Introduction

Part I: Section Planning Made Simple

Part II: The Holistic Lesson Plan
A) Teaching Goals
B) Personal Goals

Part III: Day by Day Lesson Planning

Introduction:
There are many resources available to Teaching Assistants regarding the planning of a successful discussion section. For example, the UCSB Teaching Assistant Handbook provides valuable suggestions for section activities. The following guide is meant to assist teaching assistants in creating individual section lesson plans and in the development of a “holistic” discussion lesson plan to be used throughout the quarter.

Part I: Section Planning Made Simple—The Broad (Holistic) and the Specific (Day by Day)
When I first started work as a teaching assistant I was unsure of what my responsibilities were as a discussion section leader and I worried quite a bit about the following questions which I have heard reiterated in one form or another by almost every teaching assistant I’ve talked to: Was it my job to recapitulate material addressed in lecture? How much authority did I have to discuss my own ideas, thoughts, worries, or criticisms of texts we were reading? How much time in section should be spent preparing for exams and paper writing?
There are no hard and fast answers to these very serious questions. However, by developing lesson plan ideas early on or before the start of the quarter, you are in the position to begin to address these issues in a way that makes you feel comfortable, meets the goals of the professor, and most importantly, helps your students. I’m not advocating that you write up detailed lesson plans for ten weeks worth of sections before the quarter begins—that would be impractical and inflexible to a fault. Instead I propose that you spend about an hour designing some broad and specific goals for yourself and your students that you can then translate into more specific lesson plans during the quarter.

Part II: The Holistic Lesson Plan
The idea of a holistic lesson plan is predicated on the assumption that the teaching of literature should be holistic or, as the American Heritage Dictionary states “emphasize the importance of the whole and the interdependence of its parts.” It is useful to approach the teaching of discussion sections in a strategic and thoughtful manner. The best way to do this is to develop a set of goals for section that will help to emphasize the themes of the course you are TAing for. Most importantly, developing a holistic lesson plan will gives you as a TA valuable anchors with which to ground the section and your own sense of yourself as an educator.

A) Teaching Goals
It's in your best interest to start the quarter with a clear sense of several issues that you’d like you students to have learned and discussed by the last week of section. Although section should always be a space which allows students to test out their own ideas and gain a better understanding of the material covered in lecture, teaching assistants have a great deal of flexibility within the discussion section space to influence the tone and topic(s) covered in discussion.
There are several important reasons why it is useful to begin TAing a class with a set of clear topics you want to cover in mind.
It allows you to teach and discuss ideas and issues that you feel are relevant to the subject of the course.
It allows you to teach and discuss ideas and issues that you plan to deal with as a professor in the classroom or in your scholarly research. I don’t mean at all to imply that you should make the discussion section a space in which to “teach” students a paper you’ve written, or pitch them a potential dissertation topic. However, if you’ve done a lot of research on a topic that seems relevant to the class you’re TAing I don’t see why you shouldn’t attempt to judiciously apply it to your discussion sections.
It allows you the satisfaction of knowing that your students will leave the class and your section with a set of clear ideas about a type of literature or a literary period that they can use to enrich their own thought about literary works.
At one point or another you will TA for a professor who spends most of his/her time on close readings of texts rather than broader thematic issues. Developing a set of themes will help you to guide your students beyond literary exegesis and towards the ability to analyze and synthesize thematic issues inherent in the text(s).
It’s good practice for when you are the teacher rather than the teaching assistant.

Example:
Let’s say you’re TAing English 101 (English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650). Even if this isn’t you’re field, you can get a sense of some of the issues that might be section salient by taking a look at the following syllabus designed by Professor Richard Helgerson:
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MEDIEVAL/RENAISSANCE

Sept 22 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, lines 1-42

Sept 29 Chaucer, General Prologue, lines 43-860

Oct 6 Chaucer, The Miller's Prologue and Tale and the Wife of Bath's Tale

13 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

20 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Letter to Raleigh and Book 1, proem and cantos 1 and 2

27 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus

Nov 3 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

10 Sonnets: Francesco Petrarca, Garcilaso de la Vega, and Joachim du Bellay (handout); Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella 1, 6, 71 Spenser, Amoretti 1, 68, 75 Samuel Daniel, Delia 33, 45, 46 Michael Drayton, Idea To the Reader of These Sonnets, 6, 61 Mary Wroth, Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

