2019 TA Institute Themes

The TA Institute runs Jan. 15–18 at UBC’s Vancouver campus and is open to any graduate student who is interested in teaching or TAing. We will explore five themes at this year’s event:

1. TA wellness

• Self advocacy and negotiation strategies for TAs
• How your TAship can help your career
• Faculty-TA relationship
• Improving your time management

Graduate School can be a difficult time, managing competing demands and deadlines from research and coursework, Teaching and TAing, and of course maintaining our own personal relationships, hobbies, and personal development. TAs are often especially challenged, in the expectation to support students, maintain their programs, and elements of their personal lives are put on hold or sidetracked. These sessions focus on how to manage your life as a TA so that it fits into, and perhaps even enhances your overall wellness.

2. Teaching and Learning Space(s)

• TA'ing a Community Engaged Learning course: exploring the roles, tension points and opportunities for professional development
• Making Space: supporting inclusive classrooms
• Faculty-TA relationship

Sometimes, we can be tempted to think of teaching and learning as discrete processes, a task that students and teachers work at and accomplish, and whose resources, challenges, and meanings are fully contained within the lessons and the content being learned. However, all teaching, all learning, and all knowledge are set within multiple contexts — social, historical and technological — which learning both helps to form, and is informed by, whether we know it or not. In these sessions, we will think about how teaching and learning are situated in the multiple spaces in which they occur, and how to make the most of these contexts for the benefit of our diverse learners.

3. Experiential learning

• TA'ing a Community Engaged Learning course: exploring the roles, tension points and opportunities for professional development
• Experiential Learning Theory
• Facilitating discussions
• Canvas as an Experiential Learning Space

How can we as instructors help students to meaningfully interact with and have an experience of the things we want to teach them in a way that encourages deep, lifelong learning? Planning our teaching intentionally in ways that alternate between “trying things out” — having a meaningful, well aligned interaction with something they are attempting to learn, and providing time, space, and possibly structure to support reflection on and integration of those experiences into a wider understanding is the heart of experiential learning. But abstractly describing the theory, and actually embedding it in concrete practices are two different things (or two different sides of the same thing?) In these sessions we will explore different ways of guiding students through this essential cycle of learning to build genuine understanding.

4. Teaching with technology

• Canvas as an Experiential Learning Space
• Learning Analytics
• Presentation and guest lecturing skills

Changes in technology have made their way into classroom spaces, increasing speed, connectivity, and opening up a new space of possibility. But, as in all things, technology in the classroom alone does not ensure good teaching or effective learning. How can we best use technologies to support student learning?

5. Teaching skills

• Presentation and guest lecturing skills
• Facilitating discussions
• Making Space: supporting inclusive classrooms
• Improving your time management
• Experiential learning

The building blocks of good teaching are the techniques and skills we bring to bear on helping our students learn. These involve decisions on how we present, how we organize our lessons, ourselves, the discussions we have, and space in the classroom. But teaching skill is more than a vast library of tips and tricks; it is judgment about when, how, and why to use these techniques in order to help your students learn. In these sessions, you will explore not only a wide range of skills and techniques, but an exploration into the how and why of the use of these approaches to further enrich your teaching.