The End of the Semester

Hello, fellow teaching fellows! My name is Stacey and I am a 4th year PhD candidate in clinical psychology. For our final blog entry of the academic semester (happy Last Day of Classes, by the way!), I would like to take this moment to remind myself – and possibly you – of how to take advantage of this special time of the year as a professor-in-the-making. The exams have been written. The final papers have been assigned. Our students are frantically cramming out enjoying this blissful and carefree spring afternoon. What is a bored teaching fellow to do before the deluge of grading begins? Before you rush off to the lab or run to go complete your dissertation progress report (am I the only one still getting reminders for that?), I want to let you know that this is actually a perfect time to work on polishing your teaching dossier.

Reflecting Back for Projecting Forward

We all know that the end of the semester is the time to assess our students’ learning and acquired abilities. With any luck, you may have approached your semester from the perspective of Backward Design and built your course around carefully selected learning goals. But what about assessing your own growth and learning as an instructor? How can we evaluate ourselves and our own teaching progress?

Perhaps you have already administered your own end-of-the-semester evaluations. If you have, great! If you haven’t, it’s not too late! The free website www.surveymonkey.com is easy to use and emailing a link isn’t so hard either. These evaluations can be helpful as a summary of student reactions to the course – and to you as an instructor. Ask students to rate, rank, or somehow assess a few of the approaches you’ve used to enhance their learning. What students like isn’t as important as what's helping them learn. Sometimes they forget that. Sometimes we do too. For sample evaluation forms, see Appendix D of our Becoming Teachers handbook.

Type out a summary of your students’ comments and be careful to avoid focusing on the extremes. While one student might suggest that your sections are akin to pedagogical waterboarding, another student might want to continue attending your office hours over the summer to bask in the glow of your genius. Don’t let the hyperboles drown out the more balanced and reasonable comments. If you write up a summary, every voice will be heard and you’ll see that the polarized evaluations are far less important than the many moderate ones. Bonus hint! Make copies of all of your evaluations and keep them on file. Evaluations are often an important part of your teaching portfolio.

In addition to your students’ perspective on how the course went, take a moment to reflect on your own thoughts and feelings about the semester. Did you experiment with anything new? How did it go? Looking back, what would you do differently? What techniques did you use that were effective for student learning? Jot down your thoughts and experiences in one place... a “teaching journal” of sorts. This gives you a single place to generate ideas, troubleshoot problems, and reflect on your own successes and struggles as a budding teacher – an invaluable resource when planning future courses and creating a teaching portfolio. You might even be able to use an anecdote or two in your Teaching Statement. The experiences you reflect on now just might be the stories you will tell when you are interviewing for a job. In case you’re not convinced, or for more tips, tricks, and recommendations on keeping a teaching journal, see this gradhackerblog post.

Basking in the NOW

While you wrap your mind around the mental exercise that is looking backward and forward at the same time, give your neck a break and focus your attention and awareness on the here and now. Experience the sensations that come with the end of another semester – without regret for the past or worry for the future. Congratulate yourself for surviving another year and remember that making it to this point is a success unto itself!

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE CLASS OF 2013!

How to spend less time preparing better lectures

Erica De Bruin

Advice for new faculty suggests that, when lecturing on material that is familiar to you, you should spend two to three hours to prepare a one hour lecture. If you’ve given the lecture before, it should take you a half hour or less.

That time frame might seem undoable/possibly insane. The goal of this post is convince you otherwise.

In fact, I’m going to suggest that spending less time preparing can lead to better lectures. This is because excessive preparation can mire you in details that are not essential for students to learn. Research consistently shows that student retention is higher when less material is presented. Excessive preparation also encourages you to fill the entire lecture period with lecturing, which is not optimal for student learning.

So how can you prevent yourself from over preparing for a lecture? Here are some suggestions:

(1) Specify learning goals first

Identifying at the outset how you want your students to be different at the end of the lecture will help you focus your preparation. It will also prevent you from wasting time gathering supporting materials that you won’t end up using. A good guideline is to limit yourself to 2-3 learning goals for an hour-long lecture.

(2) Cover less content

The less content you intend to cover, the less time you will need to spend preparing it. It might be tempting to try to impress the audience with the breadth and depth of your knowledge about the topic, but there is only so much new information that students can process in a given lecture.^[1] So focus on conveying a few ideas well, rather than a lot of ideas poorly. Doing so will allow you to reiterate main points, provide examples, and connect the content to your students’ own experiences—all of which will aid student retention.

