The Distinct Self Teacher Training Program
"For the first time ever, the Department of Economics employed a tutor to train our graduate student teaching assistants (TAs). The latter guide students in smaller groups through question-and-answer sessions that also involve problem solving related to the introductory economics courses.
The training of the TAs benefits both the students who attend their tutorials, and the graduate students themselves in their preparation for the job market.
The feedback from the TAs (in both written and verbal forms) was tremendously positive: They indicated a very considerable improvement in their ability to communicate and interact with their students, how to motivate the students to work, and how to get the students to learn from one another through active participation in a group setting. Mr. Reznichek's methods, enthusiasm and diligence were a source of inspiration for very many of the TAs he trained.
The result of this pilot project is that the Economics Department will put such training in place on a permanent basis, and extend it to courses beyond the introductory level."
Ian Irvine
Professor, Department of Economics
---------
Dear Mr. Reznichek,
It was a pleasure working with you this semester; I really enjoyed it and profited a lot.
Many of your suggestions regarding the way the tutorial session should be organized turned out to be very helpful when applied. My tutorials were even more dynamic: students were interested and participating. Indeed adopting these strategies made the tutorial sessions more structured and organized. Students appreciated this new methodology.
Thank you for your efforts to improve our tutorials.
Amal Dabous (November 9, 2010)
PhD candidate, Economics Department, Concordia
---------
Hi Zach,
I really like a lot of the ideas you've provided about how to get the students more involved in the tutorial, how to make the sessions more interactive, etc. In particular, the idea you tossed out about splitting the students into groups to answer multiple choice questions was a lot of fun, and turning the student's questions back around to the class also helps to increase the interest/participation level in the tutorial I teach.
Thanks,
Tim Ruse (Nov 8, 2010)
---------
Hi Zach:
I just want to thank you for your effort in helping me to make my tutorial session more active and efficient. I really appreciate your time and patience in this matter. More importantly, with your help, my sessions have become more effective and vivid. I do hope that in the future, we can have an opportunity to work together again. Thank you!
Regards,
Xingfei Liu (Nov 14, 2010)
ECON201 Tutor
---------
Dear Zach,
I like your suggestion of reviewing some building blocks of the tutorial before talking about tutorial questions. I also like the idea of asking the students questions from time to time instead of lecturing all the time. I like your suggestion that whenever a student asks a question, let him/her repeat it loudly in order for others to get involved. You also suggest that we can even redirect one student's question to other students. By doing all these, I feel students become more active and get involved more in the class. In addition, it is a good idea to let the students form groups and discuss when time permits.
I am also grateful for you to spend time listening to our tutorials, videotaping us (I will ask you for my video for sure, hehe) and talking with us afterwards. It's very nice of you to help us to find some resources to improve our pronunciation.
In a word, you did a pretty good job.
Best,
Helen Hua Shang (November 10, 2010)
---------
Dear Future Tutorial Leaders:
I strongly recommend that you take the teaching seminars given by Zachary Reznichek (Zach) because it was very helpful for me, and I believe it will benefit you, too.
Before I participated in these workshops, I thought tutoring a session was simple, as long as you could answer the students’ questions. For that reason, I did nothing more than reviewing the tutorial questions. On few occasions, did I plan how to make the tutorial interactive, which I regarded as the “privilege” for the instructors. Although I always asked students, “Do you have any questions”, I learned that this is, according to Zach’s seminar, far from enough.
The central topic of Zach’s seminar is how to make tutorial sessions effective. And the secret is to make the tutorial session dynamic. Zach gives detailed examples on how to accomplish this: We can ask students questions, redirect questions, and generate discussions before throwing them the solutions.
Zach encourages the tutorial leaders to control the sessions towards the direction as planned before the class. For example, a perfect session should have a conclusion, yet this conclusion should be concluded without them knowing: the students may start packing as they realize the class is finishing.
I tried the skills in my sessions and it proved very successful. At first, few students answered my questions, but soon they started speaking up. I can see now that they are concentrating more and working harder in the tutorial session. If time permits, I also give them a topic to discuss to hear more students talk. Now my tutorial looks like a class, more than just a tutorial session, and this actually made the session more efficient.
Tutoring undergraduates may sound easy, but efficient teaching, definitely requires more skills than just economics knowledge. This is why I highly recommend Zach’s seminar to you all.
Yours faithfully,
Yan Zhao (November 12, 2010)
---------
Being organised and planning tutorials ahead of time definitely saves a lot of time in the long run. Getting the students to answer their own questions as well as designing tutorials in order to increase students’ participation, helps students to think more critically and keeps students interested in the course. Students actually now come to tutorials to learn and not just to get answers. After doing the seminar and implementing most of the strategies, one student actually told me "you rock!"
Please quote me as "anonymous" (Nov 11, 2010)
---------
As well as I could know the material, I have no prior experience in teaching or pedagogy and so every “tool” we received in the seminars was helpful. It was pleasing and rewarding to observe the students react to these tools; high levels of class participation, students posing insightful questions, attendance levels remaining consistent throughout the term. I could sense that the better I used the tools, the more students were engaged and appreciating the tutorial.
