom?

In the following guest post, Harry Brighouse, professor of philosophy at  University of Wisconsin and director of the Center for Ethics and Education, shares several strategies for being an effective teaching assistant (TA). Of course, the advice isn’t just for TAs. Many professors could improve their pedagogy by adopting some of the techniques Professor Brighouse suggests.

(A version of this post was first published at Crooked Timber.)

Six Techniques for Being a More Effective TA
by Harry Brighouse

Our department (Philosophy) has a class for all beginning Teaching Assistants (beginning at Madison, whether or not they have already taught elsewhere). The focus is pretty relentlessly practical: providing them with strategies, techniques, and advice that will enable them to do better instruction in discussion sections. We do readings that we think will help them reflect on their teaching, but discussions of those readings are designed display the strategies and techniques we are trying to teach them. We also spend a fair amount of time trouble-shooting problems that they encounter over the course of the semester. And the instructor observes one section from each TA and gives feedback to them (fire-walled from any evaluation, to encourage honesty and authenticity).

Last week colleagues on the instructional resource team in our college asked me to give them a short document listing the 5 or 6 things I most wanted every TA to know and know how to do by the end of the semester and having written it, I thought it might be useful to post a version of it: feel free to direct your new, or not new, TAs to it (it should be useful whatever their discipline). Obviously it draws on and links to things I’ve posted on Crooked Timber over the years. And it is not supposed to be exhaustive: it’s just what I happened to prioritize when they asked me to give them something. Here goes:

Note: all the strategies I describe here are to some extent dependent on how the physical space of your classroom is organized. If you have fixed seats in rows, and the classroom is full, many of these will be challenging. But to the extent that students can be moved around the classroom so that they can see each other, some will work better or worse. (Structured Academic Controversy, for example, can work even in a fixed seat room: I recommend that you organize the A and B groups so that they are in front of and behind each other, not next to each other).

Also: you get to choose where your students sit. They don’t. This isn’t a cafeteria, it’s a place of work. Move them to optimize the learning experience. You might think this seems authoritarian: it isn’t and students don’t experience it as such. They appreciate that someone is thinking about their learning.

Finally, be alert to auditory challenges. Does the classroom door need to be closed so that students can pay attention to one another (e.g. because the nearby men’s bathroom doesn’t have a door, and uses a very loud and oversensitive air dryer)? Does the door of your classroom and/or the door of a nearby classroom creak? (Point out to the students that it creaks, observe how that distracts people, and tell them that we’ll fix it. I keep WD40 in my office for that purpose. It’s a way of displaying that you are interested in their learning.) Can all the students in the room hear the soft-spoken student? (If not, ask them to speak up and/or toward their classmates—most of them can).

Ok, here are some things you need to know how to do.

1. Creating Shared Intellectual Community

You need to know how to create a sense of intellectual community in the room. Doing this has at least two components. Students have to know that a sense of intellectual community is something that you are aiming for and they should be aiming for. And students need to know (and usually use) each other’s names, and you have to use (and usually know) their names.

How to achieve these? I just tell them, several times, that I want them to be part of an intellectual community, and that I want my class to be the class they think about more than any other during the semester, and that if they get to know each other, especially if they talk with each other outside of class, I know the chances of them talking about what we’re doing in my class are higher than if they don’t. And I tell them that I want them to talk with people who are not in the class about what we are doing in class, so they get practice explaining ideas to people who don’t already understand them.

I also tell them I want them to learn each other’s names, and that I want to learn their names. I tell them to create name tents, and every class session in the first third of the semester starts with an ice breaker (I have a useful list). I also tell them that I’ll quiz them on each other’s names, and after a couple of weeks I do an ice breaker in which I ask them not to bring out the name tents, and each student is asked the name of another specific student to whom I point. (If I don’t have all the names by this point, I usually do after). The reaction to this exercise, by the way, has always been positive. Because the default is that nobody knows anyone’s name, nobody is offended if someone doesn’t know their name, and everyone is pleased if someone does.

Here’s a UW Econ grad, Kailey Mullane, on learning each other’s names:

One simple thing consistently makes classes better: when teachers make the students introduce themselves at the start of each class period in the first few weeks. Students introducing and saying a little bit about themselves (like majors and hometowns) really changes the dynamic. Knowing a classmate’s name instantly creates a more inviting environment and is the first step in developing a relationship. In those classes, I notice that instead of sitting silently staring at screens, students actually talk to one another before class starts. They talk during class: students are more willing to offer comments, ask questions and disagree with one another. And they talk to each other outside of class, often about the material—which means there is more outside learning. Time is precious. But in small classes, introductions take just three to five minutes. Large lectures are more difficult, but TAs can effectively administer that process in discussion sections. Just taking time at the start of each class to have students introduce themselves can have invaluable effects in and beyond the classroom.

