Preparing a lecture

Well, in this trip of 50% chance wanting to become a professor, I have already been exposed to prepare and give lectures. One of the first things that have pop out is that being a lecturer is completely different than just being the TA for a class. As a lecturer you are the responsible for what happens in class, whereas as a TA you are just a facilitator for learning. This means that as a lecturer you have the freedom (= responsibility) to select the topics and the way that these are delivered but as a TA you are perceived as that amazing tool that connects incomprehensible and abstract lectures with meaningful and applicable exercises that keep on the flame of learning.

Therefore, one of my first dreams as a lecturer was to make my classes more approachable to my students, given that I had the freedom to choose what to teach and I had a great experience and reviews as a TA. Then, I started to prepare my lecture notes, and after hours and hours of staring at my computer, I realized this was not an easy task. I felt even worse when I gave my first lectures and I saw confusion on the faces of my students and an enormous wall of silence in front of any question I designed to motivate the class. Well to be fair enough, I wasn’t even sure if the confusion came from the topic itself, or my strong foreign accent, or a really messy blackboard with chalk of a lot of colors. This was completely different from those TA sections where a bunch of students came to ask question and after some doodling, jokes and debugging, it looked that I solved their life problems for one day.

Teaching requires more than just understanding the concept. You need to present it to people that don’t have the same background, experiences or interests as you. And even more important, they haven’t taken the course in which you learnt the concept (something that you do not need to worry as a TA). Therefore this requires to extract myself of the baseline of my knowledge, to understand why and how anyone else can be interested in what I have to say. In my few experiences I learnt the following:

• Look back to the courses where I learnt the stuff: It makes me think why I did/didn’t like something when it was first presented to me, what I would loved to make different at the time, which material was/wasn’t useful.
• Look where I have used the stuff: to detect the real applications of what I am teaching and how hard was to switch between just getting good grades and using the tools in real life.
• Refer to textbooks/ online courses/ other people that have given similar courses: to have a general idea of why people introduce things in certain way and contrast my knowledge with other sources
• Do not expect to create all of the material out of the sudden. Preparing class takes a lot of time, and it is valid to reuse the material from previous professors.
• Give a class is not only talking. Prepare side material (slides or lecture notes) that your students can follow and keep as a reference.
• Do not expect to be the most amazing professor that changes the life of the students. It is better to care about having an structured class where you feel that as student at least you will not fall asleep.
• Even if there is a wall of silence, continue trying talking to your students. And if you do not get a positive response, do not relate it with the quality of your class.
• I generally understand the concepts from the most general idea and then going slowly down to the details. Therefore it works for me to tell at the beginning the whole picture story and use it as an anchor along the class to show progress and refresh concepts. Also it helps to structure ideas and applications around it.
• Trust in my knowledge and do not be afraid of use my notes during the class. This is not a presentation in my research lab. This is to share ideas. Regardless if the students see me as a master of the topic, I am just there to motivate their learning in certain direction.
• It is important to get input from the students about how they see the class. Nevertheless this is extremely difficult as a lecturer. It looks as if they are afraid of me. Anonymous surveys seem to work better.
• Open room for question during office hours and after class, that also gives a sensing of where the students are.
• Other typical advises: learn the name of my students, give an outlook of the class before starting, have an organized board, give a small abstract of what I talked the previous class to connect it with today’s topic, be clear in my ideas

… and the list continues

Caveat: Of course I am just starting in this teaching path, therefore I do not assume that my ideas are the holy grail of teaching. Even more, I would love to enrich them. But for now, at least it has been a good way to procrastinate while I prepare my next set of lectures.