{"id":13475,"date":"2013-07-26t08:00:15","date_gmt":"2013-07-26t13:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/?p=13475"},"modified":"2013-03-06t11:15:14","modified_gmt":"2013-03-06t16:15:14","slug":"ask-professor-pedagogy-leading-review-sessions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/2013\/07\/ask-professor-pedagogy-leading-review-sessions\/","title":{"rendered":"ask professor pedagogy: leading review sessions"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
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<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

ask professor pedagogy<\/strong> is a twice monthly advice column written by 2022年世界杯中国小组赛积分 staff. one aspect of our mission is to cultivate dialogue about teaching and learning, so we welcome questions and concerns that arise in the classroom; particularly those from vanderbilt faculty, students, and staff. if you have a question that you’d like professor p to address, please send it to us<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

dear professor p.,<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

i am currently ta-ing in the sociology\u00a0department. the professor has asked me to hold a review session for students the night before the second exam. he covered a lot of content for this exam by lecturing to our 40 students. i\u2019m not sure what students will need to know since i have not seen the exam. how could i possibly cover everything? i only have an hour.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

signed,<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

overwhelmed otto<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

dear otto-the-reviewer,<\/p>\n

covering everything isn\u2019t an option\u2014and it should not be your goal. so don\u2019t cover everything. \u00a0whew! that was easy. next question?<\/span><\/p>\n

in case it will help, i\u2019ll offer a bit of strategy. i get this question all the time. tas are often asked to \u201chold a review session\u201d for students. many professors think this is a good opportunity to give their graduate students practice interacting with undergraduates, and preparing them for future roles as instructors. this might be true.<\/p>\n

it might also be panic-inducing. think of it: busy and over-extended students are asked to attend a review session on the night before a big test. their anxiety levels are likely to be high. these students are likely to be laser-focused on finding out exactly what will be on the test\u2014and thus, what they may safely ignore. because of this intense focus on determining what they can cram, and what they can chuck, students often come to review sessions expecting to get the \u201cinside track\u201d on what the test will ask them to know. unfortunately, this approach to preparation is not helpful to the kinds of deep learning and sustained engagement that professors want their students to develop throughout the course. it\u2019s a recipe for shallow, surface-level learning.<\/p>\n

i feel for you, otto. no matter how knowledgeable a ta you may be, you are not writing this exam\u2014and thus may not be perceived as an expert by your anxious students. do you have access to the test? will you see it before the review session? why not volunteer to offer comments and suggestions about the test this time, or next time? if you regularly attend class, you should have a good sense of what the professor covered, and what will likely seem most important to your students. what seems most important to you?<\/p>\n

when faced with the challenge of reviewing an third of the semester\u2019s material in one hour, most of us would panic.\u00a0be bold and strategize!<\/strong><\/p>\n

my first piece of advice is to remember that your students are novices<\/strong> in sociology. they don\u2019t have an ma in the subject, and they certainly don\u2019t know all the nuances of the field. you have this knowledge. what you and the professor have is an expert\u2019s mental organization of sociology. you know the major figures, when they published, and the schools of thought they have pioneered, critiqued, and developed. to your students, lectures can be a jumbled mess because they simply do not have a well-developed view of the \u201clandscape\u201d of your field. this means that you will need to show your students the structure of sociology studies. your job in this review session is to help students organize their knowledge so that they can develop the enduring understandings taught to them through the class. this is called meta-cognition, and i like to think it\u2019s the \u201cforest\u201d that holds individual trees.<\/p>\n

to develop your review session strategy, you might:<\/strong><\/p>\n