Schedule

Week 1: Reflections on readings, structuring student interactions. Decide on groups for future weeks.

To Dos:

Read the materials in the sample dialogs page: Teaching Staff Training: Sample Dialogs. Then, with your group, write about the following (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

Week 2: Reflections on Teaching Staff Training: Sample Dialogs, and role-play/mock tutoring sessions. Discuss what we learned in these role-plays.

To Dos:

• Sign up for a week with your group to present (every group should sign up for at least 1 week).
• Start taking a look at the learning theories primer and start familiarizing yourself with the ideas there.

Groups present on a learning theory from the learning theories primer. Non-presenting members come up with practice questions or other materials and reflections related to the topic of the week.

• Week 3: Behaviorism
• Week 4: Cognitivism
• Week 5: Constructivism
• Week 6: Situativism & Socio Cultural Theories

To Dos:

Presentations (if you're the presenting group for the week), and creating practice questions based on/inspired by the current week's learning theory (if not presenting).

Read the A, K, and W chapters from The ABCs of How We Learn.

These chapters talk about key teaching strategies. Analogies are a helpful technique that many of us use, and it's important to think about what makes an analogy helpful or unhelpful to students. The knowledge chapter talks about how sometimes the most "efficient" way of giving someone information isn't the best at helping them learn—letting students take a winding path to understand why something works is often helpful. On the other hand, sometimes worked examples are helpful for students to directly see all the steps to solving a problem. With your group, think about how you decide which approach to take in a given situation.

An amazing teaching staff training course is here: https://luthert.web.illinois.edu/UVA_CS2910_S2021/. This course was created by Luther Tychonievich, a teaching professor at UIUC (previously at UVA, where he developed this training). All of the topics there are worth thinking about and reading, but this week we're going to focus on cognitive load theory and diversity and implicit bias.

You'll find these in the "Student Learning" section and "Diversity – TA-mind and external phenomena" on that page (screenshots shown below). There's a written version of the content, along with a video version. You're welcome to choose either to read/watch. You're welcome (and encouraged!) to read/watch all of them, but the ones we want to make sure everyone covers are CLT Intro, CLT and TAing, IB, and IB Mitigation.

Note that some of the "Computing Parallels" might be a bit technical (e.g. they refer to things like "registers" that you may not have encountered before)—these are not strictly necessary for understanding the content, so don't worry if you've never heard of them. If you're interested though, you can ask others in your group if anyone knows about them and wants to explain the analogy being made (or feel free to search online).

How might these topics relate to each other? Are there perhaps ways that underrepresented students might experience more cognitive load as they try to "prove" that they belong or managing how they are perceived? Discuss each of the topics and how they relate.

Read the N, O, and T chapters from The ABCs of How We Learn.

This week's chapters all relate to the idea of leading by example. We set Norms by exemplifying behaviors we want our students to emulate; they Observe us and pick up our behaviors (both content-related and interpersonal things like respecting classmates). As a Teacher, you're setting an example for the depth of knowledge you want students to have in a particular topic (and you can help them see why certain things are/aren't important to understand—and, as the chapter says, learn it better yourself!)

Read the M, P, and R chapters from The ABCs of How We Learn.

This week's chapters all relate to the idea of student buy-in and intrinsic motivation. Students are much more willing to learn and complete coursework when they understand why it's important to them—that is, when they've bought in to something being a good idea. These chapters all cover strategies to make clearer connections between what students are learning and why it's in their best interest to do so—in some cases, explicitly creating rewards for learning behaviors we want.