2. Cold or Warm Calling

You need to know how to cold/warm call, and do it. This is a way of engaging students who are reserved into the discussions, and also a vital instrument for preventing one or two people from doing most of the talking. A new instructor who observed one of my classes recently balked when a student observer told her I always cold call. “It’s not cold at all”, she said, “it’s more like warm calling”. Let’s go with that: I’ll propose a few rules of thumb for warm-calling:

i) First, what makes it warm calling rather than cold-calling is making it clear that you know sometimes people space out, and sometimes they have nothing to say. So it is ok to pass. Tell them that explicitly. But then, make sure they really believe you, by reinforcing it whenever someone does pass.

ii) Ask good questions so that students don’t think you are searching for a specific answer and get paralysed searching for it.

iii) Forewarn the students that you will engage in the practice.

iv) I find it virtually impossible to cold/warm call without using names “Oi, you, yeah, you in the white shirt, could you start us off by telling us how somebody might challenge Thomson’s assumption of the self-ownership thesis?”. So: use the students’ names (have them introduce themselves at the start of every class, and get them to use name tents).

v) Before you call on anyone you should often, though not always, give students time to get their thoughts in order, with think-pair-share or by asking them to spend a minute writing their thoughts on paper.

vi) If you don’t give them time before you call on them, give them time after you call on them. Smart people can’t always answer good questions immediately, and part of the point of the practice is to elicit the voices of those who don’t answer immediately.

vii) Many students are habituated to the idea that they need to get everything right: talking risks getting things wrong. Make it clear—not just by saying it, but by the way you interact with the students—that you expect them to make mistakes because that’s an essential part of learning.

Warm calling is a self-effacing practice. If you do it quite a bit in the first few weeks, you’ll pretty quickly stop doing it. The students, including the shy ones, will start to talk of their own accord.

3. Think Pair Share

You need to know how to do variants of Think Pair Share.

Strict Think Pair Share works exactly the way you would imagine: You start by asking a question. The students do not jump into class discussion, but they think for 30-60 seconds, and then turn to their neighbor and talk about it for 1 to 3 minutes. Then you invite some pairs to share with the whole class what they thought.

The strict version has an element of warm calling, but whoever you call on almost invariably has something to share because the think-pair has generated that. I generally use a non-strict version, in which I get one pair to share, and allow whatever they have shared to start off the discussion.

As in all class discussions, whatever strategies you use, you have to ask good questions! A straightforward factual question, especially one that they should know the answer to if they’ve done the reading: there is nothing to talk about, so it’s pointless (and sometimes you get uncomfortable silences because students assume you are asking a trick question). Set them a question about which disagreement is likely and reasonable. Of course, lots will be repeating problems that have been talked about in lecture, but this is THEM talking about the problems, which they have limited opportunity to do in lecture. Key to your preparation for section is preparing prompts, and playing out how you think they will go (so you can anticipate the contours of discussion). A good prompt is one about which reasonable people can disagree and about which you have reason to anticipate that people in the class actually will disagree. The question needs to be open-ended enough to warrant discussion, but narrow enough that the whole class is talking about more or less the same thing. A question about how to understand a contested concept (democracy, freedom, capitalism, socialism, wellbeing), or about how best to interpret a stanza of a poem, or about the reasons for thinking that some controversial political view might be true or false, or to articulate specific plausible causal factors that might explain the occurrence of some historical event, all might work.

Think Pair Share is so so simple you might wonder why I even mention it. Here’s why: at a teaching event a few years ago a colleague who is both a highly respected researcher and a dedicated teacher told me that for decades he had difficulty making good discussion happen in the classroom. Then, one day, he observed his TA, a Teach for America alum, in her section and “she did this amazing thing, which she told me was called Think Pair Share, and it was brilliant at provoking productive discussion, so I use it all the time now, and you’d think it should fail sometimes, but it seems to work every time”.

4. Structured Academic Controversy

In Philosophy, the rest of the humanities and social sciences and, I suspect, in many STEM disciplines, Structured Academic Controversy (SAC) is an invaluable tool. I don’t use the canonical version you’ll find described on websites, but a variant of it that goes like this:

• Students are given a proposition and divided into groups of 4, each of which is divided into pairs, one of which is going to support, the other of which will oppose, the proposition.
• The pairs have 5 minutes to come up with their arguments.
• Pair A spends 3 minutes giving its arguments to Pair B
• Pair B spends 3 minutes giving its arguments to Pair A
• They discuss the arguments they have each given, staying in role, for 5 minutes
• They continue for another 5 minutes, permitted to break out of their roles and say whatever they now, on reflection, think.
• We continue the discussion in the whole class, drawing on what they have said in their groups

I vary the times allocated to each task depending on the topic and how much time is available, and often drop the stage at which they have to stay in role. Students frequently report that they are glad that they were made to argue for a side they didn’t agree with, because it enabled them to see the why somebody might believe it. And the SAC is especially helpful for one particular kind of issue: one for which there is not much authentic disagreement in the room, because it forces about half the students to think through the reasons for holding a view they don’t accept.

