UTAs learn quite a bit about responding to student writing in their 388V seminar work; it’s something they discuss and practice almost weekly. We do not, however, explicitly address expectations for or approaches to specific writing assignments. Instructors are responsible for communicating their expectations about each assignment–as well as their preferences for UTA feedback on student writing–with their UTAs.
While many UTAs assist the same class they took as students, once they begin looking at their own students’ work from the instructional perspective, everything changes. This can be disorienting and intimidating, especially if they don’t know what their instructors want them to address and what to ignore on drafts. Without sitting down with their instructors early in the semester–within the first two weeks–UTAs will not know how well their internal writing standards match those of their instructors.
Three overarching principles drive the recommendations below:
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- No one knows your assignments like you do
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- Your students trust that your UTAs know your assignments like you do
- Your students will ask your UTAs for feedback on their drafts
Recommendations:
- Meet with your UTA to go over each assignment, even if they just completed it themselves last semester
- Show your UTA how to view this assignment from your perspective so that they know what to look for when they work one-on-one with students. This is vital.
- Tip: go over at least 2 (anonymous) student examples from previous semesters with your UTA. Ask him or her to reflect to you what s/he thinks of each one. She’ll likely be much harsher than you are. Walk her through what you’re looking for: remind her where you are in the semester, what you’ve covered with students (and what you haven’t), and what higher-order concerns are most important with this particular assignment
- Show your UTA how to view this assignment from your perspective so that they know what to look for when they work one-on-one with students. This is vital.
- Ask your UTAs to meet with students in person
- In 388V, we address the many advantages, for both students and UTAs, of meeting with students in person instead of responding to a draft over email. It is much more effective for your students’ overall growth as writers to discuss their writing in person. Reinforce this with your UTAs. Emphasize your UTA’s role as a coach, not an editor. This distinction is strongly supported by the literature on peer tutoring.
- Explain your approach to in-person, 1:1 meetings with your students
- Without some concrete strategies, UTAs and students can easily spend an hour (or more) together with students, which is not always optimal for either party. Consider how you work with students. How do you handle meeting with multiple students during a one-hour time block? When they come in with full drafts, do you read the whole thing? Do you request that your students identify 1-2 specific things they’d like feedback on? Do you offer sentence-level feedback? If so, do you identify everything you see as you read a whole draft, or do you focus closely on one paragraph? Do you touch the draft with your own pen or pencil (or keyboard)? Or do you talk and have students do all of the writing and notetaking?
- Again, we cover a lot of this in 388V, but at every stage, I emphasize that I am not the instructor. You are. You likely do several things in your own way, which is one of the many reasons you are an excellent instructor. Help your UTAs bring the scholarship into practice by showing them what you do and why.
Image by Mike Caffrey