CS8801 GTA Workshop: Course Postmortem

Learning Objectives

• Practice performing a partial course postmortem.

You will be performing a course postmortem on the Graduate Teaching Workshop.  This is your opportunity to provide meaningful feedback to the instructors of this course in order to improve the course for future graduate teaching assistants.  As a teaching assistant or an instructor, one of your jobs should be to leave a page on the class website (if there is one) analyzing the success of the implementation of the class, what difficulties were encountered in executing the course from the instructor's and teaching assistant's point of view, and some recommendations for how to approach the class in the future.  For this assignment, you will only be analyzing the class implementation and providing recommendations for future versions of this workshop.

• Full credit upon completion.
• Credit will not be given if the student fails to show sufficient effort or thought on this assignment in a way that provides useful feedback (positive or negative) to the instructor.

Instructions

• Choose at least 3 workshop sessions that you felt were useful or well-executed.  Summarize what you learned from and/or liked about each session.  If you have advice or strategies about how they could be better, provide them here.
• Choose at least 3 workshop sessions that you felt were not useful or could have been improved.  Summarize what each session was about.  Describe what things you disliked about those sessions and provide feedback about how they could have been improved.  For example, should they have covered more information about a particular issue that concerned you?

Instructions

Answer the following questions (you can cover these points in a coherent essay or series of paragraphs if you want):

• Did the workshop succeed in accomplishing the objectives outlined in the course syllabus?  If so, how well.  If not, why?
• Did the workshop succeed in preparing you to be a Teaching Assistant at the College of Computing?  If not, where did it fall short or what information did the workshop fail to cover that you needed to do your job?
• Were the assignments and in-class activities useful for conveying the learning objectives outlined for that day?
• Were the classroom logistics (location, size, presentations) appropriate?
• How was the overall design of the workshop?  (Do you believe there were topics that should have been presented that weren't?  Should certain classes have been presented in a different sequence?  Should certain classes not have been held at all?)

Instructions

Answer the following questions (you can cover these points in a coherent essay or series of paragraphs if you want):

• If you were going to teach this class in the future, what would you change and why?
• If you had time and resources to experiment with the workshop, what kinds of lectures, activities, discussions, would you want to try introducing to the workshop?
• If you had to give advice to someone teaching this workshop in the future, what would you say?

• The deliverable should contain your answers to the questions in parts I, II, and III.
• The deliverable should be typed and formatted with 1" margins, 10 point Times New Roman font, single-spaced text.
• Each assignment should be spell-checked.
• Assignments are due no later than 5 minutes after the start of class.  A student failing to submit this assignment at all will not pass the course.