So far in our mini-series of tips for teaching outside of your area of expertise we’ve learned how to design the course and how to establish credibility in the classroom. In this final post of the series, Therese Huston offers some guidance on managing your time. Huston is the founding Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Seattle University, and author of Teaching What You Don’t Know.
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Perhaps classes begin for you in the next couple of weeks. Or perhaps you’re one of the lucky ones who won’t be welcoming students until after Labor Day. Either way, if you’re teaching a course on unfamiliar material, you might be asking yourself “How will I manage my time?” Or more accurately, “Will I have a life and will I sleep?”
Yes, you will undoubtedly get some sleep, but you’ll get much more of it if you have a system. Teaching new material is a ton of work. There’s no escaping that reality and everyone I’ve interviewed about it agreed on that one point.
But the faculty who found the workload more manageable had several things in common. One important distinction they shared was a shift in their teaching philosophy—these professors did not view their role in the classroom as that of a knowledge dispenser. They described their roles in many ways; some of them focused on teaching students how to formulate good questions, others said “My role is to show them to think like a chemist | historian | etc.”
In contrast, the faculty who felt the most strained and consumed by the experience basically described themselves as knowledge dispensers, or, as I like to think of them affectionately, “knowledge gumball machines.” In their view, when students ask the instructor a question, a perfectly formed piece of knowledge should come rolling out, preferably in a pleasing color. When faculty hold themselves to that standard in an unfamiliar course on an unfamiliar topic, class prep becomes a nightmare.
So the first step towards managing your time is to reconsider your role in the classroom and make sure it’s realistic.
The next step is to have a system for preparing for class, and the system I recommend is called backward design. It’s an approach that’s well documented in the literature, so here I’ll just explain a modified version, streamlined so that you can use it for every class.
Step 1: Writing Three Questions
When you sit down to prepare for each class, ask yourself “What are the three questions I want students to be able to answer by the end of class?” They can be really broad questions such as “Why was the Vietnam War important?” or they can be more focused questions such as “Why did Johnson escalate the war in 1963?” Depending on your learning goals, they can be questions that require recall or they can be questions that require complex reasoning. Commit to three questions for a given class period. (You might want four questions if your class is unusually long, but three is a manageable number that’s easy for students to remember.)
You’re going to use these questions to shape your class prep time. As we saw in last week’s post it’s still important that you read everything that you’ve assigned, but with the three question approach you don’t have to acquire depth on every single topic in the reading. Your three questions tell you where you need depth, and they focus any additional research you need to do. Your questions also provide the three main pillars around which you can organize your lecture or discussion.
Step 2: Picking the Learning Experiences
Once you’ve got your questions, ask yourself “What in-class learning experiences will equip students to answer those questions?” If students should be able to evaluate why the Vietnam War was important, what are your options? You could tell them why scholars think the war was important, students could debate the political, social, and economic consequences of the war, or together you could compare and contrast what might have happened if the U.S. hadn’t gotten involved, just to name a few.
The three questions prompt you to make better choices about how to spend your time in class, and they shift the focus to what the students should be doing. My observation has been that when instructors are scrambling to learn the material themselves, they can lose sight of the fact that it’s students’ learning that should be the focus, not their own.
Step 3: Share the Questions
When you get to class, share your three questions with the students. I usually list mine on the side of the board for easy reference and explain, “By the end of today’s class, you should be able to answer these three questions.” The beauty of this approach is that you’ve just directed their questions to the material you’ve prepared. Because they now share your priorities for the day, they are more likely to ask questions that you can answer and less likely to surprise you with things from left field.
Some faculty ask “Should students actually answer these three questions in class?” That’s really up to you. The key here is that building individual classes around three questions helps to organize your thinking and keep your prep time focused and manageable. All too often we fling ourselves at a new topic, learning fifteen things we will actually use in class and fifty things we won’t. That works if you have all the time in the world, but not if you still want some sleep.
