Teaching survival tips

[jorisbonsun]

I've started a permanent lectureship and realising with horror that for 1 hour lecturing I get the equivalent time allocated for teaching prep. It's all very well if the topic is well within my existing knowledge, or previous iterations of good quality course material exist. Really tough if it is a new topic and/or has to be done from scratch. Any tips for speeding things up and general survival in first year? Thanks

Sorry, can you clarify. For each hour you teach, do you get an hour to prepare?

Hi yes one hours prep for one hour of teaching

Better than the 6 minutes planning, preparation and assessment time that school teachers get per hour of teaching then...

Omg! Count yourself lucky you don't work in a school or college where you only get 10% planning AND preparation time (read marking etc). I'd love an hour for every hour taught.

*Sorry, I know that's not helpful

I have some friends who are teachers who have made some observations- not trying to deny teachers have it incredibly hard. Without going into the complexities of a workload model I don't fully understand there are many tasks that end up being done in 'prep' time. Not looking to compare with other teachers in terms of prep time or lack of, just wanting any advice/support with a busy role

Well a) you're probably expected to do two hours per teaching hour during term times, with no teaching during the holidays, b) lecturers do shedloads of unpaid overtime.

Sorry! But good luck.

You are going to get a lot of snarky replies as this thread is coming up in Active. Perhaps ask for it to be removed from active (if it is possible?).

But yes, it's a real issue and a real struggle at first. Nothing like preparing a seminar.
I would personally break the hour up with some form of interaction, small group discussion/ discussion with the student sat next to them sort of thing. It'll take up time but also mean the students engage with the content properly. My experience is that they just switch off if you talk non stop for one hour.

Ask for all previous teaching materials. Unless it's a new module then these should exist.

Use the first session to lay out your documentation and assignment and have some task set for students. This gives you some padding before getting into teaching proper.

My lectures do not tend to be one hour solid. Definitely would have some questions, discussion, think pair share,. videos, other tasks. My subject is more creative though so would often be mini lecture within longer practical anyway.

That's tough, we get two hours for a module we've taught before and 3 if it's new (plus marking time etc).

Are you teaching in September? I'd aim to have the materials and assessments written over the summer if possible (I've never once managed this...). Agree about adding exercises and discussion to break up the hour (for you as well, if you're new to teaching it will be tiring). Schedule your assessments and associated marking away from other deadlines if possible.

Do the basics right - upload materials promptly, set a timetable for covering the material and stick to it, tell them early what form the assessment will take and when it will happen etc. All sounds very basic and simple and it should be but so many academics are bad at this stuff. If you give the students the impression you're organised and professional you'll have fewer problems as they'll have faith in you.

Get past materials if you can, get as many informal corridor chats with colleagues who teach that cohort as you can, that'll give an idea of the likely problems. Similarly, try attend the exam boards and review meetings over the summer if you can.

Maybe teaching grandma to suck eggs but hopefully some of it useful!

This is true, but in school/college it’s not generally a lecture where you’ll have to talk for an hour on a topic.

I’ve done both fe and uni. School/FE needs what lecturers have, plus more for marking. Uni people need more than that.

But at least when I used to work in uni, workload was calculated per student, which does make a big difference.

Unless you teach three modules with relatively small numbers in a school with large classes and a workflow allocation written with that in mind 😭

my uni assumes 4 hrs prep per 1hr teaching for a new course.

are you convening a whole module or just teaching a few lectures? If the latter,
ask for as many past materials as possible and just re-work them in your own words. Keep things simple and have lots of pictures on your slides.

If it is a full module, you should have a set of learning objectives and can build the teaching around them. My 10-lecture module has a structure of

1. intro to topic & how this course will work
2. methods we will use
3. core topic A
4. core topic B
5. core topic C ... etc
6. recap and integration of all core topics

across the core topics, I have 4 'themes' which come up repeatedly and which are normally the basis for the exams questions. So I highlight as I go along - this core topic fits in Theme 1 and Theme 2 - and have discussion groups / Mentimeter questions about the Themes.

It has taken me quite a while to get it set up like that, but now that it works I can roll it out each year without too much work and the students like it.

I've taught 6th form and currently teaching UG/PG. It takes a lot more prep for an hour UG lecture - if it's a new topic - several hours (in a subject where I have to digest several research papers per lecture). I didn't get my teaching schedule until term started which was a royal PITA - really hoping I can get it before next summer for next year.

Do ask for all available previous slides/materials - I did but it still took hours because I was unfamiliar with the specific research papers in the new topics. (A lot of my pictures are pictures of data that needs interpreting.) But it did give me a starting point for planning and some confidence in the overall shape of things.

I'm also finding it hard to work in the interaction - not helped by recordings where students should be unidentifiable. Lectures here are quite dense. Not sure how to improve on this - any tips welcome!

To some extent I just accept that term times will be very intense and working round the clock - but take it easier after that. If you're repeating lectures - should be much easier after this year (I'm rotating each year - and I didn't realise until I started just what a shedload of work that would turn out to be....).

Sorry that you don't get more preparation time OP - if it's any consolation, once you have a palette of lectures and materials ready to go (developed over the next few years) things will hopefully get easier! Here's a few things:
-Definitely ask for past materials and slides.

