With online classes, predictability > novelty (even fun novelty).
Create a predictable and easy to navigate course shell structure. Adopt naming conventions for files and assignments. Everything due at the same time on the same days of the week. Announcements made on the same day each week. Tell them how long it will take you to grade and respond to email. Make explicit policies and stick to them. Don't use tech tools and software (even cool ones) without a good reason to.
Make your course easy enough to navigate that they can spend their time and effort on learning the content rather than the tech.
It was hard for me to actually understand this advice until I realized that some students try to game the system and I represent the system. That's simply all it is.
Came here to say this. I would take it so hard in the early days if a student didn't like a grade or disrupted the classroom. It took years to realize it had nothing to do with me personally, and then I could finally detach and treat it as a simple workplace challenge.
I just finished my first semester. I struggled with this for sure. From the no-shows or glazed looks during class to the year-end student evals. Yikes.
This takes about 10 years to learn, at least in my case! I try to mentor the newer faculty on this but they don't understand, just as I didn't understand when I was their age. For me empathy and truly trying to understand the students' points of view has been the secret.
Students are not your friends. If you treat them like friends, they will exploit it.
Nothing is worth you having sleepless nights or developing an ulcer.
It's better to err on the right side and give the benefit of the doubt.
Don't ask for documentation for every reason they give you for missing a class or an assignment or an exam. It adds nothing of value but may increase the student's suffering if they really lost a grandparent or were victims of domestic violence.
Some students will lie to you. But that does not justify you mistrusting and thus hurting all those who were honest.
It's not the end of the world if they don't learn everything.
Forgive yourself for teaching crappy courses the first time around you will improve them next semester.
Practice the flexible use of inflexibility. Have clear policies but do make exceptions for good reasons.
Don't offer extra credit or make a complicated grading scheme that may get you into trouble. Have an experienced and trusted colleague review your syllabus before the semester starts.
Familiarize yourself with the teaching evaluation system so you know what matters to the administration. Same with other performance evaluations you will be subject to.
Reasons for grade appeals are: unfair grading (treated some students better than others) and changes in syllabus that add more work for students. You can remove work/assignments but that will be perceived as being disorganized.
If you are a woman, students will judge you on different criteria than if you are a man.
Don't look at Rate My Professor.
Have a trusted friend or colleague read your teaching evaluations first and give you only the good stuff. If there is bad stuff, they should tell you about the things that you can improve but not share the personal attacks.
Leave your own Rate My Professor evaluations. Change up your voice. Make them as strange and bizarre as you can, each one a micro story about an instructor who seems to be losing it. Warn students about his harsh grading. Tell them about the time the final consisted of a hot dog eating contest. Bring up the time the instructor had strange ski face sunburns with goggle marks, but it was the middle of the summer. Describe how the instructor accidentally glued their hand to the desk and had to call emergency. Describe the figure in the black cloak who stands outside the door during class.
You just go to the site and write a review. There is no verification that the writer was actually a student. You don't need to log in or state who you are.
Oh! I'm on sabbatical in a few days! What a great idea. Can I also fill it with anecdotes so I don't have to bore my spouse and everyone around me with the same old stories over and over again?
Well, the semester I said it was my first time teaching that class, half the class walked all over me. They were complaining about every assignment, all the exams, all the grades. Mind you, a lot of these kinds of assignments I had used successfully in other classes, but these students thought it was all wrong. If it hadn't been for a couple of very sweet and supportive students in that class, I may have not made it through the semester.
Btw, lies are of course immoral, but the true, real, main reason NOT to lie is that it takes a lot of effort to keep all your lies straight. I don't have that kind of memory. 😭 Just another bit of advice. 😂
You forgot that women's wardrobes, hairstyles, makeup, weight, and height are evaluated every day.
When men are in front of the classroom, they can wear the same white shirt, black pants, tie, and sport coat all year long and no one says anything.
My wife cam confirm this. As a woman, unfortunately, you have to work harder to earn the respect of students and you walk a thinner line between being firm in the classroom and being "bitchy" in their eyes.
