Promising Practices
When working as a teaching assistant for any kind of creative arts or writing-intensive class, a lot of your work becomes not only imparting your own knowledge, or reinforcing the new concepts and approaches taught by the lecturer in class, but also motivating and coaching. Many times, your students will "get" and understand the artistic techniques communicated in lectures and readings, but will not yet trust these strange new methods enough to fully give themselves over to them. So one of the ways I have handled teaching small workshop sessions is making sure that the writers learn not only, for example, the difference between inneffective and effective dialogue, or what the three-act structure is, but also to trust that the professor and I are are encouraging them to try uncomfortable new things with their writing that will make them better writers in the long run. I also work to make sure they can trust themselves through endless rounds of critiquing. Students must keep believing in their ability to eventually master whatever new area of writing you are teaching them, because otherwise they will give up. And since half the battle in most creative and analytical writing classes is churning out work to a weekly deadline, getting frustrated and giving up is deadly. So I always make sure to get students used to the idea that their weekly work will not always be perfect. But that is no reason to stop creating and writing. Quite the opposite, it's the reason artists do keep creating and writing. The students know the techniques, the tools, we have given them, so if they just give it their honest try at using them, instead of fighting them, they will do very well.
As part of this "creativity coaching" aspect of working as a TA in a writing class, it's also important to keep integrating techniques for them to refill their wells of creativity and ideas, to not just practice technical writing techniques, but to learn how to lead an artist's or writer's life everyday. They must learn how to take care of themselves so they can work at an optimum perfomance level. I always put an emphasis on two things: they are lucky to be writers, to have that ability and want to pursue such a career; and they are capable of greatness in their ideas and creations, they just need to know where to look for the greatness all around them.