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Folks:
The posting below gives some excellent tips on what to do, and
not do, when preparing to teach a course for the first time. It
is by Richard M. Felder, North Carolina State University, and
Rebecca Brent, Education Designs, Inc. It is from Chem. Engr.
Education, 41(2), 121–122 (Spring 2007). Reprinted with permission.
Regards,
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Teaching in the U.S. Classroom
Tomorrow's Teaching and Learning
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How to Prepare New Courses While Keeping Your Sanity
Think of a two-word phrase for a huge time sink that can effectively
keep faculty members from doing the things they want to do.
You can probably come up with several phrases that fit. "Proposal
deadline" is an obvious one, as are "curriculum revision,"
"safety inspection," "accreditation visit,"
and "No Parking." (The last one is on the sign posted
by the one open space you find on campus minutes before you're
supposed to teach a class, with the small print that says "Reserved
for the Deputy Associate Vice Provost for Dry Erase Marker Procurement.")
But the phrase we have in mind is "new prep"-preparing
for and teaching a course you've never taught before. This column
describes the usual approach, which makes this challenging task
almost completely unmanageable, and then proposes a better alternative.
Three steps to disaster, or, how not to approach a new course
preparation
1. Go it alone. Colleagues may have taught the course in the
past and done it very well, but it would be embarrassing to ask
them if you can use their materials (syllabi, learning objectives,
lecture notes, demonstrations, assignments, tests, etc.), so instead
create everything yourself from scratch.
2.Try to cover everything known about the subject in your lectures
and always be prepared to answer any question any student might
ever ask. Assemble all the books and research articles you can
find and make your lecture notes a self-contained encyclopedia
on the subject.
3. Don't bother making up learning objectives or a detailed syllabus-just
work things out as you go. It's all you can do to stay ahead of
the class in your lectures, so just throw together a syllabus
that contains only the course name and textbook, your name and
office hours, and the catalog description of the course; invent
course policies and procedures on a day-by-day basis; and decide
what your learning objectives are when you make up the exams.
Here's what's likely to happen if you adopt this plan. You'll
spend an outlandish amount of time on the course-ten hours or
more of preparation for every lecture hour. You'll start neglecting
your research and your personal life just to keep up with the
course preparation, and if you're unfortunate enough to have two
new preps at once, you may no longer have a personal life to neglect.
Your lecture notes will be so long and dense that to cover them
you'll have to lecture at a pace no normal human being could possibly
follow; you'll have no time for interactivity in class; and you'll
end up skimming some important material or skipping it altogether.
Your policies regarding late homework, absences, missed tests,
grading, and cheating will be fuzzy and inconsistent. Without
learning objectives to guide the preparation, the course will
be incoherent, with lectures covering one body of material, assignments
another, and tests yet another. The students' frustration and
complaints will mount, and the final course evaluations will look
like nothing you'd want to post on your blog.
There's a better way.
A rational approach to new course preparation.
1. Start preparing as soon as you know you'll be teaching a particular
course.
Dedicate a paper file folder and a folder on your computer to
the course and begin to assemble ideas and instructional materials.
While you're teaching the course, continue to file ideas and resources
as you come up with them.
2. Don't reinvent the wheel.
Identify a colleague who is a good teacher and has taught the
course you're preparing to teach, and ask if he/she would be willing
to share course materials with you. (Most faculty members would
be fine with that request.) In addition, try finding the course
on the MIT OpenCourseWare Web site (<http://ocw.mit.edu>)
and download materials from there. Open courseware may contain
visuals, simulations, class activities, and assignments that can
add considerably to the quality of a course and would take you
months or years to construct from scratch. The first time you
teach the course, borrow liberally from the shared materials and
note after each class what you want to change in future offerings.
Also consider asking TA's to come up with good instructional materials
and/or inviting students to do it for extra credit.
3. Write detailed learning objectives, give them to the students
as study guides, and let the objectives guide the construction
of lesson plans, assignments, and tests.
Learning objectives are statements of observable tasks that students
should be able to accomplish if they have learned what the instructor
wanted them to learn. Felder and Brent recommend giving objectives
to students as study guides for tests , and show an illustrative
study guide for a midterm exam.
Before you start to prepare a section of a course that will be
covered on a test, draft a study guide and use it to design lessons
(lectures and in-class activities ) and assignments that provide
instruction and practice in the tasks specified in the objectives.
As you get new ideas for things you want to teach, add them to
the study guide. One to two weeks before the test, finalize the
guide and give it to the students, and then draw on it to design
the test. The course will then be coherent, with mutually compatible
lessons, assignments, and assessments. Instead of having to guess
what you think is important, the students will clearly understand
your expectations, and those with the ability to complete the
tasks specified in the objectives will be much more likely to
do so on the test. In other words, more of your students will
have learned what you wanted them to learn. The objectives will
also help you avoid trying to cram everything known about the
subject into your lecture notes. If you can't think of anything
students might do with content besides memorize and repeat it,
consider either dropping that content or cutting down on it in
lectures, giving yourself more time to spend on higher-level material.
4. Get feedback during the course.
It's always a good idea to monitor how things are going in a class
so you can make mid-course corrections, particularly when the
course is new. Every so often collect "minute papers,"
in which the students anonymously hand in brief statements of
what they consider to be the main points and muddiest points of
the class they just sat through. In addition, have them complete
a survey four or five weeks into the semester in which they list
the things you're doing that are helping their learning and the
things that are hindering it. Look for patterns in the responses
to these assessments and make adjustments you consider appropriate,
or make a note to do so next time you teach the course.
5. Do everything you can to minimize new preps early in your
career, and especially try to avoid having to deal with several
of them at a time.
Some department heads inconsiderately burden their newest faculty
members with one new prep after another. If you find yourself
in this position, politely ask your head to consider letting you
teach the same course several times before you move on to a new
one so that you have adequate time to work on your research. Most
department heads want their new faculty to start turning out proposals
and papers in their first few years and will be sympathetic to
such requests. It might not work, but as Rich's grandmother said
when told that chicken soup doesn't cure cancer, it couldn't hurt.
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