Centre for Leadership in Learning Office

TA Day:

90 minute time slots vs. 60 minute time slots Asked which format people would prefer this year Is there a way to incorporate both formats since “Effective Presentations” and “Managing anger and conflict in the classroom” need the full 90 minutes Asked for people to think about presenting a workshop at TA Day since Terry is coordinating that as well

Ideas for Workshops within department:

Motivating students (possible TA Day workshop as well) – Terry has started to collect resources for this topic Making effective presentations For TAs to incorporate into the beginning of a course: How to use referencing software (Refworks specifically since it is available free on the library website, Endnote etc.), do a basic search for literature in an area, and general rules about citing and what constitutes plagiarism

Academic Dishonesty:

In SGS course: mainly targeting grad students own work So workshop is needed focusing on how to deal with academic dishonesty as a TA Steps to follow if you encounter as a TA this training is particularly important in light of research at University of Guelph that found that there is a large group of students that will cheat or not depending on how cheating is dealt with (provide info about consequences as a deterrent) – see: Julia Christensen Hughes and Don McCabe (2006) “Understanding academic misconduct,” Canadian Journal of Higher Education 36(1):49-63 Good resource for prevention: “Using Sources Effectively: Strengthening your writing and avoiding plagiarism” by Robert Harris (2002, Pyrczak Publishing) and it’s in Innis Library LB 2369.H32 2002

Courses offered in Bio: how to read / critique a paper, discussed how students lack these skills coming in to university and the need to teach these skills

Previous TA network

TAN Book Club discussed pedagogy and higher education- is there an interest in getting together for this purpose? Example of an Article: comparison of design slides to teach students more effectively in science and engineering words / bullet lists vs. a sentence and pictures *Terry has the PDF of this article if anyone wants it e-mailed to them

Wikis

LTRC: how to create – workshop topic at TA Day last year – video on what they are: http://www.commoncraft.com/video-wikis-plain-english effective way to summarize info – TAN coordinator will set one up and TAs can contribute to it so we have a resource to use and somewhere to put useful info we find about teaching