-I tend to find that you actually cannot cram that much in a one-hour lecture (which in my place are actually 50 minutes because we start at :05 and finish at :55) if you are trying to do it in a way that will facilitate absorption from the students - in order to do that, you need to build in opportunity for repetition and consolidation, maybe explain the same thing twice with reference to different examples or build in a few minutes discussion between the students, re-cap at the end, etc.

-With teaching I definitely see there is a "diminishing returns" point - if you spend say 2 hours prepping for a lecture, it is likely that it will be twice as good (if those things could be measured) than if you had spent 1 hour. Same perhaps for 4 hours vs 2 hours - but at a certain point spending more and more time polishing your lecture is only going to result in very marginal improvments that probably won't make a difference to students. Try to identify what your "point of diminishing returns" is (will depend on discipline, your teaching style, your students, etc. - but definitely I see so many academics who overwork themselves spending hours or days on a single lecture!).

-If I don't have to rigidly stick to a pre-arranged syllabus, I tend to select topics that allow me to do reading I wanted to do anyway, either for research, or to learn about a different part of the discipline, etc.

-Depends on the person but I like @JenniferBarkley 's advice of preparing all of your materials during the summer. I now basically do all of my course preparation in a block of several weeks before the term - it is intense but also enjoyable in many ways, because it means I am often reading about lots of different topics; I've found that it also allows for more efficiency - i.e. I am reading about a topic with the idea of teaching it in a certain course and turns out that it is becoming too far removed from the original idea, so instead of just writing it off I consider whether I can recycle it for another course I am preparing.

The difference between teaching at school and university is that academics are expected to draw on recent & original research for their teaching, and link it to our own research in some way. Teachers aren't.

One hour prep is a bit niggardly - we get 3 for a new module, and while a junior lecturer is new in post and on probation for their first 3 years, they are given a reduced teaching workload, particularly in the first year.

But you work with what you've got ... the first year of teaching in any new post is hectic (I've found that even as a professor - I've got a new core module to teach next year & it'll suck my time).

Be confident that even if some of your lecture topics are not smack bang in your area of expertise, you know FAR more than any undergraduate!

And if you're delivering 1 hour lectures, these are 50 minutes, and if I were you, I wouldn't write the whole text. I use PowerPoint slides to keep me on track, and then speak to them. It's much more effective communication to a large group.

Also draw on all your pedagogical knowledge and break up the hour - give them an activity about 30 minutes in. Also spend the first couple of minutes setting out where the lecture is going to go, and then a couple of minutes at the end to summarise the central points you want them to take away. I tend to assume that an undergrad is capable of maybe 4 to 5 main points of thinking, and the more detailed information around them.

This all feels like spoon-feeding, but in the end I think makes lectures more effective.

Thanks everyone who has taken time to reply, this is all really helpful- I'm very new in the game so nothing comes across as spoon-feeding! I think a good structure and plan across the sessions I teach, with lots of active learning time, is key, but I am often doing things here and there at short notice so don't always have a clear overarching structure to fall back on

Oh sorry - I didn't mean spoon-feeding you - I meant, spoon-feeding the students.

Also, be prepare for students to be really lackadaisical nowadays - to be uncommitted to attending or doing the reading, or even respecting your knowledge.

Of course, tired brain- spoon feeding the students

It's been really hard to engage some of them! Usually with more complex topics. Sometimes a few in the room interested but others not even trying. That has been tough and difficult to know the right level to pitch things at- and to know how much they need to take responsibility for their own learning and how much you carry with you if it's not been as entertaining...

This. I know it's not a race to the bottomnbutbckass teachers have maybe 2 hours a Week prep time. The rest of the time is teaching am those lessons need planning and preparation. Non wonder teaching is in the miré.

“It's been really hard to engage some of them! Usually with more complex topics. Sometimes a few in the room interested but others not even trying.”

How young they are at 18 can be a real shock. The culture of school often doesn’t do much, if anything, to prepare them for university. Some good tips on this thread. Often they are more interested in each other than the subject or lecturer, which is obviously hard. You can mobilise this with some targeted group work and research activities if appropriate to your subject and context.

While it can sound awful and too much like school, having a few learning aims broken down and framed can be useful for them as it’s what they are used to. This is what you are going to get out of this, rather than this is what you are expected to do, is what they like because education has become quite extractive; one of the times you’ll see them most animated is when complaining or feeding back. Sadly.

What on earth does school level teaching have to do with this? Absolutely teachers should have lower workloads and higher pay, but what does that have to do with OP who has a new academic job and has posted in the academic section? No one is getting at teachers here.

No, but teachers were snarking at academics ...

I saw this thread on Twitter a few months ago and bookmarked it: https://twitter.com/AnnaMeierPS/status/1617867475898732545.

I'm in my first semester as a lecturer, and while I haven't managed to implement all the suggestions from that thread, I have found some of them really helpful, like the one about having a standard template that you use for each lecture. That has so far saved me getting distracted and messing around with different designs etc each time I design a new lecture.

The other thing I have tried to do is get my lectures 80-90% finished and then do the last 10-20% in the 60 minutes before I am due to lecture. It saves me wasting lots of time earlier on to make everything perfect (see the diminishing returns comment someone made earlier), and it means that I am refreshing my memory of what I want to say at the same time.

Thank you so much for this link.