A TA Training Lesson for Problem-Solving: How to Explain A Solution and Meet Students Where They Are
Teaching assistants (TAs) are essential to support growing Computer Science (CS) programs. In our university’s TA training program, we taught 53 CS TAs a framework for how to develop solutions that focus on helping students with the problem-solving process. The framework provides TAs with tools to create a solution narrative that finds common ground with students, explicitly points out how to get started, emphasizes the trial and error process of problem-solving, and suggests how to recover from errors. In this poster we share our framework and preliminary findings that participants positively rated the quality of the lesson content and their narratives prior to our lesson do not already include this content. We suggest steps for future work.