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Reader Question of the Week: Teaching Assistance, Part III

Here is the question we put before readers three weeks ago:

M.R. in Lowell, MA, asks: I am going to start teaching full time at a university this fall. Any suggestions?

And here some more of the answers we got in response:

C.R. in St Louis, MO: I got my master's rather late in life. I had a lot going on with kids, work, and school. For me, the most important trait in a good teacher was clear expectations. Everything else was a bonus. I needed to know up front when everything was due so I could plan my schedule around the syllabus and the other immovable calendar events from work and family. I detested surprises and courses where things "unlocked" or became visible after a certain date.

D.B.M. in Vashon Island, WA: I offer an idea I stole from a colleague. One day I went into my classroom and on the chalkboard (this was a few years ago) was an outline of the previous class's lecture. Only 5 or so lines but it was obvious what it was. I stared at it for a while and pondered it and adopted the technique for my own teaching. The idea is that students can't always tell when the topic is important. You can get sidetracked by a question or a tangent. When you return to the meat of your lecture, students may not realize it's not more of the tangent. I had noticed under these circumstances sometimes some students did not resume note taking. You might point to the board, however that might be done these days, to emphasize we're back to the meat. It does cut down on that most discouraging of questions: Will this be on the test?

D.G. in New York City, NY: Never "cold call" the class (i.e., "What did you think about the reading?"). At best, you'll get a few keeners dominating the conversation. At worst, awkward silence.

Instead, try think-pair-share. Put up a question, give students time to think about it on their own. Then have them speak about it in a small group (3-6 is good). Then come back together as a class. This way everybody has had a chance to formulate their thoughts and check them over with others. Because everybody has something written down, there's never a struggle to get students to share. This way, much more of the class gets engaged and some of the students who might never raise their hand get a chance to speak.

B.S. in Huntington Beach, CA: The issue of excellence in teaching was my area of research for my doctoral program. After reading all of the research I could find on high-quality teaching as measured by student achievement, my conclusion was that it boiled down to three attributes:

You must be a master of your chosen discipline. There is no faking it or bluffing your way through. Your students will know if you are blowing smoke.

You must be passionate and enthusiastic about your chosen discipline. Your enthusiasm becomes infectious and brings the classroom to life.

You must love your students. They come in all stripes, backgrounds, perspectives, motivations, etc., but once they know you care, and I mean that you care about each and every one of them individually, more than half of your battle is won.

You are entering one of the most significant and rewarding careers, one that will give you the chance repeatedly to change lives for the better. I wish you the best!

C.S. in Lake Elmo, MN: I was asked to speak to a strategic planning class of about 30 seniors.

Engaging and getting responses from the students was impossible for me, or nearly so. In a postmortem with the tenured professor, I apologized for my lame job and waste of classroom time. His response, "All of the students are terrible. That's how they always are." Hmmm. Thirty bad students or one bad "teacher"?

Words to live by: "I am responsible for outcomes." Those 30 students deserved better from me. I failed them. Worse, the university and the professor failed the students for an entire semester.

E.W. in Skaneateles, NY: I have been teaching psychology full-time for the past ten years across two different liberal arts teaching-oriented colleges, so I have a fair bit of teaching advice:

You are the expert here. Although some days it might not feel like it, you are much more knowledgeable about your area than your students are. I assume that if you have a teaching job, then you have a graduate degree of some sort. Graduate schools, and especially Ph.D. programs, tend to make you feel unintelligent and ignorant, especially compared to your peers and mentors, who are often world-class experts in their fields and have been studying them for years. Also, graduate school teaches you all about the nuances, caveats, and gaps in our knowledge in a way most undergrad classes just don't. Thus, you know a lot about what you don't know in a way an undergrad doesn't. There's a reason why most graduate students, and even some young professors, experience "imposter syndrome." However, you definitely know more about the material than your students, who are encountering it for the first time.

You can still learn more, and you are an expert learner. One thing that all good teachers do is keep learning. Sometimes I have had the not-so-fun experience of being required to teach a class outside my immediate specialty. In that case, I read ahead and learn the material in advance of the students, so that I can teach it to them. You only have to outrun them a little to seem like you know a lot about the topic. Next time you teach it, you will be way ahead of the game.

Be humble about what you don't know. Sometimes a student will ask a really insightful question that I don't immediately know the answer to (though I can often give an educated guess). In those cases, I will say, "Wow, that is a very insightful question! I will look that up and get back to you next class." Then I actually look it up or consult a colleague and get back to them. In my experience, students are uniformly understanding that you don't know absolutely everything, and they are impressed that you took them seriously and reported back. I've learned a lot from looking up the answers to insightful student questions over the years.

Be courageous about your topic by speaking the truth. Last Thursday, I covered the topic of abortion in my "womb-to-tomb" lifespan developmental psychology class. It is part of the curriculum, and I was not going to shy away from covering it, even though my current institution is religiously-affiliated (albeit liberal) and I am currently untenured. I addressed the issue in a frank manner, acknowledging that there are strong differences of opinion here. My job is not to convince them that a particular moral position is correct because it is not a moral philosophy class. (And even then, the goal would be to discuss the issue thoroughly rather than press one's preferred view.) My goal was to teach the facts and the psychology of the issue, even if it is not what (some) students wanted to hear.

