Teaching outside your expertise? Don't worry...

Teaching outside your area of expertise can be daunting but is a reality in academia today. Even when teaching courses about subjects you know well, there will always be some topics you are more comfortable with relative to others. Non-experts do bring strengths to the classroom: when teaching a less familiar subject, you're more likely to have realistic expectations of your students, and you'll tend to focus on concrete explanations of problems and phenomena. As with any teaching assignment, though, you will want to manage your time, plan course content, and be respected by the students - all things we have a few suggestions for here.

What's important? Planning the course

• Look for a few syllabi (online or elsewhere) for a similar course
• Talk to at least one expert in the field to learn about important themes as well as common misconceptions
• Start with a topic that you are more familiar with
• Employ active learning techniques to engage students and encourage them to take responsibility for their own learning
• Build flexibility into the syllabus

Establishing credibility

• Introduce yourself, including your background, work experience, and degrees
• Arrive on time or a little early
• Dress professionally
• Be clear about expectations and due dates
• Remind students about upcoming due dates, exams, and other events
• If something needs to be changed or rescheduled, ask for student preferences and feedback
• Prepare to explain confusing or difficult topics clearly and in more than one way
• Do all of the course reading in advance, and be familiar with it
• Learn how to field questions appropriately, and have ways of saying "I don't know the answer"

Managing your time

• Reframe your role in the classroom so you don't feel that you hold the "key" to all the knowledge
• Reuse quality material developed for the same course in the past
• Transfer relevant material from previous courses you've taught
• Familiarize yourself with course readings before the course and then before each class
• Stagger due dates and do not plan too many assessments
• Aim for quality instead of quantity

Try to avoid

• Underestimating the amount of time it takes to prepare
• Assigning too much work and too many assignments
• Over-preparing

These are just a few suggestions and techniques that may be helpful when you are teaching material that you're less familiar with. Keep in mind that, as a non-expert, you have strengths that you can use to your advantage. Furthermore, teaching outside your expertise can broaden your knowledge base, lead to new and interesting areas of research, connect you with faculty and colleagues in other departments and institutions, and enhance your C.V.  Let us know how it goes!

Source: Huston, Therese. Teaching What You Don't Know. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Print.

Course Design Resources

By Erica De Bruin and Mercedes Bravo

Preparing to teach your own course for the first time? Here's a round-up of some of our favorite course design resources on the web: 

The teaching centers at Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and Vanderbilt have put together particularly comprehensive online guides, which take you from identifying situational constraints and developing course goals to writing the syllabus. If you are thinking of revising an existing course, reading about the experiences of other faculty (PDF) members might be a great place to start. 

"Integrated Course Design" (PDF), a paper by L. Dee Fink of the University of Oklahoma, discusses how to integrate course design so that your learning goals, instructional strategies, and assessments are well-aligned. For an illustration of how you might vary your instructional strategies, see: "Scientific Teaching in Practice." (For those of you that attended the Yale Teaching Center's recent workshop on course design, these papers were the source of the graphics we showed illustrating how to vary your instructional strategies.)

The University of Minnesota has a helpful tutorial that walks you through the process of designing a syllabus. Other great syllabus design guides have been put together by the teaching centers at Brown (PDF), Cornell, and Michigan. For sample syllabi, one website to check out is OpenCourseWareSearch, which compiles course materials from several universities with open courses including MIT, Notre Dame, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Yale.

If you've found any additional resources, please leave them in the comments!