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Graduate Teaching Seminar Phil 593 - USC Philosophy - Fall 2021 - Shieva Kleinschmidt

Overview

This course is designed to give support and helpful information to first-semester teaching assistants. It is assumed that this course will be taken during the first semester one is carrying out a TAship in philosophy at USC. (Once students reach their fourth year and have had more experience as TAs, they may take a sequel to this course.)

Our focus will be on the content of your course meetings / recitation sessions. We'll look at policies you have for these meetings, activities you plan for them, and materials you produce to support them. We'll also discuss classroom dynamics and how to support diversity in the classroom. Finally, we'll discuss steps you can begin to take now to reflectively develop as an instructor and to put yourself in a position to easily develop a teaching portfolio later.

Our learning objectives: By the end of the semester, (1) students will be able to identify choice-points in policy plans, as well as pros and cons for multiple alternatives for those choice points, (2) students will be able to draft learning objectives for lessons, and will be able to differentiate learning objectives from learning aspirations, (3) students will be able to write descriptions of in-class activities aligned with at least some of those learning objectives, (4) students will be able to identify diversity-related issues faced by members of the university community, and best practices for supporting those members in and out of the classroom, (5) students will be able to identify choice-points in relation to grading, and to develop approaches to grading based in their responses to those, and (6) students will be able to evaluate teaching samples and materials for implementation of best practices.

For the fall of 2021, our course will take place online. The first meeting will take place the week before undergraduate classes begin in Dornsife. The first six meetings will be held on consecutive weeks, so the vast majority of the course will have taken place by late September. The seventh and final meeting will take place later in the term, on a week we choose in late October or early November.

Schedule

Syllabus

Available here

ASSIGNMENT TIMING INFORMATION

All assignments will be due 24 hours before we meet. So, even though it says "Do This Before Our Meeting", what it really means is "Do this by at least 24 hours before we meet". This is so that I (and your classmates!) will have time to read your contributions before we meet.

Further, some aspects of this website are still being determined. The large assignments, such as selecting and reading papers on diversity and on grading and preparing to present the general ideas to the class, and observing teaching by your peers, are fixed and you can start on those. But some things, such as which things you should read or watch, and which smaller assignments (such as contributions to collaborative documents) you have to do before our meetings, may be altered slightly. So here is the plan: asynchronous content and the assignments for any given meeting will be fixed by the time of the previous meeting. So once we meet, you know you can start preparing for the next meeting as soon as you'd like. For instance, though there is already content available for the Peer Observation and Looking Forward week, that content is subject to change at any point up until we have the previous meeting, on Grading.

Week 1 - First Day and Initial Policies

What To Expect

We'll discuss your role as TAs and the value of teaching, we'll do an activity related to the first few minutes in the classroom, and we'll discuss policies to settle before your first meeting.

Watch This

(Note: this video is a bit outdated. You won't be required to make an electronic resource, and you'll be observing the teaching of 2 peers, not 3. And the course's zoom link was sent via email, rather than posted to a google document.)

Read This

Handout - Setting Expectations

A general CET document on course policies

Do This Before Our Meeting

Contribute to this google doc with your own course policy and pros and cons for it.

Optional: If you want to, think about what you'd like to do for your contribution during our in-class activity. Prepare any materials you'll need.

Week 2 - Lesson Planning and Classroom Dynamics

What To Expect

For the first half, our class will be a bit like a support group. We'll simply chat about how your first meetings went. We'll talk about which sorts of things you did, how you prepared, what your students were like, whether there were any challenging situations, and how you felt afterward. Then we'll discuss lesson planning, and the wide range of approaches one may take to it. Finally, we'll talk about classroom dynamics and discussion.

Read This

Look through the lesson plans in this dropbox folder, and in our course's non-public folder as well. No need to read any of them closely, just note the variety of approaches represented. (Also note that there are many approaches not represented here.)

Ch. 4, "Running A Discussion", of Curzan and Damour, available in our class's non-public folder. (20 pages) (Note: I'm assigning this reading, but I do not endorse all of its content.)

Do This

In preparation for discussion in class, think about how you might want to approach lesson planning given your own particular strengths and preferences.

Contribute a question on teaching (on any topic at all), or a reflection on how things went in your class this week, or a question or reflection related to this week's topics of lesson planning and classroom dynamics, to the google document here.

Week 3 - Activity Planning And Design

What To Expect

We will work through an interactive handout together on developing learning objectives at the course-level and meeting-level, then you will work in groups to develop in-class activities that support meeting-level learning objectives. Any remaining time we have will be spent talking about how your lesson planning went, how your meetings went, and any teaching-related questions or comments you have.

