On Course

A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching

James M. Lang

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780674047419, 9780674028067
• eBook ISBN: 9780674255074
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

You go into teaching with high hopes: to inspire students, to motivate them to learn, to help them love your subject. Then you find yourself facing a crowd of expectant faces on the first day of the first semester, and you think "Now what do I do?"

Practical and lively, On Course is full of experience-tested, research-based advice for graduate students and new teaching faculty. It provides a range of innovative and traditional strategies that work well without requiring extensive preparation or long grading sessions when you're trying to meet your own demanding research and service requirements. What do you put on the syllabus? How do you balance lectures with group assignments or discussions—and how do you get a dialogue going when the students won't participate? What grading system is fairest and most efficient for your class? Should you post lecture notes on a website? How do you prevent cheating, and what do you do if it occurs? How can you help the student with serious personal problems without becoming overly involved? And what do you do about the student who won't turn off his cell phone?

Packed with anecdotes and concrete suggestions, this book will keep both inexperienced and veteran teachers on course as they navigate the calms and storms of classroom life.

WEEK 1

First Days of Class

I walked into my very first college course as a teacher three weeks before my twenty-second birthday, in late August of 1991, the first week of my first year of graduate school. It was English composition, 8:30 a.m., and I had seven students enrolled. Concerned about the fact that I was probably only three years older than the students I would find in the class, I decided to forget about trying to impress them with my authority, and to try instead to seem like one of them—so I was wearing sandals, a pair of navy-blue khakis that I had cut raggedly into shorts, and a white T-shirt. I was nervous, so I kept it short. I gave them the syllabus and the first assignment sheet for the course, read through both documents, and then let the students go.

I’m willing to shoulder only part of the blame for all of the bad decisions I’ve just described (if you think you can identify all of them, put your name and address on a postcard, send it to me, and you’ll be eligible for a drawing for a free lunch). Like the other new graduate student instructors that year, I had spent a day or two at a teaching orientation sponsored by the university, and I was enrolled in a graduate course called “Teaching Writing” that would meet weekly throughout the semester (though it hadn’t met yet). Despite these kindly (but flimsy) efforts by the university, I was massively underprepared for a very complex task—helping eighteen-year-old students learn to read, think, and write well enough to prepare them for success in college and life beyond.

My lack-of-training story is a familiar one in academic autobiographies, as Elaine Showalter points out in Teaching Literature (4–9), common to most of us who have been teaching for a half-dozen to a dozen years or more now. But times have changed, and few teachers will enter their first classroom with such a tiny amount of advance help and advice. Your commitment to reading this book, if you do nothing else, still puts you ahead of where I was on that first day. But more likely than not, you have already taken a graduate course on teaching, or you have spent time serving as a teaching assistant, or you have been through a more extensive orientation or training program than the one I experienced.

However much of this you have under your belt, I can promise you this: you will be nervous, and you will be glad when that first class is over. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—nervousness produces an energy that you can channel into your opening day presentation, and no nerves whatsoever would probably mean that you aren’t taking the job seriously enough. Showalter cites a colleague who offers an excellent description of this dynamic: “Of course you are scared of going into a classroom and performing in public. Who isn’t? But that’s where your energy will come from. Reinterpret your reluctance to perform as a desire to perform” (17). So accept the fact that you will be nervous, prepare for it if nerves produce physical symptoms for you—for instance, have a bottle of water for dehydration, or a handkerchief for sweaty palms—and rest assured that once you get into the room, that first class will fly by.

But while you’re eagerly anticipating that opening day, you need to consider a handful of issues, and plan your course of action for that first day. I’ll address below a few decisions you’ll need to make before you step into the classroom, and then consider your pedagogical options for the first day of the semester.

What (Not) to Wear

Let’s begin very specifically: don’t wear navy-blue khaki cutoffs, sandals, and a white T-shirt. Moving to a more general level, don’t wear the kinds of casual or unkempt outfits that you believe the students will think are cool, for two main reasons: you’re not a student, and in any case you’re probably wrong about what the students will think is cool.

The question of the kind of relationship you want to forge with your students, and what kind of teaching persona you want to construct, is a complex one. I will address it more fully in Chapter 15. But I will anticipate the ending here and say that the one relationship you should not imagine yourself having with your students is that of a friend or peer. However close you are to your student days yourself, you are now in a position of authority over the students in your class. You should certainly want them to feel comfortable with you, and to speak to you openly and honestly about their ideas and their lives, but keep in mind that you have control over their grades, and those grades, rightly or wrongly, can impact their lives in all kinds of significant ways—determining whether or not they maintain scholarships, are accepted into graduate or professional schools, and are offered the jobs they want. Trying to assume the role of a friend in their lives—either by your dress, or your interactions with them outside of the classroom, or your correspondence with them—is a disingenuous pose that obfuscates the nature of the real authority you have in their academic lives.

