Workshop Protocol
Consider this a “code of conduct” for the TATP Certificate Program, if you will; some guiding principles that cover all TATP-sponsored workshops, all microteaching sessions, all documents submitted to the TATP office including teaching dossiers and scholarly papers, and conduct during consultation meetings with TATP staff.
RESPECTFUL QUESTIONING
The TATP Workshop Series is highly interdisciplinary. TAs from all backgrounds, disciplines and levels of experience attend our sessions. This means that the discussion, activities or question-and-answer period in a given session cannot always speak to your particular teaching context. Keep this in mind when listening to others and asking questions in a workshop. During TATP workshops, seek to ask thoughtful questions with a broad enough focus that the answers may interest your fellow workshop participants as well. TATP Workshop Series facilitators cannot always answer questions with a specific disciplinary focus, but TATP staff members are very happy to discuss specific concerns about teaching in a given department or discipline following our workshops.
RESPECTFUL FEEDBACK
When commenting on a peer’s point of view in a workshop, or when providing feedback to a peer on his or her teaching during a microteaching session, it is extremely important to maintain a professional demeanour and to focus on constructive comments that point toward future development or future discussion. Especially when commenting on someone else’s teaching, be sure to provide descriptive comments that paint a picture for the teacher and describe what it is like to be a student sitting in that person’s class, and avoid prescriptive comments that seek to enumerate everything the person is doing wrong and seek to tell the teacher what she or he must do differently. Feedback is not evaluation: you are not meant to critique your peers. You are sharing observations and perspectives.
ACADEMIC INTEGRITY
Even though the TATP Certificate Program is not an academic program, the TATP is still an office of the University of Toronto and as such is governed by the same policies and overarching codes of conduct that apply to all institutional programs. Should any TATP staff member, through the course of interaction with students registered in the TATP Certificate Program, notice or suspect plagiarism in a document or a presentation or any teaching handouts or materials that are prepared for the TATP Certificate Program and submitted or used by a student in completing either of the two TATP certificates, the TATP staff member must bring this to the attention of the Assistant Director, OTA/TATP. A decision will then be made to bar the student from the TATP Certificate Program and all future TATP programming and if necessary inform the student’s home department of the misconduct.
In particular, a word of caution about Statements of Teaching Philosophy written for teaching dossiers: there are many teaching philosophy statements available online and it is both very easy and very tempting to cut and paste text from an online source into one’s own statement. Do not do this. TATP staff members who suspect plagiarism in a teaching dossier will search for sentence fragments in an Internet search engine and if any portion of the text appears on a website, the teaching dossier will be rejected and the steps mentioned will be followed (contacting the home department, removal from the TATP Certificate Program). Please note that copying someone else’s work—regardless of whether or not the document or presentation being prepared is for academic credit—constitutes misrepresentation of one’s own accomplishments, and therefore contravenes the University’s code of conduct.
RESPECTFUL QUESTIONING
The TATP Workshop Series is highly interdisciplinary. TAs from all backgrounds, disciplines and levels of experience attend our sessions. This means that the discussion, activities or question-and-answer period in a given session cannot always speak to your particular teaching context. Keep this in mind when listening to others and asking questions in a workshop. During TATP workshops, seek to ask thoughtful questions with a broad enough focus that the answers may interest your fellow workshop participants as well. TATP Workshop Series facilitators cannot always answer questions with a specific disciplinary focus, but TATP staff members are very happy to discuss specific concerns about teaching in a given department or discipline following our workshops.
RESPECTFUL FEEDBACK
When commenting on a peer’s point of view in a workshop, or when providing feedback to a peer on his or her teaching during a microteaching session, it is extremely important to maintain a professional demeanour and to focus on constructive comments that point toward future development or future discussion. Especially when commenting on someone else’s teaching, be sure to provide descriptive comments that paint a picture for the teacher and describe what it is like to be a student sitting in that person’s class, and avoid prescriptive comments that seek to enumerate everything the person is doing wrong and seek to tell the teacher what she or he must do differently. Feedback is not evaluation: you are not meant to critique your peers. You are sharing observations and perspectives.
ACADEMIC INTEGRITY
Even though the TATP Certificate Program is not an academic program, the TATP is still an office of the University of Toronto and as such is governed by the same policies and overarching codes of conduct that apply to all institutional programs. Should any TATP staff member, through the course of interaction with students registered in the TATP Certificate Program, notice or suspect plagiarism in a document or a presentation or any teaching handouts or materials that are prepared for the TATP Certificate Program and submitted or used by a student in completing either of the two TATP certificates, the TATP staff member must bring this to the attention of the Assistant Director, OTA/TATP. A decision will then be made to bar the student from the TATP Certificate Program and all future TATP programming and if necessary inform the student’s home department of the misconduct.
In particular, a word of caution about Statements of Teaching Philosophy written for teaching dossiers: there are many teaching philosophy statements available online and it is both very easy and very tempting to cut and paste text from an online source into one’s own statement. Do not do this. TATP staff members who suspect plagiarism in a teaching dossier will search for sentence fragments in an Internet search engine and if any portion of the text appears on a website, the teaching dossier will be rejected and the steps mentioned will be followed (contacting the home department, removal from the TATP Certificate Program). Please note that copying someone else’s work—regardless of whether or not the document or presentation being prepared is for academic credit—constitutes misrepresentation of one’s own accomplishments, and therefore contravenes the University’s code of conduct.