What to Know Before Your First Time Teaching College
6 Tips for the new educator with no experience
There’s nothing that can really prepare you for teaching, especially when you didn’t have an entire degree program focused on it. You can read all of the articles, study all of your material, and write out little scripts for yourself, and things will still go off-plan. While I’m not the most experienced educator in the world (I have two years of teaching college English on my resume from my time working on my MFA), I learned a thing or two between my own experiences and the experiences of my peers that would likely have been helpful before I started teaching.
My teaching experience ranges between a few levels of composition classes and a creative writing course, as well as a few specialized one-offs in poetry and philosophy specific classes, but from what I’ve gathered, the advice remains the same. If you’re being thrown into your first teaching situation, read on and don’t panic.
1. Even best-made plans will change
Maybe you’re in a lucky position where your entire curriculum was created for you by higher-ups. Amazing. You’re done. No planning! You’ve got lesson plans for an entire term and you’re ready to get rolling.
Except, not really.
There’s no one-size-fits-all method for teaching, especially when you’re working with older students. Even if you have a book of lesson plans mapped out by the minute, you will need to ad-lib some things, make some changes, and adjust for the needs of your class (and yourself!). New teachers might find themselves talking quickly because of nerves (Hello! Me!) or moving through things really slowly because they want to make sure they cover every single thing. You may have to adjust for timing.
You may have to adjust for your own personality. Are you a “lecture all the time” type teacher, or an “activities and group projects” type teacher? I’m the second, so I modified nearly all of the lectures given to me initially, to the point that they no longer existed once I had adapted my lesson plans to my own teaching style.
You may have to adjust for the needs of the students. Maybe the way you’re explaining things, even if it worked great for a different class, isn’t working great for this one. This isn’t necessarily your fault, but there are all kinds of different learners in the world, and you want to make sure that you can reach as many of them as possible. That said…
2. Students are coming from all different backgrounds
Especially in college, and especially in the intro-level classes. You will be working with a diverse group, likely coming from all kinds of educational backgrounds, cultural backgrounds, and life situations. This makes having a strict “stick to the plan” mentality pretty unhelpful. Best laid plans might work for 90% of your students, but leave 9% behind and have 1% extremely bored because they’re so far ahead. You need to be flexible. While this might not be as relevant for the upper-level and specialized classes, it’s still a useful thing to keep in mind.
Teaching, you might come across some students who had a really poor highschool or home education and are pretty far behind. They may be sitting in the same room with people who graduated valedictorian from a well-funded highschool and are far ahead. It’s your job to find a way to teach both of them, and the students in between. No one expects to teach college and have students who can’t construct sentences, or do basic arithmetic, but we all learn at different paces and have different strengths, and as long as these students need your class to complete their degree, you need to help them along.
Now, this can be facilitated with different university learning tools and methods, there’s often some kind of support service offered to students for free at every university, as well as your own office hours, but unfortunately…
3. Don’t expect students to seek out extra help
Especially younger students in their first and second years. Eventually, many of us get the idea that it’s helpful to talk to our professors and seek out extra support when we need it (although, admittedly, I too have refused a Writing Center visit when I likely could have used it). In your first few years of college though, this feels intimidating, or like you’re quitting. Students also may have busy lives outside of class, with full or part-time jobs, families, and extracurricular activities. It can be frustrating when they don’t seek out help that they need, but it is a reality.
You can offer all of the extra credit, all of the class attendance points, you can assign a grade to seeking out a university-provided tutor outside of class; it will still not guarantee that students are going to use it. This means that regardless of how tough it gets, and it will get tough, you are responsible for teaching as much as you are capable of. Make sure you’re present during your office hours and attentive to emails, and try to be as clear as possible in your lessons.
This doesn’t mean that you have to be capable of everything.
4. You should collaborate with other teachers
We all have different strengths and weaknesses, and especially when we’re first getting started teaching, it’s good to utilize your resources. Your best resource is going to be other educators. These might be your peers, who will also need your help. You can help each other plan lessons, or even co-teach from time to time if your university allows it. Do you not know anything about a specific topic but your fellow educator does? Have them plan your lesson, or see if they’re available to guest-teach. All of this should be exchanged fairly, of course.
There are also plenty of resources online. Many teachers at all different levels have blogged about their experience, what has worked for them, and even uploaded lesson plans for other needy teachers. Use these resources. They might not all work for you, but there’s no need at all to reinvent the wheel. Unless you’re working on entirely new concepts, there is going to be something already made that you can tweak for your own needs.
I had to teach the argument for the first time, and the lesson plan I was given just didn’t work. My students were rowdy, but intelligent. They didn’t like the baby argument worksheets provided by the university. They did like a debate-style situation that I set up based on the blogs of several former composition instructors that I likely wouldn’t have tried without reading about its success. I later tweaked it based on the advice of a peer who had done debate in her own undergrad experience. This is using your resources.
5. Don’t expect that students are too old for play
They might think they are. The younger college students might be in the age where they’re struggling with the gap between childhood and adulthood, and they might resist the initial push towards “play as learning”. They’ll also have fun with games, though, even if they choose not to admit it.
There’s evidence to suggest that using games as learning tools allows (and encourages) students to focus longer on the task at hand, because there’s a tangible goal, thus helping them learn more effectively without feeling like they’re actually “learning”. Similarly, depending on the style of game, play allows students to both feel competitive to “win” (learning more) but also feel safe “losing”, or getting things wrong. Games provide a safety net in which students can learn without fear. There’s less stress than graded assignments, and students are likely working collaboratively, helping their adult social skills.
They might roll their eyes and resist games, but they will also get competitive and learn along the way. I’ve had many Jeopardy games that nearly ended in bloodshed from competitive students (kidding — kind of).
6. Finally — give yourself room to make mistakes
No one is good at something when they first start. It’s really easy to get caught up in the stresses of early teaching, feeling like you have to be the perfect educator. Evaluations and sites like “ratemyprofessor” certainly don’t help this problem, and it’s easy to feel inadequate. Just follow your gut, do what feels right, and try to be the best teacher for as many students as possible.
You’re going to make mistakes, but you’re also going to teach some people important things. The first time a student lets you know that you’ve done something important for them is going to feel great. It’s worth the failures.