So, what should you wear? Styles change, and I don’t follow fashion trends very closely, so I won’t be too specific here. But wear attire that seems professional, and that helps to establish a boundary between you and the students (who will all mostly be wearing shorts, jeans, and various articles from Abercrombie and Fitch). Men will always be safe wearing long pants and a shirt with a collar; women can of course be safe wearing the same thing, though women will have more varied options for boundary-establishing dress. A great resource for the more complicated world of women’s fashion in higher education is Emily Toth’s Ms. Mentor guide, listed in the reference section of this chapter (you can also find some of her fashion advice online in the free archives of her column for The Chronicle of Higher Education).

But don’t obsess about it. If you’re really flummoxed about what to wear, then throw on the outfit you wore when you interviewed for the teaching position you now have, and for the first day or two of classes just see what everyone else is wearing.

Follow suit.

Free Day or Full Day?

Mistake number two, on my legendary opening day, was doing twenty minutes of syllabus reading and letting the students go early. Unfortunately, you will find that some of your colleagues treat the first day of class as a half-day, the only purpose of which is to pass out the syllabus and take questions (and there are almost never any questions). I see little harm in making a slight concession to this custom, and letting the class out five or ten or fifteen minutes early (depending upon the length of the session), but to offer no substantive pedagogy on the first day of the course is a mistake.

Much of what we do in the classroom has symbolic value on top of whatever face value it might have. So lecturing for an entire semester without allowing students any opportunity to speak sends the message that you have no interest in what they have to say; dressing in khaki cutoffs sends (or tries to send) the message that you’re no different from the students; leaving your cell phone in view on your desk during class signals that cell phones are acceptable in class.

Opening the semester by introducing the students to the course topic or material in a substantive way sends the message that you are excited and eager to help the students learn in this course, and that the time they invest in coming to class matters. Not engaging with the course topic or material on the first day, by contrast, sends a message that the course meetings are a requirement that you both would rather not fulfill: you’ll meet when you have to, but at every opportunity to cut things short (first and last days, or days before a break), you’re as eager to avoid seeing them as they are to avoid seeing you.

Engaging with the course material on the first day does not mean delivering a full lecture—that seems to me as poor an idea as ending class early. Indeed, a research study by Perlman and McCann on teaching strategies that were most and least effective on the first day of class, published in the journal Teaching of Psychology, suggests that delivering a full session’s worth of information on the first day proved counterproductive for many students, and turned them off to the course (278). Remember that students are usually beginning five new courses this first week, so offering too much information on that first day may prove a waste of time, since the students may be too overwhelmed to absorb it. Still, even within the limits of a (slightly) shortened class, you can easily make use of a few simple but substantive teaching techniques to introduce the course, pique the students’ interest, and start the semester off right.

Adding and Dropping

Experienced faculty might reject the argument above for a reason that you will quickly become familiar with yourself—namely, that the first week of classes at most colleges and universities is add/drop week, meaning that students have the opportunity to make changes to their schedule through the first week of the semester, adding courses that might have opened up over break and dropping courses that no longer fit in their schedule. Some schools have developed a culture which views the first week almost as an opportunity for students to window-shop in various courses, visiting multiple classes which might be competing for the same slot in their schedule, and eventually picking the one with the best professor, or the right workload, or even just the most convenient times and days. Since a sizable percentage of students who attend the first day might not be here in a week, faculty members might wonder, why spend a lot of time planning for that first day?

Add/drop week is a necessary evil, since students will always have to deal with possible last-minute schedule changes in extracurricular activities, work commitments outside of school, internships, or other obligations. But reducing the first day of the semester to the equivalent of sticking your syllabus in the shop window, hoping to attract customers, helps to make this necessary evil into a regular feature of the campus culture. Although it may seem to stretch on endlessly to you now, the fifteen weeks of the semester will fly by, and you’ll find yourself struggling to accomplish all of the objectives you set for yourself in your syllabus. Don’t sacrifice course time lightly; make the first day an important part of your course.

What should you do about adding and dropping students? You don’t have to do anything about students who drop, of course, except be grateful about the fact that you now have one less set of exams or papers to grade this semester.

Adding students presents a bit more of a challenge. In every class that follows the first one in add/drop week, make a quick announcement at the beginning of class that students who did not attend on the first day should stop and see you after the class. Hand them a syllabus, ask them to review it and e-mail questions to you or bring them to the next class, and—most important—explain that they bear the full responsibility for material or assignments that were covered on days they have missed. If they can get that information from a fellow student, fine; if not, point out your office hours and ask them to come and see you so that you can review for them what they have missed. Because you will be sure to have a student or two in this situation, you might consider making your opening-day lecture or exercise available in paper form, or posting it to the course website, so that you can save yourself some time that first week by sending them away from their visit to your office with a handout or worksheet or a website address.

