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Hosting Lab

Preparing for Lab

Similarly to preparing for OH, you should not be redoing the entire lab every time to "lab prep." The same tips and techniques for "OH prep" also apply to lab prep (see "Preparing for OH" in "Office Hours TAs"). Because labs are smaller than projects, regarding timing, lab prep should take on the scale of approximately 20 minutes.

During Lab

On the first day of lab, you should:

  • Introduce yourself (giving your name).
  • Clearly explain how lab is going to flow so that students know what they are expected to do when they come in. You can state exactly what the students will do every lab, which is outlined below:
    • Find the lab on the course website and register for it.
    • Spend the rest of the session working on the lab as specified, raising their hands for help.
  • Emphasize that if students are stuck on something for more than around 1 minute, they should feel free to raise their hand, as lab is much faster-paced than an OH for a project.

After the first day, you can give a brief summary of the above points at the start of every lab.

You’ll spend the bulk of lab time walking/running around from person to person (or pair/group to pair/group) answering questions. In the first 5-10 minutes of lab, it might make sense if nobody has questions, as students will just be registering, starting, or walking in. If it has been a while and nobody has raised their hand, take the initiative to walk around and check in on how people are doing.

Again, because lab is much faster-paced than OH, generally, you will be spending much less than 8 minutes with a single person/group. The timing will be more on the scale of 0.5-3 minutes. Similar to OH, the purpose of an interaction (answering a question) is to get them unstuck.

Similarly to in OH, if you and/or a student catch a mistake (or even just something tricky not covered in the TA guide) in the lab, you can alert the other course staff/course leadership on discord.

After Lab

Most of the metacognitive reflection after OH (see "After OH" in "Office Hours TAs") also applies to labs. The main difference between reflecting on labs and OH is that there’s usually no “next time” for that specific lab. Thus, you can reflect on what you can apply going forward to labs in general.