Being a Postgraduate Teaching Assistant R, D and the In-betweens

In this episode of R, D and the Inbetweens PGRs Belinda (Dan) Li and Irene Gomez talk to other PGRs about being a Postgraduate Teaching Assistant. This epsiode contains interviews with:
Lu Yang
Lisanne Moline
Umas Jin
Riadh Ghemmour
Chris Grosvenor
Music credit: Happy Boy Theme Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
 
Transcript
 
Hello, and welcome to rd in the in betweens. I'm your host Kelly Preece. And every fortnight I talk to a different guest about researchers development, and everything in between.
 
Hello, and welcome to the latest episode rd and the in betweens. I'm your host, Kelly Preece. And for now on rd in the in betweens is going to be taking a slight change, of course, and the reason for this is that I have started a new job. I was in a researcher development team and my job was to support our postgraduate researchers with their training and development. But I've just moved to join our academic development team doesn't sound that different. And in reality, I suppose it isn't. But I'm working on the other side of things. Now I'm working to develop and deliver doctoral supervision training. So I'm helping our supervisors become even more excellent in the support of our postgraduate researchers. So as such, the content of R D and the in betweens might be a little bit different and might be a little bit more teaching focused, a little bit more supervision focused, but it will fundamentally still be about researchers, their development and everything in between. So for this first episode, I've actually got a guest episode from two PGRs, Belinda L, and Irene Gomez, and they ran a project in the summer, talking to our postgraduate teaching assistants about their experiences
 
Welcome to our PTA podcast, aiming to improve your experiences. We are a group of PTAs from a range of courses and backgrounds with various different experiences. We have been working on a project this summer to share inspirational PTA experiences and top tips. We hope this will help both incoming and current PTAs have the best experience possible.
 
Lu Yang is a second year PhD student in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, she teaches speaking seminars for intermediate Chinese. My first tip is don't be afraid of your students, because if you are afraid, they will find it. The second is pay more attention to those shy students and those that are not catching the lessons because they need more attention and need more help. My top tip is about to take your classmates (and) your student as your friends because we are most near the same age and we are all at the state of learning things. If we just take them as friends, it will release your stress and they will also feel relaxed to talk about your lesson and the content. My teaching style is more friendly and because my lesson is about the oral speaking. So, I think a friendly atmosphere will make them more encouraged to like practice and rather than worrying about any potential mistakes. My lesson is about the Chinese oral speaking. So to prepare my lesson and I usually split the whole lesson for like three parts. The first part is mainly designed by the textbook, questions on the textbook. And the second part usually combined events happened recently, or like holidays, Chinese holidays. I will design some key words about it. And the third part would be like open questions around the lesson they learned on the textbook. And I usually prepare for around an hour. But if I need to search some online videos about the lesson, it will take about two hours. I am a film student, so I tried to add some film cuts and some short videos in the class. And I always like to try to encourage them to talk more and don't worry about the mistakes. So, I think it will make a relaxed class.
 
Lisanne Moliné  is an American filmmaker and a PhD researcher. She trained at SUNY Purchase in New York an