I actually used some of the points that I learned from Electoral-Vote.com in that class. Specifically, I talked about how if one truly believes that a fertilized zygote is a full-fledged person, then women might need a passport to cross an international border if they were pregnant or possibly pregnant. Also, there is the consequence that women would need to verify that they are not pregnant before drinking alcohol to avoid committing child abuse. I stress that my goal is to teach them the messy facts and their consequences, not to preach to them or impart my own opinions.

Be engaging if you use PowerPoint for a lecture class. I personally like using PowerPoint slides to project notes for students, as it is a good way to keep myself on track and avoid extended digressions, which I tend to slip into. While I will adapt the publisher-provided PowerPoint slide decks to my own standards, I never use anyone else's PowerPoints because I often find that I don't know what kind of point they were supposed to be making. If there is something that I don't understand in a PowerPoint, I take it off.

Over the years, I have reduced the number of words per slide to a bare minimum because students just try to copy it all down without thinking about it. Often, there are just key points that I want to make and that I expand upon greatly during the lecture/discussion. I also never use cute backgrounds or graphics, just black text on a white background to improve accessibility, but I always make sure to have at least one image on every slide. Usually, it is either an image to illustrate what I'm talking about or a funny psychology-related meme carefully curated to relate to the actual topic. (In addition to xkcd.com and PhDcomics.com, Google image search is a great way to get those; I call those searches my "productive procrastination.") I use animations in PowerPoint (mostly "Appear" or "Fade") to make the text or images appear when I want them to, so the students aren't staring at a slide full of text the whole time. There's nothing worse than someone slowly reading a slide word-for-word when I have already finished reading it twice. I also always provide students with full copies of the slides after I finish each topic, so students don't freak out if they happen to miss something.

Remember, the first time you teach a class is the hardest. There's a reason why professors make a distinction between the number of courses and the number of "preps," and there's a big difference between "new preps" and "old preps." Creating a brand new course for the first time you teach it is a huge lift, but after that, it is MUCH easier to tweak, modify, and update a course, as you experiment with different material and with better ways to teach the students. So, it might seem really stressful now, but the work you put in now will pay off BIG time later, and it becomes a lot of fun.

M.S. in Canton, NY: There has been a lot of great advice in these responses. Let me add two more notes about classroom dynamics, and two about student teaching evaluations:

Consciously build into each class a moment for students' brains to shift gears, or maybe even get taken out of gear. In a smaller class, this could mean a brief small-group discussion, or an ungraded self-quiz, or lots of other things. But even in a large lecture class, you can tell a related but off-topic anecdote, or use an unexpectedly funny example, or really anything to break up the relentless flow of information.

Respect the scheduled end of the class period. Build a lesson plan that could be completed 5 minutes before the end of class. If it runs long, you can still end on time without rushing. If it runs short, I'm certain that you can find something of value to fill the extra time. (Or let the students leave a few minutes early occasionally—they will love you for it!) Trust me, if you go into overtime, students will not get anything out of it, and all you will do is annoy the instructor who is waiting outside to come into the classroom for the next class period.

Unless you are very unusual, student evaluations of your teaching in the first year will be disappointing, or worse. Take all criticism constructively—even if they are not offered that way—and consciously address the concerns. If you do so, your evaluations can and will get better.

Accept that you cannot please everyone. In my first year of full-time teaching, I taught an introductory-level night course at a state university to a very mixed audience of students. When I read my evaluations afterwards, one student roasted me up and down the scale: I was distant, arrogant, disrespectful of the students, etc., etc. Huh. The very next evaluation I read began, "I never would have made it through this course except for the easy-going and supportive attitude of the instructor."

Good luck!

P.S. in La Quinta, CA: In my 40 years of university teaching I taught over 275 unique classes and over 11,000 students. My generic advice is to game the system, otherwise it will game you. Within the work expectations associated with teaching, research, and service, find things that work to your benefit, save you time, and (perhaps) make you money. My example is online teaching. I was the first one in my department to jump into online teaching. I didn't do it for pedagogical reasons, but to make sure I had steady summer income. At the time (pre-COVID), online summer classes were popular and always filled up; thus, my summer income was guaranteed. In the semester COVID hit, I happened to be teaching in-person sections of classes I had already taught online. We were given a week to transition all our classes from in-person to online. I was lucky and watched as my colleagues suffered through 80-hour workweeks trying to adapt, while I made the transition from in-person to online over the course of a weekend.

Beyond that, I always took the first few minutes of my classes to cover current events that related to course content (easy when teaching atmospheric sciences). That was always the #1 positive comment on student evaluations and a great way to connect with students. Also, avoid faculty governance and record ALL your conversations with administration!

S.C. in New York, NY: Teaching at a university has two components: actually teaching students and interacting with the other people in academia. Those are different skills.

