Welcome to the TA Office
The TA Office is a platform where teaching assistants can offer each other support, share ideas, and enrich pedagogical practices.
Features
Scavenger Hunts: not just for birthday parties by Sharon Fox
In this workshop we will explore ways to incorporate scavenger hunts into the classroom.
How to Build a Bridge from the Familiar to the Unfamiliar
Teaching a difficult concept? Learn how analogies can make difficult concepts more accessible to your students.
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Quick Tips: Best Practices from the Community
Better discussions using socratic seminar
Do you ever have trouble keeping conversations about readings going, especially when your class seems to be made up of shy students?
Accessibility Tip: Make Your Deadlines Flexible
Do you have strict deadlines for turning assignments in? Are you worried that setting strict deadlines will make things difficult for students with busy lives? Feel free to use my deadline policy, which I adapted from www.accessiblesyllabus.com.
Textual Telephone
Help your students think about paraphrasing differently by putting a new spin on a familiar game.
The Rhetorical Marble Machine
Use this musical marble machine video to help your students grasp the idea of the rhetorical situation.
Practicing Paragraphs Using Troll 2
So, you’ve explained how to write a thesis statement and given guidelines on good paragraphs. Now how do you help your students visualize that? Use the oft-cited worst ever film, Troll 2, to guide you!
Emoji Lesson Plan for MultiModal Revision
This in-class assignment asks students to revise the plot of a film into emoji code. Emphasis can be placed on revision practices, multimodal texts, the variety of Englishes available to rhetors depending on their cultures and contexts, or all three simultaneously.
Teaching by Example
This exercise demonstrates, step by step, how freshmen can use the “They Say / I Say” format to write compelling, college-level essays.
εύρηκα!: How I Utilized Classical Myth to Help Explain Audience: Lesson Plan
To help students understand the difference between a popular, generalized media source and an academic/original source, I presented students with 3 different forms of the same myth of Pandora. By discussing each of the sources, all of them leading to a collective and informational Ted Talk on the myth, students were able to come to the conclusion of why the audience is important to writing and how expertise affects the way information is delivered.
Rhetorical Analysis – Open Letter
This activity gets students to practice recognizing rhetorical moves in a piece of writing by analyzing the satirical open letter that birthed Pastafarianism.
Questions on Grant-Davie’s “Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents.”
I used the questions in this activity as a way of having students read in class Grant-Davie’s “Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents.” It was very helpful in getting students engaged with the reading while formulating the anwers to these questions, which I asked at the end of the activity to corroborate that they’d done it.