17 Shakespeare, Sonnets

24 John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi

Dec 1 John Donne, Songs and Sonnets and Holy Sonnets, "Good Friday," "A Hymn to Christ," "Hymn to God My God," "A Hymn to God the Father"

Final Examination (noon to 3 pm)
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When I saw this syllabus for English 101 my first instinct—based on a undergraduate knowledge of some of the texts and my own sense of what’s interesting to talk about—was to think that GENDER, RELIGION, and NATURE/THE LAND might be three key themes that would recur through the course. I also thought that TRAVELING or the QUEST might be important and recurring tropes that might be useful to discuss in section.
This constellation of issues could certainly help to anchor a series of discussions about texts from English 101, the issues are broad enough to be included in most of the texts and, more importantly, approached in a variety of ways. For example, in a discussion of John Donne’s poetry, you might have students do an analysis Donne’s discussion of gender and religion in “Hymn to God My God”. Having already read The Canterbury Tales, you might ask students to measure Donne’s discussion of religion and gender against that of Chaucer. To really flesh out the discussion, you could even add something new to the mix by having someone read aloud “Batter My Heart” and then ask the class to discuss the similarities and differences between the speaker’s relationship to God in terms of religion and gender in each of the works.

Once I have a set of themes in mind, I try to use them to help me structure questions for individual section lesson plans. I also use the themes to help me think about what sorts of media aids might be useful to bring into section (movies, music, art). Usually, by middle of the quarter, the students will be aware that in section we’ll be covering the material in a way that enhances their understanding of the texts by focusing the discussion through a set of issues which are both topical and useful for helping them to organize their thoughts for papers and exams.

B) Personal Goals
During my first quarter as a teaching assistant I had nightmares (and daymares) that I would somehow mislead or confuse my students so much that they would all fail the class and it would be my fault. Consequently, I worked really hard to make sure that I was a good teaching assistant, but I ended up feeling a bit martyred at the end of the quarter. Although none of my students were confused, misled or failed out of the class, I couldn’t help feel a bit cheated. They had all done well, but I couldn’t help wondering what had I gotten out of the experience. I wasn’t even sure if I was supposed to be getting something out of the experience besides the satisfaction that comes when you know that you haven’t totally bewildered and/or alienated your students.
A quick consultation with the ever-useful English Department Graduate Student Handbook informed me that the position of a TA “is crucial to the English Department, representing as it does that place where graduate training, the undergraduate curriculum, and faculty teaching responsibilities intersect.” I read the passage as implying the following: the position of a TA is one in which you can apply your graduate and undergraduate training in literature to the practice of teaching literature as an apprentice faculty member. In other words, this is your shot to learn to be a teacher of college level literature so learn as much as you can! The more you learn now, the more teaching strategies you’ll have when you get your first “real” teaching assignment.
There are an endless number of ways to become a better teacher and a better discussion leader and I think it’s important to keep in mind that teaching, like all crafts, is one that you learn gradually. I’m not advocating that you set a large number of new goals for yourself as an educator but I do know from experience that achieving one or two small but significant goals or learning one or more new skills can help you to make you feel like a less martyred, more organized and much better teaching assistant.

The following are a list of personal goals that you might set for yourself before you begin the quarter as a teaching assistant. I’ve divided the goals into two categories: administrative/organizational and pedgagoy based. Both categories are, in my opinion, equally important. Good teachers work hard at the administrative and organizational side of teaching in order to be better teachers in the classroom.

Administrative and Organizational Goals
Develop an efficient method of tracking students grades for section by using Excel or a handheld organization system.
Figure out a way in which you personally can quickly memorize your students names.
Design a grading schedule that you’ll stick to and which allows you to hand back papers in a timely manner.
Adopt a grading rubric which you can use to quickly grade student papers in a fair and standardized way.
Decide for yourself what aspects of student papers matter to you the most i.e. thesis statement, paragraph unity, appropriate quotations and specific grammar issues and vow to focus on those issues when you grade, rather than getting overly involved in grading minutia.
Keep a computerized record or a binder of your lesson plans to be used in the future and to help you build a library of teaching ideas you can use in the future.

