The 3 Ps: Prepare, Participate, Practice

The three engagement behaviours the course rewards, in order, each with the observable evidence a TA would accept.

Engagement is a behaviour, not a feeling

One fifth of the grade is "engagement". That word is useless until it is turned into things a teaching assistant can see. AFM 111 frames engagement as three behaviours, in a fixed order, that this course calls the 3 Ps: Prepare, Participate, Practice. (The wording is the course's own framework as students describe it; treat the three words and their order as the thing to remember, not any particular sentence about them.) The order matters because each P produces the input for the next: you cannot participate usefully in a seminar you did not prepare for, and you cannot practise a skill you did not see used.

The test for each P is the same: what evidence exists that it happened? Feeling engaged leaves no trace. A note, a contribution, a submitted piece — those do.

Worked example — one seminar week, with the evidence trail

Take week four, when the seminar introduces stage 1 of the problem-solving process on a short case.

Prepare. Before the seminar you read the case and the stage-1 template, and you write half a page of notes: who the client is, what they asked for, the three facts that seem to matter most, one question you cannot answer from the text. The evidence is the notes themselves — dated, specific to this case, and written before the session. A learner who "skimmed it on the bus" has prepared in the weak sense; a learner who cannot show notes has, for grading purposes, not prepared at all.

Participate. In the seminar the group has to agree on the client's real objective. You offer the question from your notes ("the owner says she wants a new press, but is the objective the press or on-time delivery?") and the group's answer changes. The evidence is a contribution to the seminar's task that other people can point to — it appears in the group's shared document, or the TA logs it. Attendance is not participation: sitting in the room while others decide leaves no trace.

Practice. After the seminar you write the stage-1 assessment for the case on your own and submit it by the weekly deadline. The evidence is the submitted piece. Reading the model answer afterwards is useful, but it is not practice — practice is producing the thing, in the form the rubric expects, and getting it marked.

Next week's Prepare then starts from this week's Practice: the feedback on your stage-1 piece tells you what to read for.

Classifying behaviours

A useful drill is to take an ordinary week's activities and ask which P each one is evidence of — and which are evidence of nothing:

Re-reading the slides after the seminar: none. It comes after the session (so it is not Prepare) and produces nothing (so it is not Practice).
Emailing the TA to ask what will be on the check: none. Contact is not contribution.
Posting your draft stakeholder list to the group's channel before the meeting: Prepare.
Proposing a criterion in the seminar that the group adopts: Participate.
Submitting the practice email by Friday: Practice.
Completing the pre-reading quiz: Prepare.

The habit to build is to end each week able to name one piece of evidence for each P. If a P has none, that week's engagement mark is at risk, whatever you felt.

Each P produces the input for the next, and the feedback on this week's practice piece tells you what to prepare next week. The evidence line under each step is what a TA can actually see.