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For most, the academic year begins next month, and teachers are gearing up for the first day of class. Start well with these essays, tutorials, and suggestions:

Build a Great Syllabus

How Do I Create an Effective Syllabus? – Instructions for making your syllabus approachable and learner-centered.

Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy – Model for describing learning; useful for writing learning outcomes. (Also check out the related page on learning outcomes.)

The Chronicle of Higher Ed‘s guide to creating a syllabus – There’s a LOT here. The “Course Goals” section is particularly valuable. There’s also a nice guide to crafting an attendance policy.

Have a Fantastic First Day

Make the Most of a First Day of Class – How to introduce yourself effectively, set the tone for the course, understand studetns’ baseline knowledge, and more.

How to Teach a Good First Day of Class – Four core principles to shape your planning for Day One.

First Day of Class – Short, to the point guide for an optimal first day.

Other Advice for the First Day and Every Day

Avoid Overprepping with Pattern Teaching – Streamline course prep with interchangeable segments; use them like Legos and build a class.

Improv Training Rescued Me in the Classroom

A Different Way to Deliver Student Feedback – A STEM professor offers a system of feedback based on the performing arts.

How to Overcome Zoom Fatigue – If you’re teaching online this semester, these tips can help your class connect and coalesce.

Small Steps to Build a More Inclusive Classroom – Use an anonymous survey to understand potential barriers to learning at the start of the semester. Request the form.

Obviously, our goal in teaching is to help students move from ignorance to acquiring the knowledge, skills, and abilities that will help them make a positive impact on the world and bring them personal success.  When a learner doesn’t move rapidly from a state of ignorance to a state of knowing, they may feel shame.  This is a common experience for the student who is called upon to answer a question, cannot respond correctly, and then receives a non-supportive response from the teacher.   One might think that then the student would be motivated to study harder so that they can avoid feeling shame.   Unfortunately, shame is a poor motivator.  Engaging with material that the student has not yet learned can bring forth feelings of inadequacy and trigger avoidance.  It’s amazing how attractive mundane tasks like organizing papers or even doing laundry become when avoiding the discomfort of facing our ignorance.  Imagine how much more students would learn if we helped them embrace curiosity about what they don’t know rather than shame about their lack of knowledge.

Here are a few suggestions to help:

Create a culture of curiosity:  Ask students WHAT their questions are.  Instead of saying, “Are there any questions?”, which is not particularly inviting and can be interpreted to mean that only those who didn’t understand may have questions, say, “What are your questions?”  This communicates the expectation that everyone will have questions.  Make sure to allow time for questions in your teaching too.  Wait with a neutral expression as long as it takes for the questions to start coming.  Thank students for sharing their questions. 

Acknowledge the imperfection of the teaching:  No lecture, reading assignment, or other learning activity will perfectly instill knowledge into the learner.  So, at the end of any such activity, ask all learners to identify the “fuzziest point,” or that which is not clear to them. (“Muddiest point” is also used.)  This acknowledges that there is always room for growth, both in the teaching and in the learning.  Addressing these fuzzy points gives you an opportunity to fill in learning gaps to the benefit of the learner and improve your future teaching.

Leverage peer-to-peer interactions:  Students are more open with peers about what they don’t yet know than they are with teachers.   Think-pair-share is a simple way to do this.  When posing a complex or challenging question, ask students to think for a minute or so individually and then to turn to a peer to discuss their ideas and their questions.  After a few minutes for the pair to work, ask them to share their thoughts with you.

Scaffold:  When teaching new or more advanced material, remind learners of the relevant material they already know and that forms the foundation for the topic at hand.  Stay with them “on the scaffold” by asking them, “What do we need to know to answer this question?”

What we do as educators to encourage learners to feel curious rather than shame when they encounter the edges of their knowledge, skills, and abilities will help them become strong lifelong learners.