Here’s a more detailed explanation of how I use SACs, and how I deviate from the strict, canonical, version of the SAC.

5. Fishbowl

Fishbowl is very simple, and is a good corrective to a classroom in which a few students do a great deal of talking, or several don’t talk at all.

Set up a discussion of some question, or problem, or argument. Designate several students as the “fish”: they will be the only people who will talk during the first X minutes of the discussion, while others attend to what they are saying (X might be 5, 7, 10, 15: probably not more than 15). Afterwards you can open up to the whole class, or you can switch roles: a different set of fish get to talk. Let the students know who the fish are going to be before you set things up, especially if the fish are predominantly reticent talkers.

In the descriptions of fishbowl you’ll see online, there’s an additional, physical component. The students who are fish are physically moved into the center of the room, and the other students surround them and watch. I did this the first couple of times I used the technique, but disliked the time it took and the disruption it caused to students’ attention, and also the noise in our, often acoustically challenging, classrooms. A student pointed out to me that moving people around was unnecessary: just have everyone sit in their regular places, and designate who is going to speak.

6. Jigsaw

Distribute a text with several distinct parts of roughly similar length (sections, or even paragraphs). Organize the students into pairs which correspond to the parts of text. Each pair is responsible for reading their part of the text. Then, in the whole group get a pair with the first part of the text to explain it to the rest in, say, 2 minutes, then a pair with the second part of the text to do the same, etc., until the whole text has been explained. (As you go, if they go significantly wrong, correct them). The idea is that they are putting a whole argument together as a team. After each group explains their piece, you can check for understanding, or you can outline the argument as you understand it on the board; then entertain discussion.

Jigsaw is a pretty simple and effective strategy and I use it a few times early on in the semester when I teach my freshman class, both to get them used to interpreting texts and to help them see how an argument works. But it requires the right text, and that’s difficult to pull off in philosophy because we generally use primary texts which were not written for pedagogical purposes and often in which understanding, say, paragraph 4 depends on already having understood paragraph 1. So, if you do it, select your texts carefully.

Postscript: Some comments about technology policy and grading.

In-room Technology Policy

Your lead instructor may have imposed a technology policy on you: if so, then follow it. If you have discretion, my advice is very strongly to disallow phones and laptops. Some students have accommodations that allow them to use laptops, and you should know about these from your university’s disability center. If there is such a person in my class I contact them, telling them my policy, telling them that they are exempt, and telling them that I will tell the class that sometimes the disability center asks a student to take notes on a computer behalf of a student registered with the center, which allows them to take notes without being outed as having a disability (though in my experience most students just tell their peers that they have an accommodation).

If you’re inclined to allow laptops, that’s your choice, but please sit in the back of some classrooms in which laptops are allowed, and look at what is happening on those laptops before you decide to allow them. If you allow cellphones your chances of forging a shared intellectual community are low.

Grading papers

I don’t know much about grading papers in disciplines outside philosophy. But I do know a good deal about how philosophy TAs grade papers, in which I think TAs often waste a lot of time and effort.

Your students are not like you. They are taking this class as one of several, and unless they are philosophy majors (which very few are in TA-ed classes) they don’t write many papers. They’re habituated to seeing comments as criticisms, and too many comments (more than four) overwhelm them. And lots of comments I see from colleagues and TAs are too cryptic to be useful for students (“Why?”; “This is unclear” or, worse, “unclear” or “clarify”). Many TAs do what I did early in my career—they think of the comments as justifying the grade. The point of the grade is to give a grade. The point of the comments is completely different: it’s so that they can learn how to write or think better (or both). So my advice is: provide 3 marginal comments of 1-2 sentences each, and make sure that they are unambiguous, and directed at improvement. Then a summary comment, which starts with their name, which might refer to the marginal comments, and if possible says one positive thing, and one thing that they can use to improve. The idea is that if they read and think about your comments and then think about them and re-write the paper it almost certainly be somewhat better.

And, of course, all those rules can be broken in some cases. Some papers are so weak that they need wholesale revision (and get a D, or F, or whatever). In those cases I just return them to the student, saying, kindly, that I think if we meet and talk they’ll be able to write a significantly better paper, and asking them to talk to me. Some papers are so lively and intellectually excited that you know the student will benefit from a conversational interaction, and you can make more comments, but if you do that you need to emphasize in the summary comment that “This paper is excellent, and was fun to read, and most of my comments are not aimed at helping you improve the paper but continuing the conversation with you because you have struck such an interesting line of thinking”.