Teaching Based Goals
Write a lesson plan—complete with discussion questions, quotations to examine for every discussion section (this sounds easier than it is).
Develop an in-class assignment which involves you teaching your students something about how to write an English paper. If you develop an assignment that you like, you can keep using it (with some modifications) during the myriad courses you’ll TA for at UCSB.
Make one day in section a day during which you are fully engaged in teaching your students something new about the subject rather than simply discussing what’s already been mentioned in lecture. Use one or more of the texts you’ve discussed as a jumping off point for you to lead a discussion that has to do with your own personal teaching and/or research interests.

Part III: Day by Day Lesson Planning
I structure my daily lesson plans using a methodology developed by a group of teachers working with St. Marks School Summer Programs. My general formula for creating a lesson plan depends on four components: SWBAT (Students Will Be Able To), Overview, Business, and Discussion. In using these four components I find it much easier to incorporate and discuss material from lecture while also including the needs and interests of my students and as myself as an educator. An explanation of each component is as follows.

SWBAT
SWBAT is basically a set of goals I set for students and myself as an educator. Early on in the course I might list after SWBAT “feel comfortable with each other and myself as an educator!” In other words, Students would leave my discussion Being Able To feel comfortable with each other and myself as an educator. I usually have three SWBAT goals for an individual day of teaching section and the goals are usually a mix of both administrative and content based. I design SWBAT before I write any other part of a section lesson plan because I find that I usually get so excited by discussion topics that I’ll forget to adequately budget time for discussing papers, midterms or other less urgently fun material. The following is an example of how the SWBAT section of my lesson plan might look on a day in the middle of the quarter when a paper due date is coming up.

SWBAT:
Know my guidelines for papers, know what’s most important to me in a paper
Know their paper topic and know who else in section is doing the same topic and have a sense of how they’ll be approaching the paper topic.
Understand/contest/critique linkages between Edna O’Brien’s protagonist in the novel Down by the River and Joyce’s female characters in Ulysses.
Based on these goals, I know that I’m going to be spending quite a bit of time in section discussing papers and paper topics. Thus, when I actually design the questions we’ll go over in discussion, I have a sense of how much time we’ll have to discuss each major topic.

Overview
The Overview section of my lesson plan lays out the flow of the section and it’s where I guesstimate how much time we’ll be spending on each topic. If my timing seems way off then I’ll think about restructuring the SWBAT or goals section of my lesson plan so that no discussion topic will be covered in a skimpy manner.
The following is an example of how I would write the Overview section of a lesson plan based on the SWBAT I developed in the last section.

Overview:
Business (5 minutes: pass back paper prospectuses, take role, announce showing of Michael Collins—attend showing or be watch the video by next Tuesday!!!)
Discussion (45 minutes: paper guidelines 10 minutes, sharing paper topics and discussing in small groups 15 minutes, discussion of House of Splendid Isolation 20ish minutes).

Business
Unless I take role at the beginning of section, I tend to forget to do so. I also like to make time to announce meetings of the English Club, relevant films that might be showing through Arts and Lecture, and/or to pass back papers, quizzes or exams—passing back papers or exams always ends up taking more time than I think it will. I also make it a point to let students know some of what we’ll be doing in section, give them a sense of the flow of the day. I also make it a point to ask students if they have any questions about the course, lecture or section at this point in the day. Sometimes students are really confused by something that the professor said or that I said, or they may be totally lost or behind in the material. This is the point in section for students to voice those issues. If it’s a serious enough problem, I’ll put my lesson plan on hold and make sure that everyone is significantly confused, lost or bewildered before I try to have an in-depth discussion about a text, papers, or any other subjects.

Discussion
Discussion is, of course, the most important and fun part of teaching a discussion section. The English Department TA Handbook includes a wealth of material on teaching discussion sections and sequencing discussion questions and it is included online here. The best discussions always come when students have adequate comprehension of the material you plan on discussing. By carefully sequencing discussion questions using a methodology such as Bloom's Taxonomy or the advice laid out in the English Department Handbook you'll be able to design discussion questions which test for comprehension and then become more nuanced and address those holistic goals you defined for yourself early on in the quarter. By carefully planning your individual sections and designing a holistic lesson plan, you'll be on your way to becoming a better educator and having more interesting and rich discussion sections.