How to teach Comm-B courses (For TAs)

Being a Teaching Assistant (TA) for a Comm-B course can be intimidating. If you have never taught writing before, it’s normal to feel a bit nervous about this new challenge—and about the grading load. As Melzer & Bean (2021) remind us, though:

Because the best teacher commentary focuses primarily on students’ ideas and the strengths, weaknesses, or clarity of their arguments, no special terminology is needed. Teachers simply need to be honest readers… (12).

You don’t need to be an expert writer—or an expert teacher of writing—to be a teaching assistant for a Comm-B course. As an advanced undergraduate or graduate student, you know how to assess arguments and ideas.

Below is additional guidance to help you TA for your Comm-B course.

Teach Writing (and Thinking) as a Process

As a TA, you may have little control over the design of the writing assignments in your Comm-B course. If you lead a section or lab session, however, you still have considerable influence over how students approach these assignments.

Students typically focus on writing product (e.g., the finished, 5-page paper) and forget about the importance of the writing process (everything from brainstorming to drafting to revision and polishing). As a Comm-B TA, you can use time in section or lab to encourage students to think of writing (and thinking) as a process.

Talk about your own writing challenges and successes. It can be very validating for college students to understand that even experienced writers struggle with parts of the writing process. Share with your students how you approach writing and the places you usually get stuck—including how you troubleshoot and navigate challenges. For example, you may share that you use concept maps or mind maps to visually map out your thoughts in the brainstorming phase because it helps you organize your ideas. Or you may share how you rely on reverse outlines to revise the structure of your drafts. By modeling for students that sticky points need not be stopping points, you will help your students learn writing resiliency.

Use in-class low-stakes writing activities. Another great way to emphasize process alongside product is to have students regularly engage in in-class, low-stakes, not graded writing activities. For a table of some common activities, see our page on Examples of Standard Low-Stakes Writing Activities & Assignments. Low-stakes writing activities help students take writing and thinking risks without fear of impacting their grade. You might even consider using low-stakes writing activities to scaffold the larger writing assignments in the class. For example, you might have students do a freewrite or write-pair-share about their potential research topics; or you might have students draw concept maps in the brainstorming phase.

Prioritize Growth-Oriented Feedback

Providing students with feedback on their writing is a key part of the role of a Comm-B TA. This can certainly feel overwhelming, given the amount of writing that students do in Comm-B courses. When giving feedback to students, resist the urge to mark every error or typo you notice. This is overwhelming for you as the person giving feedback, and for students receiving this feedback. Instead, consider the following practice.

Make global, before local, comments. In any piece of writing, global concerns are those related to the entire piece of writing (e.g., structural, argumentative, conceptual, and organizational concerns). By contrast, local concerns are those related to only a small portion of a piece of writing (e.g., sentence-level concerns such as syntax, grammar, and punctuation). In giving feedback to students on their writing, focusing on “global before local” fosters critical thinking as students grapple with ideas; helps students develop strong, clear arguments; gives students guidance for substantial edits in the drafting process; and validates students’ ideas as worthy of focus and attention. This doesn’t mean local concerns aren’t important—just that, especially early in the drafting process, global concerns should come first. Local concerns can become more important in the final, polishing stages, once global concerns have been addressed.

For more information and promising practices for giving feedback on student writing, check out our section on Responding to (and Evaluating) Student Writing.

Make Student-TA Conferences Inclusive & Accessible

One of the wonderful, high-impact practices characteristic of Comm-B courses is the opportunity for students to engage directly with instructors (including TAs) about their writing and learning processes. Because we know that individualized attention and conversation supports all learners in their development, holding individual Student-TA meetings (“conferences”) aligns with the mission of Universal Design for Learning (UDL).

Still, there are several ways you can curate conferences to be more intentionally accessible and inclusive of all students.

Take an explicitly collaborative approach. It would be impossible to plan for every kind of disability, chronic health issue, or life situation that might impact students’ performance in your sections or labs. Rather than try to guess what a student might be experiencing, UDL encourages you to engage students in genuine conversation and work collaboratively to determine how best to support their learning.

Such a collaborative approach centers the students—their identity and their experience—throughout the conference. As the teacher in this context, it is your role to ask questions and to listen as much as it is to provide feedback, clarifications, and suggestions. It is only through asking questions and listening carefully to students’ responses that you can most effectively provide feedback! Some open-ended questions you might ask during individual conferences include:

• How would you like to work together [e.g., in person or on Zoom]? What works best for you?
• Before we get started, is there anything you’d like me to know [e.g., about how you’re doing, about your experience with this class]?
• Could you tell me about your writing process? What aspects feel fairly easy or more difficult for you?
• Have you talked with instructors about your writing before? What did you find helpful (or not so helpful) about those conversations?

Offer options and flexibility. Through your conversations with students, you may come to learn that some aspects of conferences that seem inconsequential to you are sometimes significantly consequential to students. You can respond—or better yet, anticipate—such instances by being overtly flexible about your conferences and offering options for how, when, and where consultations occur.

The table below lists several ways to build greater flexibility into one-to-one conferences with students.

