Part One:
Beginning to Teach
"The
Nine and a Half Commandments of Good Teaching"
"Lecturing:
Using a Much Maligned Method of Teaching"
"Teaching
by Lecture"
"On
Discussion Teaching"
 The
Profession of Teaching
"What
Little I Think I Know About Teaching"
"The
Necessary Lie: Duplicity in the Disciplines"
The
College Curriculum
The
Academic Advisers
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The Classroom and The Course
Preparation
How prepared must I be before entering the classroom?
Nearly all beginning teachers ask this question at one time or another.
If you are seriously underprepared, the consequence is sheer terror, or
the contempt of your students. If you are mildly underprepared, the consequence
is rigidity because you must remain within the narrow area that you are
prepared to address, thereby defeating the flexibility you need to negotiate
between what your students know and the goals you have set for them. Conversely,
you can in a sense be overprepared when you succumb to the urge to squeeze
all the things you've learned into the time constraints of your course.
When you try to cover too much material in too great detail, it becomes
exceedingly difficult to respond to your students because you become more
concerned with covering the material than with whether they have absorbed
it or whether they can ever do so.
Ferguson is quite right when he notes that "teaching is work." But, how
do you know how much work is enough? You are prepared enough if you are
able to pay more attention to what the class knows than to what you yourself
do or do not know. If you are able to improvise and respond to the class's
true state while making clear progress toward defined goals, then you
are prepared enough. Many beginning teachers, however, underestimate the
number of hours of preparation that are required for each hour of presentation.
When experienced teachers are asked how much time is required to teach
a course for the first time from scratch, estimates in the social sciences
and the humanities often are as high as from ten to twenty hours for every
hour spent in the classroom. Estimates in the physical sciences and mathematics
tend to be considerably lower—by about half—because those hours
of preparation will constitute, to a greater extent than is typically
true in the humanities and social sciences, a review of previously mastered
information and concepts. What is significant in all fields, however,
is the number of hidden hours that must be devoted to all kinds of preparatory
activities—which leads to another frequently asked question.
What should I do when preparing for class?
What you should do during those hours of preparation depends largely
on what you hope to accomplish and, to a lesser extent, on the methods
of instruction you plan to employ. To say that you must know what it is
that you want to accomplish may sound simple and straightforward, but
looks can be deceiving. Recently, in fact, during a CTP forum, a group
of beginning teachers who would soon be assuming full responsibility for
a course were asked to specify the goals they had in mind for the students
they were about to teach. Answers to this seemingly straightforward question
were entirely limited to statements such as "help them understand Western
civilization," "get them interested in the subject of biology," and "teach
them to write an effective argument."
Although objectives such as these can help to get you started, they give
little focus to what you or your students will actually be doing in the
course. How, for example, will you know whether a student is interested,
and what should you do to engender that interest? Similarly, how will
you judge the effectiveness of their arguments? More importantly, if they
are not effective, what will you do?
Even if the first objective you think of is similar to these examples,
before completing further preparations for the class, and certainly before
entering the classroom, you will generally find it helpful to restate
your objectives in more precise terms. One way of doing this is to think
about what data you will use to determine whether those objectives have
been reached. For example, if you want your students to write an effective
argument, you should give some thought to what is involved in effective
argumentation, which pieces are most critical to that effectiveness, what
kind of skill or concepts are prerequisite to achieving it. It is often
helpful to work backwards by first imagining what form an effective argument
of the sort you are looking for would take and by then asking yourself
what information is necessary along the way.
When you begin clarifying and refining your objectives, you should keep
two things in mind. First, a well-considered objective clearly specifies
what the student should be able to do as a result of being in your course.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, it should provide unambiguous information
about what data will be used to determine the degree of their success.
Once you have decided on your objectives in these terms, you can then
begin thinking about which kinds of classroom activities will best foster
them. As the following section suggests, the methods of instruction and
the kinds of additional preparation you will need to do are also determined
by the goals you have set for your course.
The First Day of Class
When asked to describe their greatest fear about the first day of class,
over half of all beginning teachers mention first some variation on the
scenario of having said all they have to say in the first ten minutes
of class. This happens particularly to those who have little or no experience
in public speaking. Although there are no guaranteed procedures that will
prevent all manifestations of anxiety associated with these first-day
jitters, a detailed plan for the first class can alleviate much of it.
Accordingly, the following sections offer, first, some suggestions about
the kinds of information you may want to gather ahead of time and, second,
some guidelines for conducting your first session of a class.
Critical Information
The syllabus
The discussion in this section assumes that a full syllabus has been
given to you when you were assigned your instructional responsibilities.
