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Research Guides

Teaching & Learning: Questions to ask

The Teaching & Learning Guide provides information to help you with your needs as an instructor including class materials, statistics and assessment information, important reminders, and readings and resources.

Questions to ask the professor/TA

Meeting with a TA or professor is always a good idea.  Here are some questions you may want to ask:

  • What kinds of students do you have?  All freshmen, upperclassmen?
  • Will students know their assignment before the session? (We always want this to be a "yes" answer!)
  • And at what stage in the process are they?
    • Do they have a topic already? 
    • Have they developed a research question?
  • What is the product that you expect students to produce? (If you feel comfortable you can help evaluate the appropriateness of the assignment, for example if students need to incorporate 10 texts but only have 1 week after your session to do that, perhaps point out that students probably won't be using the best sources to accomplish the task.)
  • What kind of sources do you expect students to have?  Is there enough time for a book to arrive from Interlibrary Loan?
  • Do your students know the difference between a popular and a scholarly article?
  • How familiar are your students with database searching?
  • What are the top three things you want your students to take away from this session? (Three lesson objectives is the most you can generally cover in a 50 min. session.)