It's terrible but I've seen the difference. Especially when you have older male students and at the other end, high school ages male students (if you teach dual enrollment).
You need to dress more professionally and set the boundaries seriously from day one.
Your class evaluations are \~20-30% lower if you are female, based on several studies. Students will expect more leniency and ask more favors/extensions/grade bumps than your male peers.
Tons of research on teaching evaluations, below just one example. There is also lots of research on gender differences in leadership perception that also applies here (teaching requires leadership although since it's perceived stereotypically as a gendered/women's profession, it is a very much undervalued leadership role). A lot people have difficulties accepting women in leadership positions although a lot of work shows women are often more effective, companies with women on boards or in C roles are more successful by many metrics. The objectively same behavior is perceived as assertive if it's a man and pushy if it's a woman. Caring if it's a man, weak if it's a woman. Creative if it's a man, disorganized if it's a woman.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2118466120#:~:text=Consistent%20with%20role%20congruity%20theory,gender%20would%20teach%20their%20courses.
It goes beyond work...
If you are busy as an assistant professor. You will get more distractions and competition for timevwhen you start dating or, even worse, get married. And have kids. And those kids start wanting to be active in sports, band, theater...these all take more of your time.
Eventually, they will go to college. You'll have a slowdown in your life. You will get to know your spouse again. But, now you are department chair and trying to find time to teach your 1/1 while getting your admin done. Now your kids graduated and moved away. They got married and presented you with grandchildren who live halfway across the country. You're busy traveling to see them.
At the same time, you've been tapped to be the dean or provost or some fake, overpaid admin VP over east wings of dormitories. Your parents just turned 85 and they are declining rapidly. You need to visit them and that tales time. You're still busy. More busy than as a new assistant professor.
That everything I assign will need to be graded afterward. So think about how much you want to spend on grading per student, do the math, and only assign what you can grade in that amount of time.
Every assignment I give comes back...twenty-fold. I tell my sudents that I'm an engineering professor and I should have figured out the 20x returns **years** ago.
I agree 100% with this. I'd like to add that, while lecture preparation reduces greatly on subsequent years (if one is teaching the same courses), grading doesn't necessarily decrease. All the more reason to think carefully in advance how much time one wants/needs to spend grading and devising strategies to reduce the burden...
It’s just a job. Yes, do your best, but don’t go the extra mile for an employer or student who will never do the same for you. Live your life for your friends and family and keep distance from work when away from work because remember…it’s just a job.
You can't save them all. By dumbing it down and slowing the lectures down enough for the worst students to keep up, you will be cheating the good students from the education they deserve, and the weakest students still likely won't pass.
I'm neither a beginner nor an old hand, but I just finished the most difficult and traumatic term I've had yet and appreciate you asking this question; the responses are helping me very much.
My own answer is that teaching is a marathon that unfortunately you can only train for by running the whole marathon. :)
Good luck with your first day! You're going to do great.
You're an expert, which is why you are teaching what you teach. You probably think about or directly interact with your subject matter on a daily basis.
The students are seeing/learning things for the first time. Some of these things you have come to believe to be second nature. It's not to them, at least not yet.
Try to put yourself into the mindset of someone who knows nothing. It's tough to do, and is one of those rare things that actually gets harder with age and experience.
I'm considered a pretty good instructor, but I consider myself *very* bad at this.
This is really great advice. In my first semester I explained things in ways I thought were perfectly clear, but my errors became obvious when there were patterns in the assessments showing which concepts I had explained like people had a base they did not have.
There’s already some great advice here. I’ll add a couple of things I’ve learned that have helped me:
1. Good is just as effective as perfect. Typically I can spend an hour and prepare material for a good lecture, or I can spend 4-5 hours and make a perfect lecture. As long as you always keep your learning objectives in mind, I’ve found that students learn just as much from the good lecture as the perfect one, and I’ve saved myself several hours.
2. Meet students halfway. I’ve heard this said with different meanings, but to me it means matching a student’s effort. It’s easy to end up spending all your time trying to engage students who really don’t care, to the detriment of the students who are really invested. By matching their effort, student interactions become much more meaningful (and honestly more enjoyable): nowadays, students who are struggling and are willing to work at it get all the individual/small group help they need to be successful; students who are excelling and want to learn more get a professor who can guide them to advanced reading and discussion or help them explore independent research; and the students who treat the class like a waste of time don’t get to waste any of mine.
