Promising Practices
The T.J. Ford Model for Leading Discussions
Marian J. Barber, 8/6/04
I'm a big basketball fan, and I especially love the Longhorns – mens' and womens' teams. I've found in the game a model that has helped me become more effective at one of the primary duties of the teaching assistant – leading discussions. I call it the “T.J. Ford model” after UT's outstanding point guard of a couple years back. T.J. was the first freshman ever to win the NCAA award for the most assists in one season. An assist is what they call it when a player passes the ball to another player who shoots and makes a basket. The only way you get credit for an assist is if another player scores. And that's how I came to think of the T.J. Ford model.
I like to think of the role of the TA as very much like that of a point guard. In basketball, the coach comes up with the strategy, but he or she is not allowed to go out on the court during a game to show the players where they need to be and what they need to be doing. That role falls to the point guard – kind of like the role a discussion leader TA plays vis-à-vis the professor she works for. The professor designs the course and delivers the lectures, but it's the TA who has the hands-on contact with the students.
Now, if you watch a UT basketball game you'll notice that when the other team, say, Texas A&M, scores, it falls to one Longhorn player to bring the ball down into the part of the court that surrounds UT's basket. That player is the point guard. And you'll also notice that as she dribbles down the court, she's gesturing to the other players, indicating what positions they should be taking, which players they should be guarding, which offensive or defensive maneuvers the coach has planned for a given situation. That's what a good discussion leader does – she sets the stage for the conversation and directs the students in taking apart a text or building an outline or constructing a timeline – she executes the professor's strategy the way the point guard executes the coach's.
A good point guard is aware of everything happening on the court. A really good point guard can see not only what's going to happen next, but what's going to happen after that. This comes from hours of practice – maybe even years. And a good discussion leader is the same way. She knows what the professor's strategy is for teaching a certain set of concepts, and after a couple of class meetings, she also knows who's well-prepared, who's shy, who's got a strong personality, who's working on three hours of sleep. She can tell when a discussion is heading in the right direction, and when it's gone astray. And like a good point guard, she's won the trust of her students so she can redirect the flow of the game at any juncture. For the point guard, redirecting the flow can mean shooting the ball herself from outside the three point line – that's a lot like saying, “Okay, but can we look at it this totally different way?” Or it can mean driving the lane and dunking the ball – which is a lot like saying, “Forget all that extraneous stuff and focus on this – it's what you really need to know.” Or once in a while it can mean stealing the ball from the other team. Which is a lot like swiping the conversational initiative from a student who's hogging the floor.
But a really good discussion leader, like a really good point guard, saves those dramatic moves for the few occasions when they're really necessary. Some point guards are high scorers, but the best ones concentrate on T.J. Ford's best statistic – the assist. That's an important point to remember as a discussion leader – you're not out there to show how much you know, or how smart you are. You're not out there to shine – you're there to help your students shine. So you succeed when a marginal student comes up with a key insight or a quiet kid volunteers to explain a concept. When you ask a question that leads a student past a stumbling block, or subtly shifts the perspective so a difficult idea becomes understandable to the class clown.
You succeed when they succeed. And if you commit yourself to this model, you just may find yourself in the TA equivalent of where T.J. Ford wound up in 2003 – not only national Player of the Year, but with his team, competing in college basketball's championship series, the Final Four!