TA Training: General Background and Advice on Online Teaching (and TAing)
The Chronicle of Higher Education advice guide, “How to Be a Better Online Teacher,” contains a wealth of good advice for teachers and TAs. To learn some background information about online teaching, and to get some specific tips you can use in your TAing, do the following self-guided exercise:
- Read the entire advice guide. This should take about 20 minutes, maybe a little shorter, maybe a little longer. The guide is written for teachers, and some material in it won’t be relevant for TAs, but much will be.
- A large part of the guide is “10 Essential Principles and Practices.” Take out a sheet of paper, or open a new computer file, and write down or type in the 10 principles/practices. Then for each one write down one thing mentioned in the guide that you can use in your TAing. This might be an important idea, a specific practice, or anything else related that you think will be particularly useful in your TA work.
- Near the end of the article is a section “Common Misperceptions.” Write down or type in two or three things you learned from this section that you found particularly important, interesting, and/or surprising.
- Now go back to your answer to Item 2 above where you wrote down the 10 principles/practices as well as one idea about each. Which of these ideas do you think will be the most helpful in your TAing? Star one, two, or three of the ideas, and then write a short explanation (a small paragraph for each should suffice) explaining how you plan to use the idea in TA work.