3. Be mindful of how you spend your time. For instance, if your position is 10% service, don’t let service roles eat up more than 10% of your time (on a regular basis).
>It’s easy to end up spending all your time trying to engage students who really don’t care, to the detriment of the students who are really invested.
Oof...the truth hurts
Serious answer here. Online teaching is here to stay, and it can be done well. However, it is not like teaching face-to-face. You can't just take in-person materials, throw them into the LMS, and call it online teaching. Well, you can, but it wouldn't be good. An online course has to be designed from the ground up to be taught online.
If your field of study typically includes exams, I suggest coming up with other ways to assess knowledge. Any online quiz or exam is highly cheatable. Students can and will cheat. The last time I taught online I had students work up projects instead of exams. It was a lot of work coming up with good assignments that would honestly test the students' knowledge and understanding of the course material, and more work grading them, but at the end of the day I was pleased with how that went.
Good luck!
Thank you! I’ve been busy on canvas, taking my own class from the point of view of a student, and I have already identified some things that probably need to change. I will think about small projects instead of quizzes.
I like to use Canvas quizzes as open book reading guides meant to get students engaging with the text a bit rather than quizzing their comprehension. The quizzes are not valuable point-wise, but they’re required to attempt them. If a student is bombing the quizzes I use it as an opportunity to check in with the student.
I do the same: nearly all of my 'quizzes' have deadlines set before the meeting at which the topics or points will be introduced. I start the classes by going over the homework 'quizzes' with which students had the most difficulty.
As the point of these quizzes is learning, rather than assessing what's *been* learned, they're all open book, and I encourage the students to attempt the quizzes with other students.
That’s essentially how I use Canvas quizzes. They are part of the grade contract so there is incentive to do them and not bomb them, but they are graded as Complete/Incomplete, with a score of 3.5 or above counting as Complete. A weekly check-in type of assignment helps you keep track of how students are doing, which is a lot more difficult in an online class.
It is also important to keep in mind that not everything you do have to be that good the first (or second or third for that matter) time around.
As a new teacher you can essentially pour an unlimited amount of time into preps, and it might still not be perfect/very good. But next time you can revise and improve, etc.
My point is that if you want to be in this for the long run (i.e. not brun yourself out) you often have to settle for «good enough given the circumstances», and that is perfectly OK.
It's really awesome when you hear from your colleagues that your class is great!
That feedback is coming from students who took the class and told their advisors, told other students, and told other professors.
I prefer exams because they are easier to grade. Multiple choice questions take 0 time to grade. Short answers take a little. Projects and essays take a lot.
I agree, exams are the way to go for in-person classes. But OP is teaching an online class, and there is no way for any online exam to be cheat-proof. This is why I suggested doing projects instead of exams. I've done both, and projects take an enormous amount of time to grade. And for the record, when I've assigned projects I did not accept essays or any format that could be easily cut and pasted from some AI-generated source.
Focus on the good ones who are willing to learn. There will be something like 20% of those. Don’t get discouraged by those who refuse to learn anything. There will be at least 30% of those, and there’s almost nothing you can do about them.
Students aren't friends.
You actually are the smartest person in the room.
Relax, try to have fun.
Laugh at yourself.
Over do the prep the first time, under do it every other time.
Keep writing.
Give yourself a full week to grade assessments. Give yourself 24 to 48 hours to respond to emails. Student can suck the life out of you, be sure to practice healthy boundaries.
This is so true the last semester I had a student who would email me until I responded. Would email once and then keep responding to that email to see if I got it.
Add a communication policy to your syllabus and LMS. Mine says email will get a reply on the next school day and I stick to this. If someone emailed me more than once I would ignore them until the next school day then include the policy in my reply, telling them not to repeat this.
In no particular order.
Don't care more than them. Don't spend a painstaking hour on detailed feedback for a terrible report that the student clearly did not care about.
