New to College Teaching Starter

need to know to be successful. to be to know need Everything new instructors Starter Kit Teaching College New to THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION STARTER KIT NEW TO COLLEGE TEACHING CHRONICLE.COM Starter Kit New to College Teaching For those new to college teaching, entering the classroom for the first time can be intimidating. Whether you are fresh from a Ph.D. program or transitioning into a new ca- reer as an university instructor, teaching presents a variety of challenges: How to connect with your students? How to make a big lecture feel personal? How can technology help — or hurt — in the classroom? Chronicle editors searched our archive for the best articles and opinion essays to answer those questions. This collection includes analysis of teaching trends and tips from experi- enced professors, both those who love to teach and some who don’t. For those just stepping into the role of college instructor, we hope this is an invaluable guide. The Personal The 4 Properties of The Messages to 4 Lecture 9 Powerful Teachers 11 Send on the First Day of Class The Absolute Worst Small Changes in All the Classroom’s 12 Way to Start the 14 Teaching: The First 17 a Stage Semester Five Minutes of Class Rethinking Could Grades Be A New Generation of 19 the Exam 21 Counterproductive? 23 Digital Distraction Playing With Knowing When to Teaching the Art 26 Technology 28 Teach Current Events 30 of the Difficult Conversation I Don’t Like What Professors Can 32 Teaching. 34 Learn About Teaching There, I Said It. From Their Students the chronicle of higher education | NEW TO COLLEGE TEACHING The Personal Lecture How to Make Big Classes Feel Small By KATHERINE MANGAN Cynthia LaBrake, a lecturer in chemistry at the U. of Texas, often has her 400 students break into small discussion groups. Her 1970s-era classroom, which is scheduled for an overhaul next year, has desks bolted into the floor, posing a challenge. “We crawl over the space to reach them,” she says. “It’s not ideal, but we make it work.” ILANA PANICH-LINSMAN FOR THE CHRONICLE AUSTIN, TEX. ntroduction to Psychology is about to begin. A student in the front row of the studio audience cues her 23 classmates to give her professors a rousing cheer. Cameras are rolling as the rest of the class — all 910 of them — tune in from their dorm rooms, coffee shops, and study rooms at the University of Texas flagship campus. Over the next 75 minutes, they’ll watch a “weather report” that Imaps personal stereotypes by regions of the country (red zones splashed across parts of the Northeast mark areas of high neuroticism), and listen to an expert flown in from Stanford University discuss what someone’s Face- book “likes” reveal about her personality. 4 TOC» the chronicle of higher education | NEW TO COLLEGE TEACHING They’ll participate in a lab exercise massive open online class, he says. More lecturer of civil, architectural, and envi- that matches students from the studio than 20 faculty members are now offer- ronmental engineering who directs the audience with their taste in music and ing SMOCs. center. groan when the burly guy who looks like “We want faculty to appreciate that Sareena Contractor, a freshman who a country music fan actually favors Lady our students are using online technol- is enrolled in the psychology class, says Gaga. They’ll take a pop quiz and watch ogies most of the day,” he says. “That’s the pop quizzes and interactive exercises a video clip of their professor snooping part of who they are.” keep her focused, even when she’s work- around someone’s office for keys to his Mr. Pennebaker is leading a university- ing from home and surrounded by dis- personality. wide effort, Project 2021, to redesign un- tractions. “I thought it was going to be Welcome to a version of the giant in- dergraduate courses at UT-Austin. like watching a TV show and I’d be get- tro class that’s almost guaranteed to keep Part of the project’s goal is to get in- ting up and doing stuff,” she says. “They students awake. structors to rethink the traditional large keep you engaged.” For generations, students have com- lecture course with its emphasis on a sin- The start-up costs of setting up a stu- plained about feeling like nameless specks gle wise professor holding court in front dio like the one at Texas could run be- in a cavernous lecture hall. Faculty mem- of hundreds of students. Lectures can be tween $750,000 and $1 million, accord- bers often dread a sea of blank faces, or effective teaching tools, says Mr. Pen- ing to university officials., Once in place, worse yet, those absorbed by online shop- nebaker, but their impact is sometimes the classes cost about the same to run as ping or video games. overrated. other large classes, Mr. Pennebaker says. As budget cuts intensify pressure to “Faculty members are often bamboo- The