Watch This

... or just listen to it!

Read This

Outline of Topics about In-Class Discussion (this is a follow-up on our previous meeting - let me know if there's anything we discussed that I forgot to include!)

Writing Learning Objectives - a resource from USC's Center for Excellence in Teaching

Browse These

Glance through these and see if anything catches your eye. I will *not* expect that you have read any of these, but look at them enough to see if one has an activity you think is nifty.

A note on that last one: the Closure Activities site isn't aimed at teaching college students. And many of the ideas won't work post-COVID (like the high-five activity). But I love how creative their activities are, getting students moving and talking and incorporating different senses and skills. Several things can be modified to work for college students, producing memorable in-person activities.

Do This

Lesson Plan Assignment: Prepare a real, written lesson plan for one of your upcoming sessions that you'll teach before our Week 3 meeting. It doesn't need to be typed, and it doesn't need to be extensive. But show us what you actually prepared; don't show us notes you revised after the session, show us what you actually used. (You're welcome to include a note about what worked and what didn't, if you want.) Upload it to the Lesson Plan Assignment subfolder of our class's non-public dropbox folder.

At least 24 hours before we meet, contribute to this google document discussing this week's asynchronous materials. In my video I talked about benefits of, desiderata for, and challenges involving in-class activities. Post any benefits, desiderata, or challenges that I missed, or responses to any that I mentioned. Or post a general question or comment about in-class activities, or a teaching question from this week. Or, if you've found a resource with examples of cool in-class activities, share it on this page.

Optional, after we meet: contribute to the Activity Planning Ideas document.

Week 4 - Philosophy as a way of life

What To Expect

Teaching (or helping students practice) Philosophy as a way of life can be done in a variety of ways. One approach is to use Philosophy to reflect on how to live, and to change how one lives accordingly. When people talk about PWOL courses, they're often talking about courses that guide students in doing this. But more broadly, we may mean it as using philosophical approaches and skills to transform how we approach things in a wide range of areas of our lives. (This is a common theme you can hear expressed in this video.) This week we'll be focused on incorporating this broader approach to PWOL into our pedagogy.

Prior to our meeting, you'll have submitted some ways that Philosophy may be connected to students' lives, perhaps drawing on ways (big and small, but hopefully not super-obvious) that Philosophy has impacted your own lives, or ways that one may hope it would impact their own life. During our meeting we'll discuss these, then we'll do this activity (along with some flash-brainstorming) to develop activities and assignments based on those connections. We'll focus especially on assignments that get students actually practicing applying philosophy outside of the classroom, rather than just reflecting on how they might.

Read This

The PWOL Activity Development Activity we'll do in class

Watch This

Here are examples of a lecture and an activity that relate to real lives in effective ways, from Notre Dame's Alumni Association's Big Questions program. In the lecture and activity, the relations to real lives are direct (involving reflecting directly and generally on how to live a good life), but of course what you come up with needn't be like that. The lecture:

And an activity from a different portion of the course:

One thing that's so great about the activity is that there are a lot of variations of it that might work for different students or allow for different approaches. And it connects nicely with the activity that's paired with the lecture linked to above.

An additional, optional resource: if you're interested in interacting more about teaching Philosophy as a way of life, you can join the Philosophy as a Way of Life Instructor Community on Facebook. (When answering questions to join, answer 'yes' when asked if USC is a member of the PWOL network.)

Do This

Brainstorm as many ways as you can think of that different areas of philosophy have impacted your life (or that you once hoped they would). These can be big or small, but being very specific is helpful. Come up with at least 3 and add them to the google document here. Be ready to talk about these in class and to use them for our activity. (Two notes: There's a spot for you to list your name, but you can refrain or use an alias if you'd like. And there are additional columns for later steps of our in-class activity, but you shouldn't go beyond the Connections column before class.)

Week 5 - Diversity In The Classroom

What To Expect

There are a wide range of kinds of diversity to keep in mind, and a wide range of perspectives, experiences, backgrounds, etc., of the students you're teaching. This week I'll talk a little bit about just one of these topics: mental health and how it may impact students' experience in courses, and how instructors and TAs can help (and which sorts of resources we can direct students toward). We'll also spend roughly half of our meeting discussing whichever topics related to diversity that you want to, determined by the papers you choose to summarize and discuss with us.

Browse These

There's a lot to read on this topic, so here are a few resources. Browse through everything, but choose at least one thing to read closely in preparation for discussion in our meeting.

