"I wasn't always the A+ student,” said Karolina Rabeda. “It's not that professors presented the material and I just got it right away.”
As the Department of Chemistry’s lead writing teaching assistant (LWTA) prepares to take on her second year in the role within Arts & Science's Writing-Integrated Teaching program (WIT), she explains how that initial student experience caused her to consider a range of ways to learn material in class.
“When someone said: “How can you think of this in the wrong way?” I had six different diagrams I could draw — six approaches — that were wrong. Now I see how taking a little bit longer and trying different things helped me understand the concepts better. It also made me a stronger teacher, more able to connect with students.”
The LWTA is a prestigious TA position, one the Department of Chemistry has offered since 2009. The person in the role coordinates TA training, overseeing writing activities that students undertake in eight of chemistry’s undergraduate courses.
“In some ways it’s more about leadership than education,” said Rabeda, a PhD candidate in the Lautens Group with a research focus on developing nucleophilic trifluoromethylation reagents and exploring their reactivity.
Using this more integrated approach for writing instruction within the department is a practice that has evolved over the past 15 years. “It used to be we would tell students: to help improve your writing, there are courses in science writing that you can take,” said David Stone, an associate professor, teaching stream and one of two departmental WIT coordinators.
He added, “Through the 2000s, there was a lot of thought about effectiveness in writing instruction, and the question of whether having separate courses in the writing centers siloed it off too much.”
In the interest of providing more situated learning — instruction tailored to the disciplinary norms of each program — the Faculty of Arts & Science created the award-winning WIT program. Stone said. “WIT supports departments in creating assignments and rubrics that help students develop their writing in parallel with learning specialized course content."
WIT exercises incorporate learning-to-write by writing-to-learn activities into courses. Coordinators act as faculty mentors to the LWTA, collaborate with the faculty, provide reports, and contribute to grant renewal applications.
WIT coordinator Professor Andy Dicks first tested this proposed approach by creating writing assignments for his third-year organic lab courses, CHM343 and CHM348. The success of these initial experiments led to the practice being introduced over time into eight other courses, which are taken by chemistry program students through the course of their degrees.
“Students often think about the content of our subject being important — and of course it is,” said Dicks. “However, effective communication of that content through writing and other means is just as significant. WIT has worked well for us as it reaches all our specialist and major students in the context of the chemistry they are learning in specific courses from first- to third-year.”
In practical terms, what does this mean?
“There was a time where you wrote a formal lab report for every assignment,” explained Rabeda, “Now we may do fewer lab reports, but some are specifically targeted to writing quality. Students know that a particular lab report is a WIT assignment and thus matters both for the data they’re presenting and how they’re writing it up.”
In such assignments, she said, students first submit a draft for review. “This is when the TAs provide the most writing feedback.”
The assignments, with writing feedback, firstly go from the course TA to the LWTA, who provides additional input on this writing guidance. The assignment is then returned to the student for revision.
“I might suggest adding constructive suggestions — like reminding the undergraduate how to cite in the proper format.”
If there’s considerable constructive critique, on the other hand, Rabeda might suggest TAs pare notes down to a smaller number of core actionable points, so the student has a higher chance of success. Either way, when TAs come to grade the revised report, the goal is to assess whether undergraduates incorporated their comments successfully.
Rabeda is passionate about teaching both chemistry and writing, and about helping future researchers develop effective ways to communicate their study findings. She had numerous roles as a TA prior to taking the WIT position in 2024, and the experience of learning from previous LWTAs made her see opportunities to bring her own approach to the role.
Taking on that challenge last year meant stepping into unfamiliar territory more than once.
“I was very nervous and anxious to take the position," she said, adding that Professors Dicks and Stone offered excellent support. “Andy is an incredible mentor, and David is very passionate about the program, which is awesome.”
Dicks noted, “Karolina has been exemplary as the LWTA — we have had some wonderful individuals take on the role over the years, and she is certainly one of the best. Her organizational skills, enthusiasm and willingness to pursue improvements in our program mean she was an obvious choice to be re-hired in the position this year.”
Another asset of the program is instructional training. Rabeda said, “I was trained by A&S which meant I was the only chemistry TA along with all the other LWTAs from every different WIT department: including linguistics, classics, and art history, among many others. The training was focused on sharing teaching philosophies and writing strategies and how to apply them. You learn a lot that you wouldn't expect. It’s not like being exposed to chemistry fundamentals.”
“I was learning something totally different about communication that I don't think I could learn anywhere else. There's no course in the department that would teach this. In that sense, the LWTA is a very privileged role.”
In addition to accommodating and incorporating different learning styles and advocating for the critical importance of writing well in an increasingly collaborative research environment, another part of Rabeda’s core approach involves balancing encouragement and positive feedback with more constructive notes for writers in chemistry.
“We're at a very tough school,” she said. “It's a challenging program. Sometimes hearing that you've done something well can be so motivating.” She recalled a difficult physics course where she was not especially enthusiastic. “Having a TA who said I was first improving and then doing well — that positive reinforcement really stuck with me.”
With that in mind, she encourages TAs to actively note strengths in chemistry student writing, along with the challenges. “I generally say if you're giving four constructive comments, make sure there are also at least two positive ones. If you only have constructive comments, you need to go back and look again.”
The LWTA focus on direct work with TAs, rather than undergraduates, did give Rabeda pause when considering whether to apply for the role a second time. “For me, a huge advantage of teaching is interacting with undergraduate students. I love it. You end up building connections, and that's one of my favourite parts.”
“In this role I'm missing out on that direct relationship ... and so I don’t think I applied for this year until the very last day. But I also understand the responsibility and importance of training other TAs and using the experience I developed last year. That's why I decided to return for a second year."
"I heard a talk recently by Dr. John Warner and he said something about communication that I really appreciated: that it's not the best science that necessarily gets promoted but the science that is best communicated."
“The WIT program is about understanding that if you want to present your experimental findings, you must be intentional about ensuring that what you're saying makes sense, is clear, and is written for the right audience,” she said. “If I didn't support that, there's no way I could continue the role passionately."