What to Do: Teaching the First Class

Whatever you decide to do on the first day, you should ensure that you cover three bases: present the syllabus to the students; introduce the course topic and/or some initial material; and require at least some students to participate.

This last point may be the most important one. Determining how students can participate in the course, and can make their voices heard in and outside of the classroom, should factor into every decision you make in your pedagogy, including decisions you make about the first day of the semester.

Symbolism plays a role here as well. Inviting—and perhaps requiring—students to participate in the first class of the semester sends the signal that students in this course will not be able to sit back and coast through the semester. They are expected to be in class, to be prepared, and to participate in every session. Here are a few specific techniques that can help you accomplish these objectives for your first day of the semester.

SYLLABUS REVIEW

For most classes I have taught, this part of the first day has consisted of my standing in front of the classroom and reading the syllabus aloud, which I have traditionally done for two reasons. The first one might be construed as vaguely legalistic: I want to be sure that everyone has heard the student responsibilities in the course and the policies on academic honesty, so that when I have to deal with problems in these areas, no student can claim ignorance of them. The second reason is that the reading-aloud exercise allows me to elaborate on various aspects of the syllabus that are worth noting, and might be skipped over if the students are just skimming through it to check for the workload and due dates.

Reading the syllabus aloud will certainly suffice to introduce them to the course, and I don’t see anything wrong with it—as long as you are engaging the students more actively during some other segment of that first day. But, truth be told, both you and they will probably find it among the most boring moments of the semester; imagine if your department chair gave you the faculty policy document, and then sat across from you at a table and read it out loud to you. How boring and annoying would that be?

When I wrote a column for The Chronicle of Higher Education in the fall of 2006 about the boredom of the syllabus read-aloud, I received many e-mails from faculty members who had devised more interesting ways of introducing the students to the syllabus. The best idea came from Michael Gennert, a computer scientist who described his opening class in this way:

I usually hand out a course description sheet that includes what the course covers, the required background, instructor and TA office hours, labs, homework and project expectations, exam dates, grading policy, and honesty policy. Then I tell students to find a partner—and wait for them to do so, because someone is going to want to be a loner—and ask them to work together to find 3 questions they want to know about the course that aren’t on the sheet. Then I ask for, and try to answer, their questions. (Lang, C1)

The benefits, Gennert explains, are multiple: “They’re awake, working collaboratively, taking responsibility for asking something, talking to each other and me, and engaged.” All these qualities, of course, are ones you want to see in students throughout the semester, and Gennert’s technique does an excellent job, it seems to me, of establishing the culture of participation that you should work for in your course, and begin with on your first day. I would suggest only one small modification to this technique—namely, that the students can ask three questions either about what’s not on the syllabus, or about what is on the syllabus. Although we might imagine our syllabus prose to be crystal-clear and in no need of elaboration or explanation, our students might not see it the same way.

ICE-BREAKERS

You’ve probably participated in ice-breakers at some point in your life—activities at the beginning of a group meeting or process which are designed to help the participants get to know one another, and feel comfortable with the group. This is an admirable goal, and certainly one you’ll want to achieve somehow in your course, but I’ll be honest here and advise that ice-breakers which are not tightly tied to the content of the course should be avoided, for two reasons: they can remind students of the kinds of activities that they hoped they left behind in their grade-school and high-school classrooms; and the students are being ice-breakered to death, I can assure you, in the orientations they are undergoing in the other parts of their campus lives—for the freshman class, for their dorms or floors, for their clubs and teams, and so on.

If you’re really an ice-breaker kind of person, and you participated in an ice-breaker that changed your...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Before The Beginning: The Syllabus
• Week 1 First Days of Class
• Week 2 Teaching with Technology
• Week 3 In the Classroom: Lectures
• Week 4 In the Classroom: Discussions
• Week 5 In the Classroom: Teaching with Small Groups
• Week 6 Assignments and Grading
• Week 7 Students as Learners
• Week 8 Students as People
• Week 9 Academic Honesty
• Week 10 Finding a Balance Outside the Classroom
• Week 11 Re-Energizing the Classroom
• Week 12 Common Problems
• Week 13 Student Ratings and Evaluations
• Week 14 Last Days of Class
• Week 15 Teachers as People
• After The End: Top Ten Resources
• Appendix A: A Sample Syllabus
• Appendix B: Student Participation Evaluation Form
• Index