More Resources

Teaching Tips Roundup

Pearls of Wisdom: Teach Less but Better

Mentoring for Grief & Growth at the End of a Dissertation

If you come from a research-intensive PhD program and postdoc, you, like me, lack teaching experience. Outside of one semester of service as a teaching assistant in graduate school, I have never lectured in a course. To those of you who teach regularly, develop multiple courses, all while running a research program: I have a newfound respect for your ability to balance research with the teaching. For this bench scientist embarking on their first semester of teaching, my first attempt was rough, but I learned a lot. As always these days, n=me but today, with only pilot data.

Transferable skills: The good news about teaching is you have cultivated some of the skills necessary throughout your graduate career. Skills in public speaking and compiling clear presentations will serve you well. Even though it has been a while since I took a course, I still remember how my favorite lecturers presented material or put together exams. Use these skills.

Times have changed: If you have not been teaching or involved with college education, you might be surprised to see how much has changed. My college education included attending courses and taking furious notes for an hour. This static approach has been replaced by interactive learning with clickers, in class-question slides, and small group work during the lecture. Lectures that are more static are now videotaped, giving students the option to watch the material at home. The plus side is this makes the material more accessible to all the students in the class. The downside is that when it came time to take the exam, I had never seen 75% of my class before. I can honestly say my grading was completely free of bias.

Resources on campus: If your campus has a large undergraduate student body or medical school, there are resources available to help you design your lectures or implement some of the new teaching strategies. Do not be afraid to use these.

Your fellow faculty: Do reach out to the other faculty in your department for help with designing the lectures, deciding on what to cover in the exam, and general support. I was rather worried I had made my test too hard based on some of the low scores, but my fellow course instructors informed me these averages and distributions were well within the ranges they are used to seeing. If you will be doing a lot of teaching, cultivate some relationships with mentors who teach heavily.

Be prepared to spend a lot of time on course preparation: If you are inheriting a course section with slides, congratulations! If you are not, be prepared to invest some time in putting together lectures. My slide preparation took about eight hours per lecture. Even had my slides been prepared, designing the test took another four hours, and grading occupied a solid twelve hours, split over two days. Budget for this time; otherwise you, like me, will be miserable for two weeks.

Writing the exam: The only preparation I had for designing an exam was having taken quite a few throughout my long academic career. I decided I would model the exam after my favorite courses and include some short answer and experimental-type questions. At the gentle prodding of the course director to not make grading too hard on myself, I included some multiple choice questions. Grading the exam made me seriously consider doing an all multiple choice exam next year. The short answer questions were varied in responses, often not quite what I had envisioned because the question was too open-ended, and required quite a bit of effort to grade. However, for a subset of students, having the ability to draw out or write out experiments, instead of choosing the correct statement over an almost correct statement, proved critical for their success on the exam. Their ability to demonstrate considerable knowledge on the topic made me seriously consider the utility of multiple choice exams in identifying promising scientific minds. To those of you in education or with larger teaching loads, this, of course, is not surprising.

Dealing with course evaluations: Luckily, dealing with funding agencies and manuscript reviewers has somewhat prepared you for reading course evaluations. Be kind to yourself and accept this is your first time teaching, and next year will be better. Or so I am telling myself. Again, do not be afraid to utilize the resources on campus to improve your lectures. Finally, do not under any circumstances read websites like Rate My Professor. Do not do it.

For those of you embarking on your first lectures this fall, good luck. It is an honor and a privilege to teach the next generation of scientists and doctors. Use part of the summer to prepare and plan your lectures. You will thank me when your research or writing does not come to a screeching halt because you have to prepare course materials. Stay tuned for more tales!

Did I miss an important point? Do you have questions or concerns about the post? Or perhaps an anecdote to contribute! Feel free to send some electrons my way in the comments, via Twitter @PipetteProtag, or through traditional electronic mail pipette.protagonist@gmail.com

More Resources

Triggering Shame vs. Stimulating Curiosity

Teaching Tips Roundup

Considerations for Inclusive Support of International Students