Preparing to Teach Your First Class

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Preparing to Teach Your First Class

• Carrie Reinhardt Adams
• Asst Professor, Environmental Horticulture

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Teaching horror stories

• Example
• What is your teaching horror story? What mistake
  have you made in teaching?
• If you havent taught, what mistake have you made
  in a similar situation
• A class presentation
• Organizational activity with a club
• Speeches or scientific meeting presentations/talks

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Objectives Agenda

• Begin before feeling ready
• Work with moderation
• The first class
• Active learning strategies for beginners
• Structured discussion
• Teach-Pair-Share
• 1 mistake made by new teachers
• Assessment How am I doing?
• Student management teams
• Mid-semester assessments
• Assessment How are they doing?
• Active reading questions
• Rubrics for grading
• Class-authored exam questions

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Begin before feeling ready

• This will take longer than you think (groundwork
  8hrs/lecture)
• What is the context for this course?
• How does the course fit into already established
  curriculum for your department/program?
• Does it need to be updated significantly?
• Make sure that you dont tread into other course
  areas covered by other faculty.
• Have other faculty look over your syllabus.
• A chance to get feedback on the material you are
  planning on covering.
• Official, university-approved text needs to
  appear here (consult the institution website,
  other syllabi from your department)

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The first class

• Begin with an Ice breaker (prepare students for
  the tone of your course)
• Get to know your classuse this information to
  correct misconceptions or plan for the rest of
  the semester (suggestion note cards)
• What is their baseline level of knowledge
• What do they expect from the course
• Acknowledge the difference between a lecture and
  talk, but have the first lecture in the bag and
  practiced (like you would a talk). This will
  allow you to be more self-aware during the actual
  class.

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Work with moderation

• Be passionate! Teaching is your chance to
  inspire, probably the reason you were interested
  in this career in the first place.
• But MODERATE, if you are tired/sick or generally
  overworked, you will not be as good a teacher as
  you can be.
• Be sure not to neglect your other areas of
  responsibility, be they more classes if you are
  at a comprehensive school or research if you are
  at an R1/R2 (also service).
• Proceed consciously with a schedule of time that
  you know you can dedicate to the task.

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Active learning strategies for beginnersStructur
ed discussionlist making

• Select a question to elicit a list of pertinent
  considerations/factors/etc. and ask the class to
  provide individually-developed answers to the
  question
• Preparation think hard about your question, come
  up with some answers that youd like to see on
  the list, refine your question
• In class, you can add answers yourself if they
  are missing from the list. Also an opportunity
  for evaluating student comprehension.
• Write down the answersthis allows you to tweak
  student answers to further clarify information.
• For a class of 15, this will take 10-25
  minutesbe prepared for this variability!

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Active Learning Strategies for BeginnersTeach-Pa
ir-Share

• Use this when there is synthesis, analysis, and
  decision-making involved in the teaching
  objective.
• Students consider a question/task.
• They come up with an answer/conclusion on their
  own.
• They share their perspective with a neighbor.
• They report the consensus to the class.
• Be very clear on the question and the
  processwrite the step-by-step instructions on a
  slide that is showing while you are directing the
  exercise
• For a class of 15, this will take 10-25
  minutesbe prepared for this variability!

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Example Teach-Pair-ShareWhat do you think is
the 1 mistake made by new teachers?

• Take a minute to think to yourselfwhat is my
  best guess? (just a minute or two)
• Turn to the person next to you and share your
  guesses.
• As a team, what do you think is the best guess?
  Be prepared to share your answer with the class.

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Assessment How am I doing?Student Management
Teams

• See handout (Nufer 1997)
• Teaching success is not a product of mastery of
  the topic area and knowledge of pedagogical
  theoryyou can still get eaten alive!
• Dont fall into the trap of making incredible
  effort yet finding yourself with poor teaching
  evaluationsworking hard does not translate into
  student learning.
• Students can be enlisted in evaluating and
  improving the course via Student Management Teams

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Student Management Teams, cont.

• 3-4 students (plus the professor). One student is
  chosen by the prof on the basis of energy,
  desire, leadership. Others are chosen by
  volunteer, election, etc.
• Students have a mangerial role and assume
  responsibility for the success of the class.
• Students meet without the professor, and also
  meet with the professor.
• Short meetings
• Written log is maintainedwhat is working, what
  is not working
• Professor provides the team with at least one
  issue to consider for each meeting.
• In class, students are periodically reminded to
  share issues with the student management team.

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Assessment How am I doing?Mid-semester
evaluations

• Courses are rarely improved by end-of the
  semester evaluations.
• Gives students a sense of empowerment they have
  a chance to improve their own course.
• Gives you an opportunity to make a major shift in
  course policy, if something isnt working for
  you.
• Can be simple
• What am I doing that enhances learning?
• What am I doing that takes away from learning?
• What is one suggestion that you have to improve
  the course?
• What about this course is working for you?

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Assessment How are students doing?

• Active reading questions during the class before
  reading is due, assign questions for students to
  consider during the reading. Begin the next class
  with answers to those questions.
• Rubrics for grading have a preconceived idea of
  how you will grade an assignment. Write the
  assignment description to clearly communicate
  what you will be looking for.
• Class-authored exam questions assign students to
  groups of 3 and have them write potential exam
  questions in class at the end of each major
  content block. The well-written questions appear
  on the exam!

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Remember (lessons learned by an assistant
professor in her first 5 yrs of teaching)

• Your first class will not be as good as you want
  it to be (but look forward to improvement!).
• Stay focused and be conscious of the effort that
  you are investing, as well as the success you are
  having towards increasing student learning.
• In addition to novel approaches, seek advice from
  folks that teach successfully, and adopt/adapt
  the strategies which work for you.