Minorities in Philosophy has an excellent collection of resources on race, gender, disability, ESL, and more.

MAP's website also contains this helpful poster by Dee Payton:

(Here is an expanded list from the MAP website, containing clickable links.)

Christa Peterson has made an extremely helpful handout of issues and tips related to mental health and pedagogy, which you can find in our course's non-public dropbox folder (under Week 5).

One often-overlooked and largely invisible issue related to diversity is the impact of past and present traumas on students. 66-85% of students report having experienced a trauma, and many report multiple such experiences. In 2018, roughly 1% of children in the US were reported as victims of child abuse (including neglect) in that year alone; the reported number that had experienced abuse at some point (including earlier years) is higher. The unreported number is assumed to be much higher: in a study in the 1990s, out of 17k participants in SoCal, >28% reported having experienced childhood physical abuse, >20% for sexual abuse, and nearly 10% for neglect. Among undergrads, over 23% of women and 5% of men have, at some point in their lives (and many while in college), experienced sexual assault through force or incapacitation (here). Trauma, and especially having multiple traumatic experiences, correlates with many long-term mental and physical health impacts. It also correlates with academic challenges: for instance, students who have been victims of multiple forms of child abuse, or those who have been sexually abused, are both significantly less likely to finish their degrees (here). There are also many other kinds of potentially traumatic experience -- death of a loved one, experience of poverty, domestic violence, medical emergencies, etc. (E.g., between 22-30% of college students in the US and EU have had a family member or close friend die within 12 months (here and here)). So, here's a helpful resource on trauma and postsecondary education for you to browse through.

(My only suggestion, in addition to what they present (including their helpful recommendation to give students opportunities for increased agency and control over their environments) is this: make your students feel seen. You don't have to talk about any traumas, but giving them a chance to express their values, central features, and goals, and then showing uptake, can help with resilience.)

Finally, because this semester is online we weren't able to do Safe Zone Training as part of our course this semester. Take a look at the resources that are collected here.

Read This

Choose and read a paper related to diversity in the classroom. It can be a paper from the list of past-selected papers below, or a new one you find.

Past readings on diversity that students have chosen: available here.

Also: the list of who you're assigned to observe is available in the course's non-public folder, in a document titled "Week 7...". Be sure to also check out the actual assignment for the teaching observations, listed in the assignments section for Week 7. The deadline for completing the observations isn't until our 7th meeting, but I recommend seeing who you are assigned to observe, and considering doing your observations early.

Do This

As you read your paper, prepare to summarize it and lead discussion on it in class.

To avoid students selecting the same paper, and to better enable everyone to access papers others have chosen, please list your paper in this document.

Week 6 - Grading

What To Expect

We've all graded, but the use of rubrics may be unfamiliar. Rubrics have benefits, such as making tasks more accessible to students (especially students who may not share knowledge instructors take for granted), increasing transparency, and promoting equal treatment of students. They may also reduce the extent to which students complain about grades. At the same time, rubrics can be challenging to construct, they can be limiting, and they may cause students to focus on the wrong things (seeing assignments piecemeal and like a checklist, instead of focusing on the bigger picture). One central focus for us this week will be rubrics: we'll do an in-class grading exercise designed to increase familiarity with rubrics and to see some consequences of using one.

But there are many other topics related to grading. There are questions of how to approach grading, and what the aims of grading should be (are we trying to simply evaluate students, or are we trying to use grades as a tool to get certain effects?). There are various options for the kinds of feedback we can give (formative vs. summative feedback, synchronous vs. asynchronous feedback, etc.). And there are questions about how to make grading more efficient for you while minimizing costs to students (for instance, by utilizing rubrics, utilizing peer feedback, and pointing students to other resources for feedback on work before they turn it in to you). We won't have time for everything, but you can control what we look at: we'll spend half of our time this week discussing readings you have chosen that you'll briefly (in no more than 3-5 minutes) describe to us, followed by brief discussion.

(Note that this meeting will likely take the full 2 hours and 20 minutes.)

Browse This

One exceptionally helpful out-of-class resource for students to get feedback and guidance on their work before turning it in to you:

I encourage you to encourage your students to use this. They give one-on-one help to students, focusing on issues with writing that instructors and TAs simply don't have the time to cover along with all of the other course material, and catering their instruction to each student's individual abilities and needs. They also have a collection of handouts and videos that you can point students to, to give directed supplementation of your own instruction.

Read Something Of Your Own Choosing

Choose and read a paper related to approaches to grading. It can be a paper from the list of past-selected papers below, or a new one you find.