Actually teaching:

No matter how natural a teacher someone is, it takes a few iterations and some experimentation to find what works well for them and the students at their current institution. So that's one reason it is good to do some teaching as a grad student and postdoc—everyone will screw up some at the beginning, so it may as well be at a place where they might not be forever! Treat teaching as something that you are always trying to improve, and do not be afraid to experiment and try approaches that differ from what you always do. And students and topics change, so your approach should as well!

Aswath Damodaran, a talented professor at NYU who wins teaching awards, for good reason, has a webpage about his approach to teaching, and he summed it up wonderfully in an interview with Preet Bharara where he said "mind the 3 E's: Empathy, Enthusiasm, and Energy." If you are not excited about explaining important things to the students, that does not bode well.

Managing academic challenges:

Emily Toth had a regular column in the Chronicle of Higher Education as "Ms. Mentor," and there are some collections of her columns which are enjoyable reads and eye-opening to many people starting teaching careers, along the lines of "Really, people care about that? That would have never occurred to me!" Some of it is aimed at women faculty members (wardrobe choices are also 3 E's: Elegant, Earthy or Ethnic) but the applicability is broad.

Alice Silverberg is an accomplished mathematician who has written frankly about many of her experiences in Alice's Adventures in Numberland, which started in 2017 and continues up until now—you may want to start with earlier pieces and work forward. Some of that is troubling but it is good to know how people think and she puts a lovely humorous touch on many issues faced over the years.

D.S. in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK: The most important thing is to transmit your enthusiasm and excitement about your subject when teaching. You can't expect the students to be interested if you don't make it obvious that you are interested yourself. Second most important is to include some humor.

J.T. in Marietta, GA: Here are some suggestions from someone with 32 years experience in a wide range of institutions (11 as chair or director):

The syllabus. I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone talk about this. Make your syllabus as complete and detailed as possible. It's your contract with the students. Try for concision, but do NOT leave anything out. It helps immensely with grade appeals and complaints. Every single policy should be there, from the specific class to the department, college, and university (even if it's repetitive). And there should be detailed written instructions for every assignment. This will also help YOU in grading. It's always shocked me how many faculty members have short, vague syllabi and just go by instinct. That's a recipe for disaster.

Ask the students what they want. I got some of my best ideas this way. Ask the class, or give them some options. Just talk to them.

J.D. in Cold Spring said, "Maintain an active life and friendships away from academia." Yeah, do that. Also try to meet people across departments and the university. Interdisciplinary collaborations are good for that.

Focus service contributions to search committees, if your department head allows. You may be working with those people a long time.

Faculty members in English think they're the smartest people in the room. This is only occasionally true.

D.B. in Palatine, IL: When I first started teaching I had a mentor who told me he could tell within 5 minutes of observing a class whether an instructor was any good. If the students were engaged (asking questions, responsive, etc.), the instructor was on track. If the students were quiet, the instructor had lost them, either by being too fast or too slow with the content relative to the students' abilities.

To that end, I learned to start each semester by focusing on communication. I start with an ice breaker. I write three questions on the board: 1) What is your first name?, (2) Why are you taking this class? and (3) What is your favorite vacation destination? I have the class pair up and give them 5 minutes to learn the answers from their classmate. Then we go around the room and everyone introduces their partner. If there is an odd number of students, I pair with someone. Otherwise, I introduce myself.

Why do this? It gets the students comfortable talking with classmates. It sets the expectation that they will be talking with each other and explaining things to each other. It gives me an opportunity to expand on some of the "Why are you taking this class?" responses. And it associates a happy memory (their favorite vacation) with the class experience. It also helps them understand that we collectively see them as an individual with life beyond the classroom and appreciate their personal experiences.

And somewhere in the introductions I explain that I can't really teach them anything. But I will do everything within my power to help them learn.

B.M. in Papillion, NE: M.R.! Congratulations on the start of a new journey. I have but one piece of advice: From time to time a student will ask you a question and you will not know the answer. Never, never, never try to weasel your way out of it. The correct response is always: "Hey, that's interesting, and I don't happen to know! But I will find out for next time and we can talk about it!" Students appreciate honesty.

J.O. in Williamsburg, MA: I taught various courses of adult education; people in the work force who came to us for a week's training. What I learned was to add humor! My first student critique said "this instructor has no sense of humor." I was wounded, but learned to incorporate humor thereafter. And had fun doing it.

K.H. in Albuquerque, NM: My single biggest "trick" to effective university teaching was a negative. I tried ever so hard to NOT do anything that pissed off/frustrated me as a student.

That meant getting grades and feedback to the students promptly (remember that prof who didn't grade the midterms until the week before finals?). That meant keeping lectures and assigned reading in line with exam questions (remember that prof who said don't memorize Table 7 and then the test was all about Table 7?). That meant being honest about expectations (remember that prof who assigned a 10-item portfolio and then docked you for not submitting 12?).

You get the idea. It's surprisingly easy to not be those profs and your students will be thrilled.

We've gotten so many useful responses, we are going to do one more week of this, and then move on. So, look for Part IV next week.

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