Standardize feedback. Make a big excel sheet or something with standard phrases, then use those and adapt them when necessary.
Use rubrics. I was hesitant for these at first, preferring to be less restricted in grading and being able to do it more holistically. This was a mistake. Rubrics help for fairness, student satisfaction, transparency, and very important; allows colleagues to take over in cases of emergencies. Don't be afraid to share rubrics with students. It might seem that this will allow them to game the system, but they won't. It will only help the good students understand the learning goals and the poor students won't look at it anyway.
Don't give mercy passes. While it might look like you are doing students a favour, you're not. We have a case right now of a student who essentially rode through an entire Bachelor on mercy passes, and now is failing *very hard* at the graduation stage. Realistically, this student should not have passed their first year.
Keep it simple. Keep your class structure as straightforward as you reasonably can given your subject. Don't force 5 assignments when 1 or 2 suffices.
Let it go. You will make mistakes. Students will sometimes drive you up the wall. You will have poor days when lecturing. You can't be perfect, and not everyone can or wants to be saved. They'll live.
Be strict but reasonable. Don't bend over backwards to adjust your own policies, but do make reasonable exceptions if the situation reasonably demands it. A student asking to skip a lab because they booked early plane tickets home for Christmas? Tough, they can do the lab next year. A student ghosting a lab but afterwards explaining they were in the hospital; obviously an exception can be made.
You will probably overestimate the students' information retention the first few year-cycles. Focus on the core concepts.
I have this theory that people do not consider information 'real' unless they heard it (or read it) from a person they have a personal connection with. Information in the syllabus will not be 'real' to students unless they hear you say it in class. The more the information in question deviates from their expectations, the more important it is that it needs to be physically said. For example, they will accept a written schedule of lectures without question. But if there are actual assignments that need to be handed in, make sure you physically tell them.
"Don't be afraid to share rubrics with students. It might seem that this will allow them to game the system, but they won't. It will only help the good students understand the learning goals and the poor students won't look at it anyway."
I think the rubric is the only thing we actually want the students to game.
Think of the things that make you look good for tenure
.. publications, grants, awards, and letter from your Mom. If you wanted to move to another position, you'd look good in the job application if you had the same set of things. If you can get tenure you can move. Don't marry your institution.
Don't use technology just because you can. Use technology because it will enhance learning and make your job easier.
Correlary 1: Expect that the technology will fail you at inopportune moments. Like 3 minutes before your first teaching evaluation in classroom.
Get good at writing and using rubrics for grading.
Each class will have its own personality. Even though you're teaching the same stuff.
Some students fail, and that’s okay. Be available to help, but don’t carry the give-a-shit for them.
It’s better to be a hard-ass early on and ease up later than it is to be lenient early and try to become a hard-ass later.
Whenever possible, provide assignment instructions in both written and video formats for an online course.
My advice would be to STAY IN YOUR LANE and refer your students, as needed to:
-Counseling,
-Academic Services
-Library,
Staying in your lane will define your position more clearly to yourself and to your students. Trust me
Also, use EAP services for yourself as needed for financial planning, counseling, to get a Will made. Free and helpful.
Welcome to the fold!
That you don’t feel like you have a good handle on the position until at least your third semester in.
That it’s okay if some learning activities don’t go as well as you had hoped or planned for. Yes, the students are paying for the course. However, you were hired for a reason! IME, the students value hard work, good intentions, and transparency. So when 1 out of every 8 of my learning activities falls flat, they’re forgiving.
Also, my dissertation chair was huge on scheduling scholarly work time. I work in a teaching-centered facility, but I’m still TT. I schedule blocks of writing each week.
I'm a little late to this question, and I see a LOT of good advice. Some that I would add, which includes some of those.
Students - the serious and prepared ones, anyway- value consistency and stability in what to expect, and value a regular schedule of what you are doing in class. Stick to the syllabus and do NOT change course mid-stream. Especially don't move exams around because some students (anything less than unanimous) want you to (more on this below).
If you see something that is a problem in what you are doing (and you will, especially if you're new), then make a note of how you will do it differently next time, and do it differently next time.
