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Tips for someone new to teaching?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

I'm new to teaching and I'm struggling with making the transition from lecture preparation to delivery. I have no problem doing the readings/research, making detailed notes, making up a plan for the lecture, etc. What I'm not sure how to do is take all this and deliver a lecture where I'm not just reading my notes/slides or where I'm not just memorizing what I want to say. Does anyone have any tips?

Excellent question, and several other readers submitted responses:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY – Submitted by Patrick Winston

First, remember that teaching, unless you are blessed with innate talents, should be hard and exhausting at first. I have been teaching for several years, and still find that I spend a lot more time than I want to preparing for teaching. Second, plan places for students to participate. It can be a vote on "do you agree with X;" "let's explore why you dis/agree;" pause whenever introducing key and difficult to understand ideas, and try to get students spell out their frustration (if any). The participation time can also be used as a short break for you. Third, find connections to things students might care about. It's easier for me as I'm moral, social, legal, and political, so I basically read the news and try to understand local politics. But my guess is that other fields have their ways of getting students to care about the content of the course. Fourth, talk about what constitutes excellent writing. This, if done well, will make life significantly easier when we have to do the marking. – Submitted by 'my two cents'

I say this only with a bit of irony, but you should approach the delivery of lecture more like Freddie Mercury singer Fat Bottomed Girls – see the video on You Tube. That is, you need to engage the audience, and care less about the specifics of the article, etc. that you are teaching. – Submitted by Freddie Jr.

Any other readers have any helpful tips for a new teacher?

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4 responses to “Tips for someone new to teaching?”

  1. Vaughn

    So I am not a brilliant speaker by any means, but specifically regarding not just reading/memorizing what you want to say, one thing I find helpful is to take the mindset, roughly,that I would take if I were explaining to someone what I was going to be lecturing about. Just talk naturally about it, as if you were in a one-on-one conversation with no notes. Obviously you will have notes, and obviously you are not in a one-on-one conversation, so adjust appropriately, but start from the side of “I am just explaining this from memory to someone.” I also strongly agree with Freddie’s advice to incorporate student participation, even in simple ways like asking for a show of hands about who has a particular intuition that you’re invoking. Sometimes I plan this, sometimes it occurs to me while I’m talking that now would be a natural time to do something like that.

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  2. Michel

    Plan your in-class activities, and when you want to run them. And put only the barest bones of the lecture on your slides–they should contain almost no text, just enough to remind you of roughly what you want to talk about. And don’t have too many slides! For fifty minutes, I stick to four or five. For three hours, maybe a dozenish. (It feels interminable for students if you’re flipping slides every few minutes, rushing to get through fifty.)

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  3. Bill Vanderburgh

    The first couple of times you teach a course will not be the best times you teach that course. That’s okay. You’ve got to do it a few times, with different groups of students, to find the core of it, and then keep making small changes every time you do it. (That development cycle gets shorter, and the first approximation is closer to the good version, the more experience you get.)
    One of the key mistakes new teachers make, especially those fresh out of grad school and/or moving to a different type of institution than they attended themselves, is trying to cover too much material. In fact, erase “cover” from your mental set. Assign some short readings, and then the point is to discuss ideas with students. You will lecture to deliver or explain content, but do that in brief segments interspersed with quite a bit of time on discussion. Get students to pose questions, explain to each other, discuss/debate alternative views. That will go badly while you are learning to do it. That’s okay. Thinking about ideas is fun and I try to make sure I emphasize that both by saying it and showing it in class.
    I used slides as a crutch for too long. Teaching a “chalk and talk” intro to logic class helped me get used to not having everything on lecture notes or the slides. Then I read an amazing book called “Presentation Zen” by Garr Reynolds. It advocates two crucial ideas. (1) There are three separate documents that speakers want to use: a take-away sheet for the audience summarizing the main points/arguments/quotes; a slide deck of visual aids; and speaker notes. Too many people (I was one of them) try to make the slides do the work of all three documents, and we end up with a Frankenstein mash-up Reynolds calls a “slide-ument.” Keep the functions separate. (This does require more prep time, so build toward the ideal over several iterations of the course.) (2) Slides are a visual aid, they should not be a full set of notes, so use them that way. Reynolds says there should be an image and no more than six words per slide. I’ve never been able to be quite that “zen” but I still try to keep the rule in mind. It is free to make a new slide, so you don’t have to pack everything onto one.
    For argument analysis, I’ll put the first premise on one slide, copy that onto a second slide and add the second premise, copy that onto a third slide and add … you get the idea. A neat trick I found is to grey-out the previous sentences on the slide and only have the new one in white (white on black is best for bright rooms). That keeps the focus on the new point but allows students to keep track of the context, look back at something, etc.
    To address the OP’s core question: Write up your lecture notes as you have been doing. Chunk them into roughly slide-sized bits. Create your slides, and add all your notes into the speaker notes function (of PowerPoint or whichever program you are using). Then when you see the slide it will trigger the thought rather than having you read it from a slide-ument, and if you stumble you can look at the speaker notes. I bet you’ll rarely look at the notes. And as you get more experienced, when you prep a new class, your lecture notes for yourself will get shorter.
    I’ve been thinking about how teaching is kind of like standup comedy. New comedians bomb for a long time before they get better. And even really experienced, really good comedians bomb when trying new material or when the crowd isn’t right or for mysterious reasons. Bombing is learning–if you can get your focus off how bad it can feel. It is hard not to wish it away since it is so awkward, but a lot of good comedians embrace bombing. BTW some of what you learn is not about you or your teaching but about your students (their preparation, interest level, focus, habits, etc.). On that theme, class discussion is like crowd work–it doesn’t always go well, or go where you want it to go, but when it does go well it is brilliant.

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  4. Daniel Weltman

    I suggest the book “How Students Learn.” It’s sort of STEM focused but it’s still very valuable.

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