0.4 Teaching your first course  (Page 3/3)

Seeding discussion

• Have all (or subsets of) students read a specific assignment (often a chapter or a research paper)
• Ask for critiques of the assignment
  • What makes sense, what doesn’t
  • Why
• Find ways for students to engage each other with your guidance

Evaluations

• Do
  • Think about the feedback
  • Incorporate changes as appropriate
  • Note that completely opposite comments will be provided
    • “Too much biology, not enough engineering” vs “Too much engineering, not enough biology”
• Don’t
  • Take feedback too personally
  • Try to figure out who said what

After – recap and revise

• Fix the lectures/activities that needed the most work first
• Know that you will need to write new exam questions (word gets around)
• Get a teaching mentor and meet ~monthly and go over everything

Time management/balance

• Set office hours and keep them
  • Drop-ins can eat away your time
• Try to teach the same course over multiple years
  • Make appropriate adjustments, but minimize preparation time
• Limit undergraduates in your lab to what you can effectively mentor

Find colleagues for feedback

• How to deal with absent/failing students
• How to deal with students who are not like you were
• How to recycle quiz/exam questions safely
• How to be appropriately responsive to student requests
• How to protect your time
• How to know what is critical/not critical

Dealing with teaching assistants

• Find your comfort level and have a strategy for quality control
  • Can they grade homework? Exams?
  • Can they grade written assignments?
  • Can they convene help sessions?
  • Can they hold office hours?
  • Can they assist in the classroom?
• Can break up assignments based on what you perceive specific individuals can do

Dealing with parents

• You, for privacy reasons, cannot answer questions from someone other than the student about their performance
• If the student and parent come to see you together, you can provide input and advice about what is happening to the student

Dealing with cheating

• Ask if your institution has an Honor Code
• Discover your institution’s policies on cheating
  • Follow the procedure carefully
  • Decide whether to xerox exams before returning them to prevent changing answers
  • Find avenues that work for you!

Tips from faculty

• Put office hours right after class
• If you have TAs, direct questions first to them (convey that as you are accessible, but they have to check with the TA first)
• Provide a measured response to emails
  • Do not establish high expectations for rapid response (and make longer response times for repeat questions to avoid reinforcement)
• Establish clear criteria for re-grading (exams, homework, etc.)
• Accept that someone(s) will have big problems
• One faculty member had students in a large course write down names of two students in the class to contact with questions before even the TA
• Direct students to a blog site (but you have to monitor to ensure answers are correct)
• Draw clear boundaries
  • Don’t instant message
  • Can use Facebook site for the course, not for the instructor (don’t “friend” students)
• Use “announcements” for any errors in class
• Know your institutional culture
• “Good” teaching varies with institution
• Ask a lot of questions about expectations
  • From the institutional hierarchy (e.g., P/T)
  • From faculty colleagues
  • From students if you have the opportunity
• “Good enough” is good enough
  • Perfection is probably not an option
• Keep your research effort dynamic and healthy!
• If you get a hard teaching assignment, ask to keep it for multiple years
• Some departments use team teaching
  • Be sure you communicate with your co-teacher and agree on the course design
• Don’t negotiate grades — use your best judgment and be prepared to defend it
• Alert students who are at risk of failing
  • Email that says that their standing is well below average and that they should consider getting a lot more help for the class or dropping the class.
• Smaller classes allow more personal interaction with the lagging students
  • The student has to seek/get help
  • Faculty member cannot “fix” the student
• Grading group projects
  • Group grades
  • Each person grades their own work and each person in the group
  • Give them option to report group isn’t working and find ways to fix it
• Check copyright policy procedures at your institution before copying copyrighted material

Teaching can be fun!

• Develop a teaching style with which you are comfortable
• Be diligent, but don’t over-stress
• Seek help/feedback if you run into problems — don’t just suffer
• Anticipate future years when you run into students and they thank you for your course and what it did for them!!