I. Preparing a Course

Planning for Instruction

Before attacking the details of book ordering, scheduling, syllabus design, or equipment reservation, you need to delineate the philosophy behind your course. Begin with these questions and directions:

• What do you expect students to learn? What concepts and skills will they acquire or extend? How will they better understand relationships among concepts? You must define the course focus and the type of learning you intend in order to select and sequence the content, reading, assignments, and evaluation instruments.
  
  
• How will you correlate what you expect students to learn with assignments and evaluations of their work? If you want students to think critically, for instance, you need to demonstrate critical thinking in your lectures and class discussions, show them the types of thinking necessary to read, comment, and write successfully in your course, and evaluate their ability to demonstrate critical thinking.
  
  
• What knowledge and skills are prerequisite to success in your course? If students enter your course with a preparation different from the one you expect, neither you nor they can gain much. First, define your expectations, preferably in writing. During the first week of the course, spend a few minutes evaluating students’ current knowledge (see also “The First Day of Class”). Here are a few pertinent classroom assessment activities (Angelo and Cross, 1993):
  
  
  • Ask students to write a short paragraph, including their questions, about your subject matter.
  • Have them list relevant courses previously taken (be sure you know the content and objectives of prerequisite courses).
  • Give a short quiz on both information they should already know and facts they should learn in your course.
    
    
  What you learn from these activities will suggest whether you need to schedule a few introductory lectures or include a good introduction to assigned readings.
  
  
• How will you know whether students are learning throughout the course? Plan regular assessments of students’ progress (see “Evaluating Students’ Work,”
  and “Assessing Students’ Learning”). In addition, listen closely to students’ comments during discussions, talk with students before and after class, and designate some office hours for individual conferences. Just a few minutes’ conversation will tell you whether a student is on the right track.
  
  
• How will you vary your instruction? Novelty is intrinsically motivating. By offering a variety of activities, you interest students more, keep their attention better, and thus improve their learning. See “Typical Teaching Situations” for ideas you can implement,
  whatever your primary methodology.
  
  
• How will your syllabus show students the focus of your course and indicate how all assignments are connected to that focus? Students are more likely to realize their potential in a course for which they have a clear map. If they know your goals, they can compare their goals to yours. Share your expectations explicitly through your syllabus and course introduction.

After determining your course focus, consider the following practical questions (with the help of an experienced instructor if you are teaching the course for the first time):

• How many students should you expect? Class size will influence how much in-class time you need to devote to lectures or discussions. The larger the class, too, the fewer papers and other graded assignments you can handle on your own; if you have an especially large class, ask your department to assign you one or more TAs and/or graders. (See below for guidelines on working with TAs and graders.)
  
  
• Is this course for majors and/or minors, or does it attract students from other departments? Your students’ orientation to your discipline will define in great
  measure your expectations about students’ work, the need to explain background material, and the tenor of class discussions. On the positive side, you may find
  discussions taking unexpected—and stimulating—directions as a student from the Architecture School, for example, approaches Shakespeare’s plays or US history
  without the mediating formulae majors have learned to employ.
  
  
• How much work can you reasonably assign for each class? If you are a graduate student yourself or have been recently teaching graduate courses, you may need to review normal undergraduate requirements. Remember that each student carries about 14 to 17 hours of course credit, probably in diverse disciplines. The usual rule of thumb is two hours of study outside of class for every credit hour carried; thus for a threecredit-hour course, you can typically ask students to spend six hours a week studying and completing assignments.
  
  
• How many of your students will never have written a college-level paper? Not all students take the first-year course in academic writing; of those who do only half take it during their first semester. The first-year writing course introduces students to academic writing but does not teach them how to write in all disciplines. You may need to devote class time or a series of individual conferences to explaining the conventions of writing within your discipline.
  
  
• How will you budget your time? Not surprisingly, both TAs and faculty members face complex time management difficulties: simultaneously instructors and scholars, advisors, and administrators (if simply of an exam committee or study group), they split their days into myriad, often disparate activities. Time is in fixed supply, but you can improve the situation by examining how you spend your daily 24 hours and by looking at the demands on your time. For help with time management, see Appendix III.