The ArtsOne TA Meeting on Oct. 17, 2008, focused on marking students' papers and commenting on their writing. Attached you will find the handouts provided during that meeting.

For a discussion of rubrics see:
http://www.oct.ca/publications/professionally_speaking/march_2005/evalua...
Scroll down to “Good Rubrics”. This section will discuss the ICE rubric model which focuses on Ideas, Connections and Extensions.

What do you NOT know about how students learn?

During your discussion sections you may encounter disengaged students. Individual reasons for disengagement may occur; however, Donald Harward takes a micro approach to understanding the structural and institutional causes of disengagement.

He argues: “What all this reveals is higher education’s failure to attend to the most fundamental of our responsibilities: the development of the whole person — intellectual, emotive/behavioral, and civic.”

From: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/04/15/harward

What could you do more of to build on how students learn?

There are multiple ways of organizing student discussions. Refer to the ArtsOne Manual for Teaching Assistants 2008-09 (pgs. 15-28) for a detailed discussion of how to incorporate “think-pair-share”, “buzz groups”, “critical debate”, “jigsaw” etc. techniques into your tutorial sessions.