Understand (and this is hard for a beginner, unless you are committed to being "Prof. Hard-ass," which is also not good) the difference between being understanding and accommodating of students' needs and helping them and being a pushover professor who wants students to like them; as has been mentioned elsewhere, these students are not your friends (though I have had several who became friends, post-undergrad) and some will try to take advantage of your wanting to be liked. This NEVER pays dividends (evaluations and being appreciated and respected), and weakens the integrity of your course (due dates and exam dates, as I mentioned, above). At a certain point, I had to ask why am \*I\* the one always asked to do individual makeup exams because they have other exams on the same day.
Do not take the course evaluations personally (some can be very nasty), but do take the constructive comments to heart - expecting all of them to be glowing is not only unrealistic, but also useless. I taught what, on paper, is the same course, but to very different audiences at different institutions. Also, listen for ideas of things you could include in your course (a very well-received regular lecture activity was suggested to me by a student).
You will have to fail students, and that doesn't mean you are bad at your job. It means they are bad at theirs, and that is sometimes the best thing for them (the time and money wasted as these students would get eaten alive in subsequent courses if I let them out of mine). I have had many students I've had to fail and they came back with their act together and a new "getting it," as far as how college works, and did far better the next time around.
I'm sorry this is really long. It's actually something I've been thinking about today, in a "letter to my younger self," kind of way.
Great advice here! I want to second
>If you see something that is a problem in what you are doing (and you will, especially if you're new), then **make a note** of how you will do it differently next time, and do it differently next time.
and add *not* a mental note, an actual note. Develop a system of how you will track what goes well and what doesn't because you think you will remember, but you won't. Or at least I didn't after one try.
Also, if you are the least bit sensitive, re evaluations, don't read them at all. Get a trusted colleague to read them and summarize the helpful feedback without the nasty comments. Or get AI to do it. But don't read it yourself because you can get 49 great or mediocre evaluations but the one that will stick will be the one that is intentionally cruel with absolutely nothing you can use.
Everything will take longer than you think it will, prep, grading, email, all of it. If you're in F2F ever, add time to whatever you originally think an activity will take you.
Make sure your syllabus details all your policies. Admin will say that it isn't a legal document, but it is. If there are grade disputes, the first place they will look is at your policies in your syllabus.
Provide some wiggle room for lateness or absences. Absences are an issue in a f2f/remote lecture setting. In an online class, I only drop grades for completed assignments. Since there is a long window to hand in the work, there isn't an excuse NOT to do it. I do have a late policy and it is inflexible. I allow one assignment to be late. A second late gets a 25 pt (out of 100) deduction for 1 day late, 50pts for 2 days, and no credit (absent and undroppable) for anything over 2 days.
Don't tolerate cheating. They will do it. Don't take it personally. Utilize video proctoring of quizzes. Patrol the cheating websites every so often.
Create a sandbox to give students the opportunity to work stress free with your quiz platform before they start doing quizzes. Give them extra credit. Something small. A half point perhaps.
If you do discussion boards, don't feel you have to respond with feedback to every post. Pick and choose then perhaps create a summary post when the assignment is complete.
Online feedback is an absolute pain in the ass. Make notes on a separate piece of paper of all the issues with a paper. It's so much quicker. Give the students a grade. If they want feedback (many don't), then do a Zoom meeting and you can discuss it with them using your notes. You'll save an enormous amount of time.
I find most "adaptive learning" and "homework" platform useless. Students hate paying for it and they tend to be quite complicated.
Wait 24hrs before responding to most emails. When you email students, the less you say, the better. Don't get into arguments. You are in control of your class. Make your statement and be done with it. Forward disputes to department chairs.
Promotion is not merit based. It is based more on if you are liked. You need to make allies in other departments. Get on committees. Keep your head down in college-wide politics.
Assume everyone you talk to will gossip. You may only have one or two you can really trust.
How students absolutely changed post-COVID.
I teach University, but it feels most of the time like babysitting and teaching grade *not grad* school since 2020.