psychology class is being rerun in pack more students into these class- the spring to another 1,000 students es, universities are experimenting with and to several hundred more in the ways to liven them up. The approach- summer. The same studio space broad- es can be high-tech, like the webcast “Anyone who’s been casts to some 8,000 to 12,000 students psychology class, or they can be more who are enrolled in about a dozen other rudimentary, like breaking big class- to a good lecture courses throughout the semester. es into small brainstorming groups or Not all the solutions to the imper- interspersing lectures with snippets knows how you can sonal lecture are as tech-heavy as the about students’ backgrounds gleaned psychology class. Cynthia LaBrake, from surveys. Regardless, the goals are be carried along by a a senior lecturer in chemistry at Tex- similar: Make classes feel smaller and as, has her 400 students break into more personal. gifted lecturer as they groups of two to four to work on prob- Given economic pressures, “the lems while a dozen undergraduate and large classroom is not going away,” says unspool a story and graduate teaching and learning assis- Kathryne McConnell, senior direc- tants circulate through the room. Her tor for research and assessment at the interpret it for 1970s-era classroom, which is sched- Association of American Colleges & uled for an overhaul next year, has Universities. “You can look at it from the class.” small desks bolted into the floor, mak- a deficit perspective and say, Here’s ing group work a challenge. “We crawl everything that’s wrong with it. But over the space to reach them,” she says. what if we flip that and look at what “It’s not ideal, but we make it work.” the scope and scale of this class could At the University of California at allow us to do?” zled into thinking that students are going Berkeley, Martha L. Olney, an adjunct Three years ago, two professors of psy- to remember all these pearls of wisdom professor of economics, uses a similar chology, James W. Pennebaker and Sam- we’ve tossed at them,” he says. approach in some of her courses. She uel D. Gosling team-taught what they Because the program just began in Jan- breaks classes of 150 students into groups termed the first “synchronous massive uary, it’s too soon to measure success, but of three or four to discuss portions of her online course,” or SMOC, the precursor the factors administrators will look at in- lecture — a technique she says takes get- of the introductory psychology class Mr. clude the number of departments rede- ting used to. “If you’re going to have 50 Gosling now teaches with Paige Harden, signing their curricula, the changes that conversations going on at the same time,” an associate professor of psychology. result in higher grades in subsequent Ms. Olney says, “you have to be very courses, and increases or decreases in comfortable with noise.” hese intro classes, with their short, students’ satisfaction with the quality of For larger classes, like her principles snappy segments, may be bigger, their education. of economics class that typically enrolls TMr. Pennebaker says, “but they’re Much of the experimentation taking more than 700 students, she manages to psychologically smaller.” place at Texas is coordinated through its incorporate active learning, even if it’s Teaching a small class of students Faculty Innovation Center. just using hand-held clickers to quiz stu- while simultaneously beaming in hun- “The problem with lectures of over 50 dents and be sure they understand the dreds of others gives the classroom a has been that it’s hard to know how stu- material. more dynamic and personal feeling than dents are doing and very difficult to have That way, she says, students are get- students would get from a MOOC, or a discussion,” says Hillary Hart, a senior ting feedback a half-dozen times a day, 5 TOC» 5 Ways to Shake Up the Lecture Transforming a large lecture class into a more personal, engaging experience doesn’t have to involve high-tech gadgets and a team of production assistants. Plenty of other strategies work. Here are a few of the approaches that have gained traction. Flipped Class ronment with Upside-down Pedago- ing undergraduate students who have Instructors seem to either love or gies. done well in a class to help out for loathe this approach, which revers- The Massachusetts Institute of class credit or pay. es traditional teaching by giving stu- Technology’s version, known as Tech- Having more teaching and learning dents recorded lectures and lessons nology Enabled Active Learning, inter- assistants allows instructors to offer to access in the dorm or at home and sperses 20-minute lectures in physics frequent short quizzes and writing as- using class time for hands-on assign- with discussion questions, anima- signments.

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