Past readings on grading that students have chosen: available here.

Do This

As you read your paper, prepare to briefly (in 3-5 minutes) summarize it and lead a short discussion on it in class.

To avoid students selecting the same paper, and to better enable everyone to access papers others have chosen, please list your paper in this document.

Week 7 - Peer Observation and Looking Forward

What To Expect

Viewing of (5 minute or less) teaching samples, discussion of the variety of classroom approaches you’ve observed in your peers, review of the semester, and discussion of how you can build on this going forward.

Watch This

Read This

The Center for Excellence in Teaching of USC's Teaching Observation Checklist. One can disagree with a lot on it (and I certainly don't intent to suggest I endorse its content), as well as resist restriction to the wide variety of ways in which one may do a wonderful and effective job teaching. But at least, looking at it is inspiring for thinking about the wide range of things we might pay attention to when observing others' teaching.

Do This

Observe two of your peers before today's meeting. (You can find the list of who you're assigned to observe in the non-public course folder, in a document titled "Week 7...".) Take notes on specific things they did that you like, and any suggestions you have. Share at least some of those notes with the person you observed (either via email or in a meeting), for each person you observe.

After watching the video above, make a contribution to this google document, providing a correction, a comment, or an addition to the (very rough, and not at all definitive!) advice given in the video. Or just say: what else would you have liked to see discussed, in this video or in the class in general?

Record a sample of your own teaching (it can be from any point this semester). Prepare a 3-5-minute portion of it to be viewed and discussed by the class. Post a link to the sample to our zoom links page in the shared folder.

Supplemental Information - Safe Zone Training

Typically when I teach this seminar, we have a session of Safe Zone Training. But in semesters where we can't, I encourage you to pursue it independently through USC's LGBT Resource Center.

Materials You Can Read In The Meantime

Applying the Seven Learning Principles to Creating LGBT-Inclusive Classrooms

Characteristics and Mental Health of Gender Nonconforming Adolescents in California

Teaching Beyond the Gender Binary in the University Classroom

Supplemental Information - ISSUES AND STRATEGIES FOR ONLINE TEACHING

In 2020-2021, many of us were teaching online. The 2021-2022 school year may also involve some online teaching, or some students attending classes and/or TA sessions remotely. In the fall 2020 teaching seminar, we had a meeting where we discussed challenges with and strategies for teaching online. We began by discussing difficulties strategies for both synchronous (with a focus on logistics and activities) and asynchronous (with a focus on assignments and assessments) teaching. We also talked about different kinds of electronic and asynchronous resources one can make available to students.

Below, you can find resources I've provided (or at least linked to) for learning more about online teaching. You can also find some of the assignments submitted by former Teaching Seminar students.

Read This

USC post on online interaction and zoom fatigue

USC guidelines on contact hours

Browse This

Here's a site USC has provided, with a bunch of helpful information on teaching online. It is a bit too much for any person to work through all on their own, but you can browse through until you find something you find helpful.

Watch This

. . . or just listen to it!

Also, here is a google document (which was also shared with the students in Phil 595) with links to videos with guidance on making asynchronous materials. Watch one of the videos related to a kind of asynchronous material you'd like to produce, or, if you'd prefer, find a video not on the list, watch it, and add it to the list (noting which kind of asynchronous material the video is about, and writing a short paragraph summarizing some helpful thing you learned from the video).

Do This

Make a contribution to this collaborative google document (combining recommendations from past Phil 593 and Phil 595 students!) of online pedagogy tips. Contribute something you found helpful from the websites you browsed above, or contribute something you thought of while watching the video for this week. Try to avoid too much overlap with previously posted tips.

Make an online resource for your students (or for pretend students in some future semester). Record a spoken lecture, make a narrated Prezi or PowerPoint, a Doodly, an interactive essay (using something like Adobe Spark, as I have done for this class), an interactive tutorial, etc. Don't just make a handout or an infographic, though those would be great supplements. Add a link to the asynchronous resource to the zoom links page.

Credits:

Created with images by ROBIN WORRALL - "Vintage books on old school desk" • Estée Janssens - "untitled image" • Marcos Luiz Photograph - "Worship" • Neven Krcmarek - "Blue pencil against black paper" • Ahmed Zayan - "Alone & Lost" • Jess Bailey - "untitled image" • Scott Graham - "Sign here" • Allie - "untitled image" • Jasmin Sessler - "Pride Flag in the Streets of Reykjavik Iceland." • Maya Maceka - "Mobile Office Workspace"