This workshop is designed to tell you everything you need to know about being a graduate or teaching assistant at the University of Windsor. Whether you are newly hired, considering applying for an appointment, or are a current GA or TA needing a refresher, you are welcome to join! The facilitators are experienced GAs who will walk you through the process and answer any questions you may have. This workshop covers what to do from the minute you are hired as well as your rights and responsibilities under the CUPE 4580/University of Windsor collective agreement.

Connecting with students can be a very important and fulfilling part of being a GA or TA. In this interactive workshop, GAs and TAs will learn how to positively interact and connect with students in a variety of situations, including during office hours, answering questions about course material, discussing assignment grading and giving feedback, and when teaching labs. During the workshop, participants will be able to learn from students who have been GAs and TAs in various courses and scenarios and apply workshop techniques to several common interaction scenarios that may occur in their placements.

Your GA/TAship is a valuable opportunity that provides you with skills and experiences that can help you with your career. In this session, learn about how you can identify and develop these skills and experiences and how you can effectively communicate and market them to potential employers.

Calling all graduate students! This workshop will present you with a toolbox of strategies to successfully run engaging and effective labs and tutorials. Gain insights into preparing your students for success, designing engaging activities, and facilitating effective learning. We will also go through some tips on assessing learning, providing feedback, as well as how to gain feedback from the students themselves to improve yourself as an educator. This workshop will equip you with tools and techniques to become a master of the lab environment, helping students develop critical thinking skills and achieve practical application of learned course material.

This workshop will introduce GAs/TAs to giving effective feedback when grading assignments. An overview of both positive and negative feedback will be discussed. We will go over how to communicate with your assigned professor, understanding the assignments/rubric, and knowing your audience. We will also talk about the importance of being timely, consistent, and objective when grading. We will be going over tips and tools to help you grade more effectively and efficiently. Challenges and opportunities for improvement will also be discussed. Questions will be welcomed throughout the presentation, as well as at the allotted time at the end of the workshop.

Engaged class discussions can be used in a variety of disciplines to vivify a topic, practice and solidify previously acquired knowledge, to improve communication, to foster analysis and synthesis of different viewpoints about a problem, or to even generate debates and arguments amongst students to promote higher order thinking skills. This workshop will help GAs and TAs from all faculties and departments to plan, lead, and facilitate discussions using interactive exercises. Participants will leave with strategies on how to plan and prepare for the discussion, communicate with students, handle group dynamics and conflict, active-learning techniques, foster a collaborative environment and more!

Whether engaged in an online or in-person teaching environment, the dynamics must be managed by the Graduate and Teaching Assistants (GA/TAs). This interactive workshop will support GA/TAs to identify productive and unproductive conflict that may occur with students. The importance of developing strategies to promote effective communication and recognize when conflict is not beneficial. Participants will be engaged in opportunities to apply strategies for dealing with difficult situations, such as microaggressions, racism, discrimination among others. We will conclude by discussing managing your emotions and engaging in self-care.

Do you struggle with office hours? Are you curious about how you might facilitate effective office hours? In this workshop, the benefits of office hours for students, instructors, and GA/TAs will be presented, followed by a discussion about the problems students face when attending office hours. A set of strategies with actionable tips to improve office hours for all will be provided, and the remaining challenges will be addressed. Attendees are encouraged to come with their own thoughts and strategies to share with the group.

Designed for student leaders, this presentation covers mental health basics, stigma, resources for support, and simple caring, resilience, stress, and coping skills. Participants will learn strategies for maintaining mental health while balancing their responsibilities.

New tools have been made available that make content generation way more simple than it has ever been. It will make grading more complicated, but it could make writing that application letter a lot faster. Some parts theoretical, most parts practical, this session will introduce the various ways in which AI is going to be impacting the different roles of a GA/TA.

This session will provide an overview of key Brightspace tools and topics for GAs and TAs in the online environment. Our focus will be on communicating with students (announcements, discussion board), and grading the different types of assessments found on Brightspace (tests, assignments, and discussion boards) in addition to using the Grade Centre and related features. For optimum experience, you should be using Google Chrome for this session.

In this workshop you will learn about the main features and functions of Teams – chat, virtual meetings and collaborating within Teams using posts, files and collaborating on documents, as well as an overview of Class Teams. We will cover how to send a Teams meeting invite, how to modify Teams meeting settings to fit the purpose of your virtual sessions as well as introduce the Teams webinar function, allowing you to use Teams for professional looking presentations, webinars and virtual conferences.

In this workshop, I will examine our university Mission statement: Enabling people to make a better world through education, scholarship, research, and engagement and compare it with Marylin Cochrane-Smith's purpose of education as preparing students to engage in satisfying work, function as lifelong learners who can cope with the challenges of a rapidly changing global society, recognize inequities in their everyday contexts, and join with others to challenge them. I will make the case that every graduate of the university of Windsor should be able to define race, racism, Anti-racism, Anti-Black/Anti-Indigenous/Anti-Asian, etc. racism, within their own discipline and field of study and be committed to engaging in constructive and productive strategies for change – caring, supportive and restorative collaborative community-based/grassroots endeavours– to challenge all forms of oppression. 

International students are a core part of the University of Windsor, but have you ever considered the challenges and opportunities that international GA/TAs face? This workshop will shed some light on the challenges that international GA/TAs have to reconcile and how these challenges can be overcome. Moreover, various opportunities that international GA/TAs create at the University will be explored. Attendees are encouraged to share reflections on their experience as an international GA/TA, particularly their challenges and strategies for overcoming them with the group. Participants will gain tips and will be provided with some resources that can support international GA/TAs.

Boozhoo! Join me for this important session that will explore the relationships between teaching assistants, advisors, and Indigenous students. These relationships are interconnected and are guided by shared values of Indigenization to both improve the educational experiences of all students, and teaching assistants across the institution. It also explores how Elders, Indigenous community members, and community education partners are heard and included in the educational experience. This resource reflects a holistic way to serve Indigenous students which will help guide teaching assistants when working with Indigenous students.

The session will have two parts:

1. Cherie Gagnon will begin this session with a focus on the "A" in IDEA: There are estimates that up to 24% of first-year students self-declare that they have at least one disability, however, only 6-9% register for accommodation supports. This means that there are many students attending University who could benefit from practices that make our campus more accessible and inclusive. Beyond supporting people with a known disability, inclusive practices benefit everyone and are therefore important to the role of GA/TAs. This session will cover topics including ableism, universal design, inclusive language, accessible presentation, and other tips to make the classroom accessible for all.
2. In the second half of this session, Kaye Johnson will focus on the "IDE" in IDEA: Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion….These are interrelated, and should inform all aspects of our practice as GA/TAs. Social identity and cultural competency are important considerations that consciously or unconsciously impact our interactions with others, including the students, peers, faculty, and staff we engage with. In this session, participants will explore how these intersect and influence our world view, different experiences, and diverse perspectives.

Join us at the GATA Networking Event (in Odette room 110) where there will be an assortment of booths representing various services on campus, for instance, Leddy Library, Lancer Recreation, the GATA Union (CUPE4580), the International Student Centre, and more! Come socialize with fellow GA/TAs and learn about how you and your fellow students are supported on campus. You can drop in anytime between 12:30 and 2:00 pm.

Food and beverage were generously sponsored by UWSA, OPUS and GSS!