TA Workshops

Being part of an academic community is a hallmark of the UCSB educational experience. This workshop introduces TAs to the values, perspectives, and strategies we use at UCSB to foster a sense of belonging and community in our classes.

Students learn better when they are actively participating in the learning process rather than passively listening. In this workshop, you will differentiate between active learning and passive listening, identify elements that foster active learning, and apply a variety of instructional methods.

Creating lessons is essential, but how can we ensure those lessons are engaging for our students? In this workshop, you will use learning objective taxonomies and a lesson planning framework to design active, student-centered classes.

Much of a TA’s role during section is to formulate generative questions, structure activities that check student understanding, and give effective feedback. In this workshop, you will explore several classroom-based assessment and questioning techniques that are based on the principles of giving effective feedback.

TAs are responsible for creating, implementing, and evaluating assessments. But what makes a good assessment? How can we use assessment to support learning? And what are some reasonable ways to grade student work? In this workshop, you will use principles from evidence-based design to make assessments more focused and impactful, and help you with practical grading strategies.

Good teachers never stop learning how to improve their classes. This workshop helps TAs develop a sustainable plan for continuous improvement and professional development as teachers.

Writing a Teaching Philosophy Statement can be a challenge, and is required for most teaching positions. At the same time, examining and articulating your teaching philosophy can help you to become a more effective instructor. You will work through a series of exercises to help you reflect on your teaching, and draft an outline of your teaching philosophy statement.

The session will provide tips on writing the CCUT teaching portfolio, including ways of presenting teaching materials, documenting student ratings, meeting the technology requirement, tone of the portfolio narration, and more. Participants need to have completed at least two of the CCUT requirements. Please note that if you are completing your doctorate degree in Summer, the final date that you may submit your CCUT portfolio is Week 5 of Spring quarter. 

In this workshop you will learn how to interpret statistics from your ESCI (UCSB’s student evaluations of teaching) reports, find trends in the data, and strategize about how to enhance your teaching based on students’ feedback. We will also discuss approaches for summarizing your ESCI data for the academic job market.

The session will provide tips on writing the CCUT teaching portfolio, including ways of presenting teaching materials, documenting student ratings, meeting the technology requirement, tone of the portfolio narration, and more. Participants need to have completed at least two of the CCUT requirements. Please note that if you are completing your doctorate degree in Summer 2021, the final date that you may submit your CCUT portfolio is Friday, April 30th.