Your top tips for teaching undergraduates please!

[MaybeDoctor]

I have been offered a sessional post teaching second-year undergraduates at a local FE college. This would be alongside my other job, so I am not too worried about the temporary nature of the work. I have never worked in HE before, but have an MA from a RG institution and work quite closely with research in my other role.

I have been sent an outline scheme of work for the module (including assignments) and it looks manageable, although obviously I would need to do background reading and preparation. The references are mostly to text-books rather than journals, but they seem to be good quality text books as far as I can see.

I am a qualified and experienced teacher so know 'how' to teach, but I wondered if there were any tips around the balance of tasks, reading and discussion within an undergraduate session. Plus any pitfalls or tips for managing sessional work?

Thanks.

Don't expect most students to have done any reading before classes/tutorials.
Solution: have some prepare a brief presentation (ideally with grades awarded); do some online exercise/forum where there is a small amount of points available (e.g. 'participation' points that build up over the semester) - they have to do this before the class...
There are other solutions too but those may work.

Have clear and precise instructions for assessments, and be prepared to have lots of students ask you questions that are in the instructions anyway. One way to deal with this is to require all questions to be asked on a forum so other students see the answers and you can point them there.

(By the way I use Moodle for most of these, so I don't know if you have access to that).