Sheffield Teaching Assistant

Large Group Teaching

This workshop will provide participants with an introduction to effective practice in teaching large groups, including; engaging your audience, designing effective lectures, promoting active engagement in lectures and effective classroom management. This session will provide practical experience of an interactive large group environment. As a professional development activity the material covered in this session is also transferable to the broader professional skills of presenting to and engaging with audiences (for example conference or interview presentations).

Small Group Teaching

There are two workshops within this theme; one addressing effective laboratory demonstrating and one focused upon seminar facilitation.

Laboratory Demonstrating: the emphasis of the session will be on effective practice in demonstrating, encouraging and facilitating effective group work, undertaking assessment and feedback activities with students and health and safety requirements within the lab environment.  This session is most applicable to participants in the natural sciences, engineering and those who work within a scientific laboratory environment.

Seminar Facilitation: workshop participants will be able to; identify the role of small group learning within their discipline, design and facilitate small group learning experiences for students (including the facilitation of discussions and the identification of learning and pastoral support).  This session is most applicable to participants in arts, humanities and social science disciplines where seminar and tutorial teaching is most common.

Participants within these sessions will find that the skills of leading and managing groups will be applicable to many areas of their professional life.

Supervising Research Projects

This workshop will provide participants with an overview of the responsibilities of research supervisors for undergraduate and taught postgraduate research projects. Participants will consider the role of research projects within the curriculum, their role (and its limits) as a supervisor, strategies for developing and maintaining effective relationships with students and other supervisors and how to scope and manage research projects. Participants will also develop an awareness of the differing supervisory needs of students and how to respond to these. The transferable skills associated with this workshop are understanding project scoping and planning which can also be relevant to professional research and administrative activities.

Assessment & Feedback

This workshop is focused on providing participants with an overview of effective practice in student assessment and providing feedback. Participants will be introduced to strategies and activities that will allow them to mark student work accurately and reliably (in relation to departmental or module assessment criteria for example) and how to provide students with effective written and verbal feedback. There will also be consideration of how to identify and deal with unfair means, for example plagiarism. Being able to provide feedback that facilitates learning and future development is a transferable skill and one that all participants will find useful within their professional careers.