GSI Essentials
Tips
- Listen to your students!
- Corollary: Learn their names—it comes in handy later on.
- Practice makes perfect.
- Make your students do all the hard work.
- An ounce of preparation is worth a pound of flimflam.
- Determine your availability.
- Know your resources.
- You are not average. You are a student in one of the best universities in the country.
Tricks of the trade
- You can move rooms, for nearly any reason (send requests to soda-rooms@cs.berkeley.edu).
- You can reserve alcoves in Soda for OH (same address as above).
- For those of you with offices, you can still get other rooms. That is, you don't need to use your office for OH.
- You can reserve classrooms, including the Woz, for review sessions.
- You can get a copy card for running off section handouts from the Soda front desk or your professor.
- You can get new dry erase markers at the main office in Soda.
- Whatever you write on the board will be gone by the next day!
- You can get a key card access to the upper floors and Woz if needed.
- You can request multimedia equipment.
What are your responsibilities?
- Interacting with your students
- In person: section (1-2x per week), lecture (1-3x per week),
lab (1-2x per week), office hours (3-5 hours per week for a 20-hr/wk GSI)
- Electronically: email, newsgroups, WWW, instant messenger
- Helping them out with projects
- Helping them deal with their project partners
- Achieving a balance between answering questions and fostering self-reliance.
- Interacting with the professor
- Weekly meetings to review material to cover in section
- Reviewing the syllabus for the course
- Asking questions about the material
- Learning about their expectations (and yours)
- Giving lecture feedback (tact is important)
- Relaying student feedback
- Determining how important are grades
- Discuss plagiarism policies.
- Never argue with professor in public (especially not in lecture).
- Never insult the professor to your students.
- Preparing for section
- How many hours do you need?
- Where do you get ideas?
- Talk with the professor
- The other GSIs in the course
- The book
- Points that lecture missed or did badly
- You took this class in college—use your old notes!
- Questions from lab/office hours/email/newsgroups
- Old tests (in course readings or HKN files)
- Prepare an outline.
- Practice to your roommate or to another GSI before section.
- Don't waste time in your first section of the day because you haven't practiced an explanation.
- Running a section
- Write down an outline of things to do that day.
- Write down future events of concern to students (tests, due dates).
- How to cover all of your topics
- Sticking to the outline (or not)
- Go with the flow.
- Socratic method
- Asking questions to your class
- Answering students' questions
- Discuss applications, not just theory. Usually the professors gives them more theory than they want. It's up to you to give them a little grounding in reality.
- Bring props.
- Handouts, handouts, handouts
- When to do administrivia—in the middle.
- When to give back tests—at the beginning (otherwise you'll watch them squirm for an hour)
- Teach to the middle, not the top nor the bottom.
- How to use the board
- Look at the students, not at the board.
- Erase up and down, not side to side (physical demonstration).
- Write bigger than you think you need to.
- Use colors! (Make sure students can see them.)
- Pay attention to your students (look for glazed eyes).
- Monitor the energy flow of your students.
- Play games!
- Human Cons Cell Jeopardy (CS 61A)
- Lost on the Moon
- Compiler Jeopardy!
- Tailor examples to very little writing, lots of interaction/explanation. If you need to spend a lot of time writing it, put it on a handout.
- Use the computer in your classroom for demos/presentations.
- Running a lab
- In CS, this can be boring.
- Watch over your class and ask each group questions proactively.
- Notice students who are in trouble and slow-going.
- Look for misconceptions and ideas for discussion section.
- Never drive the computer/equipment for a student (unless it's to fix something that is totally irrelevant to the class that the student will never ever need to know or see again.)
- Ditto.
- Office Hours
- In your office or somewhere else?
- Scaling to the number of students
- Few students: personal instruction, one on one
- More students: mini-recitation-style
- Many students (like before a test): move to a bigger room, essentially do a recitation (but find out what they want to hear about—usually everything).
- Scheduling: Do them when students can make, not when is convenient for you.
- Other forms of communication
- Email
- Be available for your students.
- Answer promptly or write back saying you need more time.
- Keep of list of class email addresses.
- Instant Messenger
- Newsgroup
- Web pages
- Phone
- Grading: assignments, tests, projects
- Making up homework
- Making up test questions
- Project maintenance
- Debugging exams and homework
- Hanging out with other t.a.s
- Going to lecture (and not sleeping)
- Dealing with problem students
- Holding review sessions for tests
- Making up review sheets and sample problems for students to solve (usually helpful but optional)
Resources
- Mike Clancy, CS faculty GSI advisor
- CS office staff (390 Soda): source of card keys, chalk and white-board markers, red pens, ...
- The instructor
- Former t.a.s
- Each other!