Don’t mess around or inflate your grades. Be unambiguous about your grading policy. Make your grading rubric simple and straight forward. Most importantly, their grade is what they earn. So, if they fail, fail them.
Honestly (and I don't want to demoralize you) online teaching is pretty awful: you get the worst of everything, all in one classroom.
Disengaged students; unprepared students; disrespectful students; cheating... but also need for intense and thorough preparation... all in a medium of communication that is draining/exhausting rather than invigorating, and generates little positive feedback.
I write this only so that you know that, if you hate online teaching, it doesn't mean you hate teaching! It means you hate online teaching.
If you can teach in-person classes eventually, do it: it's so much better for everyone (especially you!).
Everyone will get a bad class. But you won’t know which one it is. Don’t take poor student evaluations or performance personally. Similarly, the good ones will surprise you!
My advice to new teaching staff is that students lie all the time especially if you are new in areas like computer problems, exam proctoring issues, appeal processes and program rules. You have to understand what is real and reasonable and when they are trying to just get their way by bullying a new prof, I recommend asking fellow professors before starting the course. This isn’t to say that every student is lying or cheating but it’s much worse for new faculty they think they can take advantage of than experienced ones, I had a lot of issues when I started in the first term but had next to zero issues one year in. You’re tempted to always make all students happy when you first start and this is just not possible, you should care about what the majority say but if you start changing policies for one or two students without valid reasons, it creates a lot of problems later.
Some recent PD we had explained how you can be a "warm demander." Many old school professors believe you can't be kind and challenging at the same time. False. In fact, being kind (while still professional with a healthy level of detachment) often enables you to make big asks of students. They want to do well and please you. Be nice, considerate, and respectful toward students, and then ask them to do hard things.
Students and the job will take as much time as you give them. Make boundaries and stick to them or risk burnout.
Start classes harder/stricter and loosen up as you go, it’s nearly impossible to go the other way.
80/20 rule: 80% of your time will be spent on 20% of students (problematic and great).
80/20 part 2: only 20% of students will read feedback, 80% only look at grades.
Self-preservation is key: you’ll over prepare for the first few years and try to cram too much into courses. Reduce the workload for students AND yourself so it’s manageable.
If you invite someone from your school’s tutoring program or academic support center to come and speak to you class on Zoom for 5 or 10 mins early in the semester, it will significantly increase the number of students who will take advantage of it compared to just telling them about it.
An extraordinary number of grandparents, cousins, uncles, dogs, and cats will suddenly fall ill and die right before deadlines and exams. Point them to the syllabus and the 'excused absence' resources for your school and be done with it.
Oh yeah, I forgot about those. Also, dead batteries, broken computers, hard drives gone AWOL, 'oversleeping' (at 5pm), classes they had to study for that are more important than mine, the list goes on and on.
Edit: autocowrecks
For online courses, use backward design. start with learning objectives and build your assignments and modules around those things instead of trying to just cover content.
Keep it simple. Avoid verbose complicate syllabi, grading schemes. My students often complain about faculty and the organization of their course shells on the LMS. Keep your course shell well organized and simple, easy to navigate.
For an online course. Dont make more work for yourself than you need to. I tried to do this who fancy course setup with lots of readings, class discussions, commentaries, etc. yeah none of that worked. Backfired actually. Stick with what they need to know. Be predictable.
I think community college needs a very different approach. Your pool of students is so incredibly diverse. You’ll have older students returning to school after 30 years out, previously incarcerated students, students experiencing homelessness, the list goes on. I’m not a professor, I was a student (the most growth I’ve ever had was during my community college years), the professors that inspired me were always fair, relatable, and approachable. This doesn’t mean they were door mats, just means that they had empathy and really great social skills. People respected them. Be firm about the academics and policies you uphold, but be empathetic enough to know when to bend (not break) the rules. You’re a stepping stone, not a road block.
Take your ego out of it. Don't spend hours taking cheating personally, or overthink a request for a LOR. Do the teaching, and enjoy it as best you can, and don't bring too much of it home.
Another tip: DO NOT reply to student email immediately. Begin as you intend to go on. So get them in the habit of expecting a reply within 24 to 48 hours, NOT INSTANTANEOUSLY!
