Prof Michael Wong
Involving TAs and assigning duties to make use of their strengths could make a drastic difference. TAs can cat as a bridge between faculty and students. By taking a student's perspective, they can point out things that are easily overlooked by the faculty."
Suggestions for Your First Large Class
First of all, sufficient preparation on teaching contents is important. Always be prepared to have students from different backgrounds (e.g. non-Physics students taking Physics subjects).
Be aware that students come with different strengths, for instance, some are good at reading and some are good at doing things. Faculty have to be careful in designing learning tasks.
Always inspire TAs to help. Well-trained TAs make a big difference.
In addition, it is more beneficial to have experienced faculty members to teach large class because it could be quite stressful for new staff to take up a large class and to cope with the administrative issues.
Department of Physics
Course:
PHYS002 Introduction to Astrophysics and Astronomy (300 students)
Format of Weekly Meetings:
- Two 100-minute lectures
- Four 1-hour tutorial sessions (optional before mid-term exam)
- Activities (e.g. field trips, astronomical observations)
Preparing Materials
Students coming from various backgrounds has made designing the syllabus of this course a major challenge. He takes the medium level of difficulty when creating the syllabus to be fair to the majority of students. For students who have weaker background, he usually warns them in the beginning of class but still leaves the add/drop decision to them.
Arranging TAs' Work
He receives good support from his department. He has altogether 2 IAs (Instructional Assistants) and 5 TAs. They specialize in different jobs. Some are responsible for marking assignments and some support in demonstration. In designing exam paper, TAs are always able to identify areas for improvement and give constructive feedback. This is important as TAs provide another perspective and can point out things that are overlooked by the faculty.
Training TAs
He tries to involve TAs as much as possible as part of the training. To maintain good communication, he has weekly TA meetings in which he lets TAs know the objectives of the course activities well ahead of time. He also encourages them to better equip themselves in areas such as presentation skills. Overall, he wants to transmit a sense of commitment in them and being a TA is more than just a job.
Managing Class (Lecture)
Chatting is a problem in class discipline. One solution he tries to adopt is to assign TAs to sit among the students to control their noise level by taking down names, however this is not always successful.
Assessment
Major assessments include two mid-term exams and one final exam in addition to two field trip reports and participation in class (PRS) and online discussion.
The challenge of assessing a class of 300 is the administrative logistics to carry out a fair examination. He needs to plan well in advance and coordinates with the TAs to implement the logistics efficiently during the exam, such as assigning each TA a section of students to monitor, making sure all papers are turned in, able to hand over the exam venue on time, etc.
On marking the exam papers, he usually provides a set of model solutions and he decides on the level of tolerance (policy on giving partial credits, etc.) together with TAs. To ensure fairness and consistency in marking, he assigns one TA to mark on one particular question for all the papers.
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