Helping TA's creativity when writing exercise sheets Teaching assistants (TAs) often have the task to compile exercise sheets for the students and need to come up with new problems for such sheets.

Let's assume that in the lecture, two methods for a certain use case were presented, and a TA is supposed to write a problem that should make the students use the second method. The first one should be cumbersome to use, so that the students can figure out themselves that the second method is the one to use in this case. Also, the problem should be somewhat motivated by an arbitrary problem from practice, so that solving the exercise sheet problem also teaches the students that the second method has its use in practice.

Now some TAs will be naturally good at such tasks, and others do not know where to start, despite knowing all of the relevant scientific results. How to teach TAs the creative skills to performing such tasks?



Note: This is a follow-up question to an earlier question on a related topic, which went without answer ideas. This new question may be of more universal interest, and I suspect that if good answers can be given, they are the same in both cases anyway.
I'm not sure why you find this to be a special problem. We basically know how to teach people things. Just do it in the ordinary way. 

If no framework for understanding how to do a task exists then you need to develop one. If you know how to do it, but are unique, then you need to capture what you do in some way that can be transmitted. 

Then you "teach" it by presenting the framework and giving some exercises so that it can be practiced and giving some feedback on how people do. 

It is a standard teaching problem. 

If no one knows how to do it, then you need to do something like research to discover how it can be done and then operationalize that research. Again, a standard problem, with a standard solution. 

But, one thing I would suggest is that you use some sort of team learning so that those who do it naturally can pass skills to those who struggle with it. Pairing is a good approach and one I often recommend for such tasks. 

Beyond that, it will likely take the examination of good and bad examples, using discussion (by the TAs) of why some things work and others don't. 

But it is practice and feedback that are the key to learning almost anything, hence key to teaching it. 



Don't take the word "framework" too literally. 

Also, the task itself is ill defined here. Expect that no one will be perfect at it and that the "examples" created will sometimes fail. But there are ways, such as pre-testing or other evaluative methods, to deal with that as well.