How To Be An Awesome TA

video: 

https://vimeo.com/157958648

Lecture Overview

• The DO's and DON'T's of being a TA and tips on how to be effective
• How to respond to student frustration

 DO:

Reinforce Engineering Best Practices

 ENFORCE:

• Debugging
• Pseudocoding
• Looking at docs / Googling / Stackoverflow
• Whiteboarding & Diagramming
• Encourage students to communicate like an engineer (e.g. specify using line numbers, identifying objects vs arrays, etc.)
• Read over Debugging Best Practices guidelines

 DO:

Study the materials beforehand

Suggested Study Workflow

* Take the weekend to complete the next week's material including extra credit.

* If you find any bugs, please send them to prepcommunication@telegraphacademy.com

* Scour the internet for helpful material that will help students and share with staff/students through slack.

 DO:

Practice Good Listening

• Listen fully to student questions
• Allow students to express their thought process
• Rephrase student questions to test your own understanding of their question
• Sympathize with student concerns / frustrations, describe how it was the same for you

DO:

Foster Effective Pair Programming 

• Celebrate the small victories with pairs!
• Enforce pair programming patterns — only one computer should be open (the driver's)
• Ask questions like: "Who's the navigator, and who's the driver?"
• Encourage the pair to talk it out when there are disagreements or only one person is understanding the new material
• Encourage the senior in the pair to help the junior in a way that is not patronizing
• Pair Programming Guide 
• https://github.com/TelegraphPrep/PrepPlus-Student-Wiki/blob/master/Pair-Programming-Reference-Guide.md

 DO:

Engage Students Proactively

• Look for students that might be reluctant to ask for help
• Give equal attention to all participants, make sure everyone's needs are being meet or addressed
• For onsite students, walk around and do thumbs checks
• Check in with offsite students for questions
• IF odd # of students (someone doesn't have a pair) it is OK to check in often with that student 

DON'T:

Be Afraid to Be Wrong / Don't Succumb to Imposter Syndrome! 

• It's OK to look things up with students that you don't know or remember right away
• If you are still struggling with finding a good answer, ask your instructor for assistance
• Don't let fear of being wrong stop you from engaging students and ultimately learning more! ​

DON'T:

Rob Students of

"The Struggle"

• It is tempting to give students the answers
• NEVER do this!
• Seriously. Don't do this.
• Try to lead students in the right direction so that they can arrive at the solution on their own
• Point to sections in their code that they may be overlooking
• Help students break down big problems into smaller, more manageable chunks
• Ask the debugger's question: "What justifies my expectation that x should work?"
• Remind students that the struggle is a very important and intentional part of the process. 

Responding to Student Frustrations

• If a student becomes too angry or abusive, notify your instructor
• Remind students that this is the nature of the process — Software Engineering is about frustrating, painstaking detail
• Sympathize with their journey (it's OK to give examples when you felt the same way)
• Celebrate what they have accomplished so far — congratulate their talent, effort, and remind students about why they are here! (It wouldn't be a good program if it weren't hard, anything easy isn't worth having, etc.)