Support executive functioning. Individual conferences are an excellent opportunity for you to talk with students about potential difficulties with executive functioning as well as course content and writing processes. Executive functions include a broad set of cognitive tasks that inform behavior, including goal-setting, planning, strategizing, and monitoring progress toward goals.

Consider reading through the UDL on Campus website’s page on executive functioning in online environments if you plan to hold some or all of your conferences virtually.

Here are UW-Madison, the McBurney Disability Resource Center is an excellent resource as you strive to support disabled, neurodivergent, and chronically ill students.

For additional information and promising practices for individual conferences, check out our section on Supporting Students in the Writing Process: Student-Teaching Conferences.

Prepare for Peer Review

Peer review can be an incredibly rewarding part of the writing process for students writers. But as you may know from your own experiences, when peer review is not properly structured, scaffolded, and executed, it can feel like busywork or be outright unpleasant.

As a TA for a Comm-B course, you may be responsible for facilitating peer review in your section or lab. Avoid assuming that students know what peer review is—and even anticipate that some may have prior negative experiences with peer review. Take time in section or lab to explain to students why peer review matters and what students can hope to get out of it.

For further information on facilitating a successful peer review, see our section on Supporting Students in the Writing Process: Peer Review.

Support Students to Present their Work

The Comm-B course criteria requires:

[A]t least two opportunities for each students to be graded for presenting research findings, creative work, or other coursework, in moves other than writing common to the discipline as well as two or more opportunities to be graded for writing. Comm-B courses should also include activities that give students further opportunities to develop and receive feedback on their communication skills in writing and at least one other mode of communication in informal settings such as discussion or brainstorming.

Many Comm-B courses include an in-class presentation to showcase students’ research and to allow students to demonstrate communication skills through presenting their work.

For many students, presenting their work in front of classmates can be intimidating and cause a great deal of stress. Make sure to discuss with students strategies they might use to help them prepare and execute the presentation successfully (e.g., using notecards, a slide deck, visuals, practicing in front of a friend or roommate). Share what works for you when you have to make presentations in classes, your department, or at conferences.

For more on helping students prepare to present, check out our section on Supporting Students to Present their Work.

Consider Your Role & Responsibilities as Part of a Teaching Team

As a Comm-B TA, you have a lead instructor(s) and potentially other TAs on your teaching team. While this means the work is divided among the team, it can be hard to ensure that everyone is on the same page throughout the semester. Because of the power relationship between TAs and lead instructors, it can often be difficult for TAs to ask for the support they need.

If the lead instructor does not set any up, consider requesting regular (e.g., weekly) team meetings throughout the semester to navigate any issues that arise and to share what’s going well. This is also a chance to hear from other TAs how their sections/labs are going and how they are navigating challenges.

If the lead instructor gives you some or complete freedom over what to cover in lab/section, consider discussing with any other TAs on the team (especially more experienced TAs or those that have taught this class before) how they structure lab/section and what activities they use. Also consider referring to our table of Examples of Standard Low-Stakes Activities & Assignments as you plan.

While you may be given freedom over what to do and cover in lab/section, make sure that your teaching aligns with the instructor’s goals for the course and supports student learning. Bring disagreements and issues to the lead instructor directly, either in team meetings or a one-to-one meeting.

Develop (or Hone) Your Own Teaching Philosophy

Being a TA for any course can be tricky, as you navigate teaching a course you yourself didn’t design. While you need to be respectful of the lead instructor’s wishes for how to teach the class, this is also an opportunity for you to start developing (or hone) your own teaching philosophy.

As you TA for your Comm-B course, reflect critically on what is going well and what isn’t. As a TA, you often have a much closer connection with the students in the course as you see then in section/lab, read their writing, and meet with them in individual conferences. As you gather student feedback (informally and perhaps formally through a midterm anonymous survey), consider what practices seem to be high-impact for students and which ones you yourself value as a teacher.

Reflect on your own teaching. One way to build a foundation for a larger teaching philosophy is to engage in reflective writing after teaching sessions. So, after a discussion or lab session, consider writing brief notes to reflect on how that session went. Were there any activities the students seemed particularly engaged in? Were there any that fell flat? Why do you think they went as they did? Engaging in reflective writing around teaching can help you elicit underlying values that guide your teaching.

Reflect on others’ teaching. Another way to develop or hone your own teaching philosophy is to critically reflect on how your values relate to those of the lead instructor or other TAs. Maybe you disagree with having “trick” questions on exams, or really admire the way the lead instructor uses active learning techniques in lecture. We often learn what we value by reacting to policies and practices of those we observe.

If you are interested in further honing your teaching philosophy, or engaging in teaching professional development, The Delta Program at UW-Madison is a wonderful resource for graduate students and postdocs.

Use Your Resources

As a TA for a Comm-B course, there are many resources at your disposal. Check out our page about Resources for Anyone Teaching Comm-B, which includes information about support from the libraries, the Writing Center, the Writing Fellows Program, and our own team—Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC).

References

Melzer, Dan and John C. Bean. Engaging Ideas : The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wisc/detail.action?docID=6632622.