Xinya College's Peer Sharing Session for Teaching Assistants in Spring Semester of 2024 was held in Conference Room 212 of the Central Main Building at noon on March 14. Zhang Weite, Deputy Dean of Xinya College, attended the session together with Zhang Wenjing, Zhang Yu, Wang Liping, and nearly ten teaching assistants from the Teaching Affairs Office.

Zhang Weite pointed out in his opening speech that Xinya College always attaches importance to the accumulation and inheritance of teaching assistants' experience, and cares about their cultivation and growth. Zhang hopes that teaching assistants will meet the following three requirements: first, provide useful advice for teachers and build a bridge between teachers and students; second, encourage students and integrate strict management with great kindness; third, grow together with students by learning from each other, improve skills, broaden horizons, and enhance the ability of organization, coordination, communication, and expression.

Later, four teaching assistant representatives shared their work experience in organizing seminars, guiding paper writing, and correcting assignments.

Chen Lijin mainly shared her work experience in organizing seminars and guiding philosophical paper writing. When organizing classroom discussions, teaching assistants should pay attention to timekeeping to avoid having the class run overtime. The criteria for grading philosophical papers should include four parts: quality of arguments, understanding of content, expression skills, and innovative thinking. For beginners in paper writing, teaching assistants should give more guidance to help them develop good writing habits, such as formatting papers in corresponding styles.

Kuang Yu shared his experience in tutoring freshmen in literary paper writing from the aspect of raising students' problem awareness. He pointed out that teaching assistants should guide students in identifying their points of confusion about the text content, raising questions about relevant details, establishing their own narrative framework around such questions, and then rewriting the text. In addition, he also mentioned that teaching assistants should flexibly adjust their work according to the teaching styles of different teachers, so as to forge synergy with teachers.

Pan Yu'ang focused on sharing his work experience in assignment correction and feedback. For an assignment in a standardized form, he advised teaching assistants to do it themselves before assignment correction in a bid to better understand students' error-prone points. When correcting assignments, teaching assistants can add comments in a timely manner, which improves the efficiency of assignment correction and makes the concluding comments more targeted. In addition, comments on assignments need to be targeted and workable in order to provide specific guidance for students to revise their articles. For aspects such as the norms and standards of assignments, teaching assistants should communicate with teachers in a timely manner to reach an agreement.

Ding Bohan has served as a teaching assistant for the course Fundamentals of Colors many times. Based on the characteristics of art practice courses, she shared her work experience in helping students solve relevant problems. Many students are unfamiliar with the teaching form of Fundamentals of Colors, a general education course of art. Therefore, teaching assistants are required to explain the process and mode of the course to them. For students who are shy and introverted, teaching assistants should encourage them to communicate with teachers at any time. Art mainly focuses on self-expression. Students should be encouraged to express themselves in painting without pursuing the "standard answer".

In the subsequent discussion session, several newly appointed teaching assistants shared their feelings about the work in the past several weeks and exchanged ideas with other attendees on problems they encountered, including how to guide students to discuss and the role of assistants in teaching.

Through this sharing session, the teaching assistants have understood their roles and responsibilities and strengthened mutual learning and support. Xinya College hopes that every teaching assistant will flexibly apply the ideas and skills learned in the sharing session to better play their role as a bridge in the teaching process. The college will continue to support the professional growth of teaching assistants to jointly promote continuous improvement in education quality.