Doing a “warm-up” review was great for creating context and getting the class engaged right from the start. Also, asking questions was very effective in getting participation
– leading questions, or ones that challenged concepts learnt, as opposed to yes/no questions. There is a very noticeable difference in class participation.
Jennifer Smolak
---------
Having been a TA for 4 years, I believed that I explained clearly and was easy to understand in my tutoring. What can I improve? I attended TA training seminars held by Zachary with doubts at the beginning. Zach started seminars in a friendly atmosphere, totally different from all other seminars or training classes I have ever been to. After analyzing ourselves with help of Zach’s experiment, I found there are quite a lot of actions I can do to improve my tutoring.
Tutoring is not only to explain knowledge. Of course, grasping knowledge solidly is the foundation of tutoring, but the structure and organization of tutoring, materials, and communication with students are also very important, even more important than how knowledgeable you are.
Let me take the organization of tutoring as an example. Before, I always went through the problems one by one and explained theory when it came up or when I needed to. After seminar training, I tried a new way in my tutoring: to collect all the theories and concepts used in the whole problem sets and go over them with students together. With clear understanding of necessary knowledge points, the students not only review and reinforce all the materials, but they also clearly know what’s going on in the problem sets that follow. When I explain problem sets after that, more students can interact with me together instead of sitting and copying my handwriting as before. At the same time, it’s surprising to find that fewer students ask the same questions over and over in-class and after-class. It’s really efficient.
Another aspect of tutoring I want to share is communication. Before, I seldom had interactive communication with students, let alone encouraged students to do some helpful interaction between them. With Zach’s help, I tried to chat with them casually before class to make a leisure atmosphere as Zach did in our TA training. In tutoring, sometimes I throw some warm-up questions to let them discuss with classmates besides them so as to remove nervousness of answering questions, and sometimes I will walk through the class to put myself among them to let them feel I’m easy to access to help them. Also, now, I will “bravo!” them with their correct feedback to confirm their achievement, and sometimes I will let students answer other students to save my tutoring energy as well as encourage students’ enthusiasm of studying. With more communication, I see students are likely to be involved in my tutoring class, rather than just to writing down my answers. Meanwhile, I am personally more enthusiastic about tutoring classes than before. It’s really benign cycling between tutor and students.
In general, I appreciate Zach's help on my tutoring skills. It will be very useful for my future possible teaching career.
Helena Liu, Yu (Nov 9, 2010)
PhD candidate, Economics Department, Concordia
----------
The most important thing I understood from what Zach shared with us is that it is very important to interact with students. Instead of just showing the solutions, it is more efficient to let students try the problems themselves.
Borislav Mavrin (Nov 12, 2010)
The training of the TAs benefits both the students who attend their tutorials, and the graduate students themselves in their preparation for the job market.
The feedback from the TAs (in both written and verbal forms) was tremendously positive: They indicated a very considerable improvement in their ability to communicate and interact with their students, how to motivate the students to work, and how to get the students to learn from one another through active participation in a group setting. Mr. Reznichek's methods, enthusiasm and diligence were a source of inspiration for very many of the TAs he trained.
The result of this pilot project is that the Economics Department will put such training in place on a permanent basis, and extend it to courses beyond the introductory level."
Ian Irvine
Professor, Department of Economics
---------
Dear Mr. Reznichek,
It was a pleasure working with you this semester; I really enjoyed it and profited a lot.
Many of your suggestions regarding the way the tutorial session should be organized turned out to be very helpful when applied. My tutorials were even more dynamic: students were interested and participating. Indeed adopting these strategies made the tutorial sessions more structured and organized. Students appreciated this new methodology.
Thank you for your efforts to improve our tutorials.
Amal Dabous (November 9, 2010)
PhD candidate, Economics Department, Concordia
---------
Hi Zach,
I really like a lot of the ideas you've provided about how to get the students more involved in the tutorial, how to make the sessions more interactive, etc. In particular, the idea you tossed out about splitting the students into groups to answer multiple choice questions was a lot of fun, and turning the student's questions back around to the class also helps to increase the interest/participation level in the tutorial I teach.
Thanks,
Tim Ruse (Nov 8, 2010)
---------
Hi Zach:
I just want to thank you for your effort in helping me to make my tutorial session more active and efficient. I really appreciate your time and patience in this matter. More importantly, with your help, my sessions have become more effective and vivid. I do hope that in the future, we can have an opportunity to work together again. Thank you!
Regards,
Xingfei Liu (Nov 14, 2010)
ECON201 Tutor
---------
Dear Zach,
I like your suggestion of reviewing some building blocks of the tutorial before talking about tutorial questions. I also like the idea of asking the students questions from time to time instead of lecturing all the time. I like your suggestion that whenever a student asks a question, let him/her repeat it loudly in order for others to get involved. You also suggest that we can even redirect one student's question to other students. By doing all these, I feel students become more active and get involved more in the class. In addition, it is a good idea to let the students form groups and discuss when time permits.
I am also grateful for you to spend time listening to our tutorials, videotaping us (I will ask you for my video for sure, hehe) and talking with us afterwards. It's very nice of you to help us to find some resources to improve our pronunciation.