If you were not given a syllabus, you should consult your departmental
chairperson or try to talk with a faculty member who has taught the course
in a previous year. Constructing an effective syllabus can be a difficult
task that often requires the assistance of those more experienced in your
field.
Even when you are given a syllabus, however, you may find that you want
to augment it. At minimum a good syllabus should contain (1) a list of
the readings for the course; (2) due dates for each of the readings and
assignments; (3) a general discussion of the criteria that will be used
to evaluate students' performance—that is, determine their grades—(4)
a summary of the policies regarding attendance or late papers; and (5)
your office hours and telephone number.
If you are in charge of the entire course, there are two additional kinds
of information that you can included in a syllabus. First, you might give
some thought to assigning topics for discussion to individual lectures
or sets of lectures. The practice of assigning a topic is especially helpful
when you superimpose the topics on the reading list; that is, you assign
each topic to a set of readings. Second, you can give the students a set
of study questions to consider while completing the readings. Study questions
are a very effective way of helping students focus on the more relevant
parts of the text and generally will also increase the amount of time
students spend preparing for class.
The course history and demographics.—If at all possible,
you should try to talk with someone who held your position in a previous
quarter. Talking with someone who has been through the experience is your
best source of information for questions concerning class composition,
common misconceptions, complaints, and expectations of the students who
typically take the course. If you are armed with this information ahead
of time, you are less likely to be disarmed by sudden and often disruptive
discoveries about who your students are and what they know.
Books
It is a good idea to know where the books for the course are being sold
and roughly how much they cost. Check to be sure that what you assume
to be true in this regard is in fact the case. You will need to know whether
an order has been delayed, whether there are enough books, and whether
any of these conditions will affect your ability to follow your plans.
This advice also applies to books placed on reserve.
The room
Before the quarter begins, check on the classroom. Is it adequate? Does
it have enough seats? Can you rearrange them to suit the teaching method
you will be using most often (e.g., in a circle for discussion or facing
the board for lecture)? Stand in the back and look at the board—is
there any glare? Do you need to pull the blinds before you use the board?
The students will expect you to provide a workable situation, and being
in control of the physical environment will help you feel in control of
the class. Assuring yourself that the physical structure of the classroom
itself will not impede your teaching can have a calming effect.
Office hours and availability
Most of you will hold office hours, and it is advisable to determine
two things ahead of time: (1) realistically, how many hours can you devote
to office hours? and (2) how many of those hours will you be available
on a walk-in basis, versus by appointment? Initially, you might try having
at least a few walk-in hours per week, since many students, especially
freshmen, seem to be less inhibited about stopping in for help at a designated
hour than about asking for an appointment.
In addition, you will need to decide how you want to schedule those office
hours. Since courses in the College run on Monday-Wednesday-Friday or
Tuesday-Thursday schedules, it is better to split your office hours between
those two subdivisions of the week. For example, you might have your office
hours on Monday and Thursday rather than on Monday and Wednesday. By splitting
your schedule in this way, you become available to the largest possible
group of students and thus will probably have to make fewer individual
appointments.
An Outline for a Typical First Class Session
Use the first day to act as the host for the course and to set the tone.
Introduce yourself and your background; then get acquainted with the class.
When you introduce yourself, be sure to provide the essential statistics—your
phone number, office location, office hours, and mailbox. It is often
useful to write this introductory information in the upper left-hand corner
of the blackboard. Some of your students will probably be late to the
first day of class, and some may have stumbled into your class by mistake,
so a written announcement will prevent a certain amount of embarrassment
for both groups. You would be surprised at how many students do not know
their professor's name, even by mid-quarter, simply because it isn't on
the syllabus and they missed, or came late to, the first day of class!
If the class is fairly small, it may also be a good idea to introduce
the class to each other. One way to do this is to call roll and ask each
student to provide some kind of background information. Alternatively,
especially in large classes, this same information can be obtained by
having students take a few minutes to fill out three-by-five cards with
their names and whatever background information you think will be helpful.
When you collect this information, you send a message to your students
that who they are is important, a message that can go a long way toward
creating a healthy classroom atmosphere.
Once these introductions are completed, you should plan to give your
students at least a brief overview of the course and let them know the
kind of work that will be involved and your general expectations. Many
faculty find that it is most convenient to convey this information when
they hand out the course syllabus. Talk about what you hope will be accomplished
in each set of readings or assignments. Prepare a brief demonstration
of the kinds of problems they will encounter during the course. In short,
you will generally find it helpful to think about the first day as a demonstration
of what the course will be about rather than trying to convey substantive
course material. Finally, take a few minutes to hear from the students.
You might ask them, for example, why they are taking the course, what
they expect from it, what parts of its content are familiar to them, or
any other question that seems appropriate. A productive first day of class
sets the tone for the remainder of the quarter.
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