If you’re finding it hard to limit the scope of your lecture, consider assigning readings that will provide students will basic facts and background information about the topic, leaving you to focus on the problems, puzzles, and debates that make the subject interesting to you.

(3) Let students do some of the work

Don’t plan to lecture for the full period. Instead, plan mini discussion sections, group work, short debates, or other activities that allow students to engage with the material actively (more ideas here). Since students retain much more information in interactively taught lectures than in traditional ones, it will also improve student retention. (For example, one study found that after two weeks, we remember only 20% of what we hear out loud, but 70% of what we say ourselves.)

(4) Don’t reinvent the wheel

Even if you are preparing a lecture that you have never prepared before, chances are someone has prepared one on the same topic. If you are giving a guest lecture in an existing course, ask the primary instructor for his or her lecture notes and materials from previous years. If you are preparing lectures for a course that has been taught in your department before, ask your colleagues for their materials.

(5) Prepare an outline, rather than a script

Prepare an outline that includes your main points, evidence to support them, questions you want to ask, and activities that you will include, but don’t write out a full script—it’s simply too time consuming. Reading from a script also prevents you from maintaining eye contact with students and can make your delivery sound rehearsed. If you are nervous, consider writing a script for the introduction to your lecture to ensure you start off fluidly, then working from an outline for the rest of the talk.

(6) Embrace imperfection

This suggestion is for those of you who (like me) have perfectionist tendencies. You know who you are! In giving a lecture, it’s okay if you are less succinct than you would be if you wrote the whole thing out. It’s okay if you don’t have the answer to every question that a student asks. (In fact, admitting what you don’t know can improve your credibility as an instructor). In short, it’s okay if your lecture isn’t “perfect.” If you approach each lecture as learning experience and welcome feedback, you’ll take some of the pressure off yourself and be able to continuously develop your skills as a lecturer.

I hope that this post has given you some ideas about how to prepare lectures efficiently, and convinced you that when it comes to lecture preparation, more time will not necessarily lead to better learning outcomes for your students.

Are there any other time saving tips that you have used when preparing a lecture? Please leave them in the comments below!

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^[1] Russell et al. (1984) compared student retention following lectures in which 90% of the sentences conveyed new information to lectures in which 70% and 50% did. The authors found that students learned and retained the most information when the least amount was presented.

Backward Design

This week’s post is written by Sarah. I am an almost finished PhD candidate in Geology and Geophysics.

I wanted to write a little about a concept that the GTC (and lots of other people - see some more links below) thinks is important and that we introduce in many workshops that we lead: backward design. I’ll also talk about a discussion that we had in my Fundamentals of Teaching Science workshop about backward design, where participants felt it was a little impractical.

Backward design emphasizes learning goals and outcomes as opposed to starting by deciding what topics you need to cover. Instead of first deciding what content you will teach or what activities you will do, backward design begins with figuring out what your desired results are.

Basically, you start out by deciding how you want students to be different when you’re done teaching. What do you want them to be able to do or know?

Then you decide how you’ll be able to tell if that was done. Is there a test question that would let you know? Should you have them do an experiment or demonstration to show you they know how? Should they write a paper about it?

Then you’ll decide what you as a teacher will do to help your students reach these goals. Is a lecture the best way? Should you have them go outside and observe a phenomenon? Should you assign a book or paper for them to read and discuss with other students?

Cue infographic:

(Image from Wikipedia)

After presenting this to our first Fundamentals session this fall, we were met with some skepticism. Would this really be feasible in someone’s first semester of teaching a class at a brand new job at a brand new university when they have so much other stuff to do? I suppose the official answer could be that it shouldn’t matter, you want the best for your students no matter how long it takes. But yes, it is overwhelming to think about redesigning a whole course when there is already one being taught that seems to be working fine.

That, to me, is the beauty of backward design. It is not all or nothing. This can be your framework for so many scales, from entire curricula to a semester-long course to a 50 minute class to a 10 minute activity. If there is a class that you may not have a lot of control over the whole thing (or you don’t want to change the whole thing) this is still a great way to make your activities and lessons align with your learning goals.

It was said at Teaching at Yale Day last month and many more times at GTC events – we want people to try new things even if they aren’t sure it will work. Otherwise, how do you know? I hope my skeptical workshop participants now feel a little more confident to try backwards design at least on a small scale because otherwise how will they know how cool it is?

So does starting on a small scale make it seem more doable? A devil’s advocate asked me, isn’t this just teaching to the test? What do you think?

Here are some other people talking about this:

A Chronicle article

Lots of examples and resource