In a word, you did a pretty good job.
Best,
Helen Hua Shang (November 10, 2010)
---------
Dear Future Tutorial Leaders:
I strongly recommend that you take the teaching seminars given by Zachary Reznichek (Zach) because it was very helpful for me, and I believe it will benefit you, too.
Before I participated in these workshops, I thought tutoring a session was simple, as long as you could answer the students’ questions. For that reason, I did nothing more than reviewing the tutorial questions. On few occasions, did I plan how to make the tutorial interactive, which I regarded as the “privilege” for the instructors. Although I always asked students, “Do you have any questions”, I learned that this is, according to Zach’s seminar, far from enough.
The central topic of Zach’s seminar is how to make tutorial sessions effective. And the secret is to make the tutorial session dynamic. Zach gives detailed examples on how to accomplish this: We can ask students questions, redirect questions, and generate discussions before throwing them the solutions.
Zach encourages the tutorial leaders to control the sessions towards the direction as planned before the class. For example, a perfect session should have a conclusion, yet this conclusion should be concluded without them knowing: the students may start packing as they realize the class is finishing.
I tried the skills in my sessions and it proved very successful. At first, few students answered my questions, but soon they started speaking up. I can see now that they are concentrating more and working harder in the tutorial session. If time permits, I also give them a topic to discuss to hear more students talk. Now my tutorial looks like a class, more than just a tutorial session, and this actually made the session more efficient.
Tutoring undergraduates may sound easy, but efficient teaching, definitely requires more skills than just economics knowledge. This is why I highly recommend Zach’s seminar to you all.
Yours faithfully,
Yan Zhao (November 12, 2010)
---------
Being organised and planning tutorials ahead of time definitely saves a lot of time in the long run. Getting the students to answer their own questions as well as designing tutorials in order to increase students’ participation, helps students to think more critically and keeps students interested in the course. Students actually now come to tutorials to learn and not just to get answers. After doing the seminar and implementing most of the strategies, one student actually told me "you rock!"
Please quote me as "anonymous" (Nov 11, 2010)
---------
As well as I could know the material, I have no prior experience in teaching or pedagogy and so every “tool” we received in the seminars was helpful. It was pleasing and rewarding to observe the students react to these tools; high levels of class participation, students posing insightful questions, attendance levels remaining consistent throughout the term. I could sense that the better I used the tools, the more students were engaged and appreciating the tutorial.
Doing a “warm-up” review was great for creating context and getting the class engaged right from the start. Also, asking questions was very effective in getting participation
– leading questions, or ones that challenged concepts learnt, as opposed to yes/no questions. There is a very noticeable difference in class participation.
Jennifer Smolak
---------
Having been a TA for 4 years, I believed that I explained clearly and was easy to understand in my tutoring. What can I improve? I attended TA training seminars held by Zachary with doubts at the beginning. Zach started seminars in a friendly atmosphere, totally different from all other seminars or training classes I have ever been to. After analyzing ourselves with help of Zach’s experiment, I found there are quite a lot of actions I can do to improve my tutoring.
Tutoring is not only to explain knowledge. Of course, grasping knowledge solidly is the foundation of tutoring, but the structure and organization of tutoring, materials, and communication with students are also very important, even more important than how knowledgeable you are.
Let me take the organization of tutoring as an example. Before, I always went through the problems one by one and explained theory when it came up or when I needed to. After seminar training, I tried a new way in my tutoring: to collect all the theories and concepts used in the whole problem sets and go over them with students together. With clear understanding of necessary knowledge points, the students not only review and reinforce all the materials, but they also clearly know what’s going on in the problem sets that follow. When I explain problem sets after that, more students can interact with me together instead of sitting and copying my handwriting as before. At the same time, it’s surprising to find that fewer students ask the same questions over and over in-class and after-class. It’s really efficient.
Another aspect of tutoring I want to share is communication. Before, I seldom had interactive communication with students, let alone encouraged students to do some helpful interaction between them. With Zach’s help, I tried to chat with them casually before class to make a leisure atmosphere as Zach did in our TA training. In tutoring, sometimes I throw some warm-up questions to let them discuss with classmates besides them so as to remove nervousness of answering questions, and sometimes I will walk through the class to put myself among them to let them feel I’m easy to access to help them. Also, now, I will “bravo!” them with their correct feedback to confirm their achievement, and sometimes I will let students answer other students to save my tutoring energy as well as encourage students’ enthusiasm of studying. With more communication, I see students are likely to be involved in my tutoring class, rather than just to writing down my answers. Meanwhile, I am personally more enthusiastic about tutoring classes than before. It’s really benign cycling between tutor and students.
In general, I appreciate Zach's help on my tutoring skills. It will be very useful for my future possible teaching career.
Helena Liu, Yu (Nov 9, 2010)
PhD candidate, Economics Department, Concordia
----------
The most important thing I understood from what Zach shared with us is that it is very important to interact with students. Instead of just showing the solutions, it is more efficient to let students try the problems themselves.
Borislav Mavrin (Nov 12, 2010)
