How I Run The Head Teaching Staff Meeting For My 200+ Student Class
By: Kristin Stephens-Martinez
Tags: Csed, Meetings, Teaching Assistant, Computer Science, Teaching

This article is also posted on my personal blog so it is freely accessible.

This is the last post of a 5 blog post series on how I organize the teaching staff for my 200+ student class. This post discusses how I run my weekly meeting with my head staff. The head staff is a subgroup of my teaching staff that helps me organize all the others. In this post, I discuss how I split the meeting into two phases to allow some head staff to leave when talking about topics that are not relevant to their responsibilities. I also include a discussion on what I do between meetings because that is just as important as what happens during.

The other posts in this series are as follows (I’ll update with links as I post):

Terminology

Rather than require you to read my teaching staff roles post, here is a quick refresher:

Teaching Associate (TA+) — A full-time department staff member (not a student) assigned to my class. She serves as my right-hand person with many and varied responsibilities.

— A full-time department staff member (not a student) assigned to my class. She serves as my right-hand person with many and varied responsibilities. Teaching Assistant (TA) — Graduate students responsible for mainly the gradebook and autograder.

— Graduate students responsible for mainly the gradebook and autograder. Head Undergraduate TA — Undergraduate students that have TAed before and are responsible for organizing other UTAs.

— Undergraduate students that have TAed before and are responsible for organizing other UTAs. UTA — Undergraduate students that either teach lab in pairs with about 25 students per lab or focus on grading the hand-graded portion of assignments or exams.

— Undergraduate students that either teach lab in pairs with about 25 students per lab or focus on grading the hand-graded portion of assignments or exams. Head staff — TA+, TAs, and head UTAs

Overview

As a reminder, my head staff consists of my TA+, TAs, head lab UTA, head office hours UTA, and head grader UTA. See my “Teaching Staff Roles” post to learn who these people are. This group is one staff person, two graduate students, and three undergraduate students for a total of seven people. If a UTA is under training to take over a head UTA role next semester, there are even more people at the meeting.

We meet once a week, preferably during business hours, though some semesters the schedules don’t work and we meet 5–6. We book for a one-hour meeting but often finish in 30 to 40 minutes, which we celebrate by closing the meeting early. The meetings center around our Trello board projected on the screen, which I mentioned in my previous post on how I track the to-do list.

Before the meeting, I duplicate the weekly task list, and my head staff knows to fill in the reports by the meeting in their respective card(s) (which represents a task in Trello).

The meeting has two phases to optimize everyone’s time. The first phase requires everyone’s attendance, and the second only those involved in assignments.

Meeting Phase I: Everyone

The first phase’s philosophy is to discuss everything that everyone should be aware of and invite input from everyone. We start with the cards with reports. This way, everyone learns how office hours and the class forum went, and the status of regrade requests. This discussion is also a natural point for people to follow up or bring up questions they’ve heard from students or UTAs. For example, someone may follow up for a student who asked on the class forum or during office hours about an issue, who then got redirected to submit a regrade request.

We then move on to tasks with life cycles that involve multiple people. This discussion ensures the handoff is smooth. These tasks are things like my head lab UTA and I preparing next week’s lab, the head lab UTA confirming with the TA when last week’s lab will be graded and ready to go into the gradebook, the head grading UTA confirming the grading status of the most recently due assignment, or a discussion with the everyone whether we’ll need extra UTAs in office hours to handle an assignment deadline.

Meeting Phase II: Assignments

At this point, all those not involved with assignments can leave, which is usually the head office hour and lab UTA. During this phase, we discuss all the tasks associated with the assignments. As I mentioned in my post about tracking tasks for the class, we are usually managing three assignments at once: the next one to be released, the current one released, and the one most recently due.

We spend the bulk of this phase talking about the assignment next to be released. Two weeks before it is released, we discuss the needed changes. We seed the discussion with a list of recommendations from my head grader UTA, who is also in charge of assignments. He creates the list by going through last semester’s assignment itself, and its associated class forum posts, reflections, regrade requests, and other notes. We discuss needed changes from this list, the relative difficulty of the change, and the change’s ramifications. The TAs then implement the agreed-upon list of changes. The following week (one week before release), the changes are confirmed or discussed based on what happened during implementation.

The rest of this phase has a, usually quick, check-in with the currently released assignment. The check-in’s main concerns are if there are any emergency changes needed due to a broken test.

Between Meetings

As I said in my previous post about how I communicate with my staff, our Slack has a Trello integration that shows the stream of notifications from the Trello board. The integration is useful because it allows me to monitor whether tasks are getting done on time and start conversations using in-line threads on specific notifications. The threading is especially useful when I make tasks between meetings and need to make sure someone in the head staff is aware of a new task assigned to them that we’ll need to discuss at the next meeting. I also check Trello a few times during the week to see which tasks are overdue and gently poke the person responsible to confirm that task’s status.

Summary

I will close this post by sharing one of the frameworks I use for meetings. The purposes of a meeting can be split into three parts: inform, discuss, decide. I read this somewhere, but I have no idea where. Inform can and should be accessible before the meeting and usually consumed before the meeting. In my case, the inform parts are concise reports, and we use them to springboard into discussions. So I do not require anyone except myself to read them before the meeting. We spend most of our meetings discussing various topics. And I always make sure to close with decisions if we need to make them. Finally, the top of this post has links to the other four posts in this series.

So this five-part series now draws to a close. What did you all think? Was it useful? I enjoyed writing it, but not clear if this was worth my time compared to other things I could have done. Questions or comments? If you have a particular question you’d like me to address, please leave a comment! I’d be happy to discuss it.