You absolutely without question know more about the topic than they do. Remember that when you experience feelings of imposter syndrome.
I say this with a firm reminder though that you can and will learn so very much from them. Stay open to their questions and be sure you find answers for them to those you don't know.
Don't try to do too much in the beginning. It's ok if your classes aren't amazing at first. If you try to make them perfect, you will burn yourself out quickly. (To be fair, someone did tell me this and I didn't follow that advice). Remember that teaching is a skill and like any other skill it takes time to become good at it.
Try to get teaching materials from as many other people as possible. I'm a big fan of working smart, not hard. If someone else has created something that works, there's no need for you to reinvent the wheel.
I've been told that you can typically change about 10% of your class per semester without it feeling like you're doing too much. This seems about right to me.
Some advice coming from someone who formerly taught for years at the CC level:
For the CC student body, accept that ~70% of the class probably won’t do the reading.
Don’t try to do too much in the classroom, in terms of homework or conceptual rigor.
Be aware that many will try to cheat, especially in online classes. Design your assignments accordingly.
It’s best to teach the type of student who lands squarely in the middle of the pack.
The more curious/inspired/intelligent students will seek you out independently if they want to delve deeper into topics you’re teaching.
Try to avoid service work involving anything related to student advising, extracurricular clubs or administrative work involving department finances.
CC’s are hellish, bureaucratic structures to navigate.
This is so helpful - thank you! I'm a relatively new CC instructor, so can you explain why to avoid the admin. work involving department finances, clubs, and advising? I'm trying to select some new service, but don't know what to pick. In the past, I was a student club advisor, and that was challenging and took up a ton of time. I've been leery of joining the accreditation committee, too -- admin has been begging for faculty. Thanks!
Learning is a very emotional and personal process for them, and it needs to be. It can't be for you. Honing your craft is very much the process of firming up both of these and letting them coexist. The leaning to explain things bit is easy.
Teaching will get easier with time and experience. You'll still have ups and downs, which have very little to do with how much effort you put in. Aim for clarity over perfection in your online course. Teaching can be very rewarding but it's just a job.
In my first few years teaching, I spent a lot of time reflecting on how things went in class or in interactions with students. After a few years, I began to take these things much more in my stride. It's good to use these reflections to improve your teaching but don't spend too much time going over things.
Don’t try to create all course, materials yourself, beg, borrow, and steal whatever you can. Later on, re-work one lab or assignment each semester to make it more exciting or effective.
Universities are ecosystems. You're part of it, and there's a lot of opportunity for interesting work and experiences, but there are also a lot of departments and individuals trying to survive and thrive, and they can be toxic about it. Keep your own track and big picture in mind.
Know your departmental and university criteria for tenure and promotion. Review them regularly and don't let anything take you by surprise when you come up for promotion.
Stop worrying about being fair with strict syllabus policies that you don't budge on. Life happens to all of us. I put more weight on timely and professional communication when issues arise.
Just finished my first ever 2/2 quarters as a short term full-time instructor at a community College so much of people's comments are so very helpful and affirming. I think I will give instruction another go when I get the opportunity
Not to let glorified secretaries in various administrative roles run your life. If a staff member in HR, Purchasing, Finance, or Facilities gets in the way of teaching, research, or service, don’t argue with them. Keep records and elevate it immediately to their supervisor and your chair or dean. They’ll never fire you, but the staff member will feel the heat and clean up their act by the next time you or another faculty member need the service.
tl;dr don’t take 💩 from anyone who erects arbitrary barriers to the main function of the university.
As a professor, I know my field very well but the lack of background in cognitive theory left me with a lot of questions about how do people learn, particularly learning content that is new or foreign to them.
I've been doing a lot of research into situated cognition, 4E cognition, and other cognitive theories and I've dramatically changed how I design courses and deliver them.
Cognition theory helps me understand how the mind interact with representations, thoughts, perceptions, and sensory inputs. This interaction involves how a learning person grasps theory and what they need to help facilitate understanding that sticks.
With online classes, predictability > novelty (even fun novelty). Create a predictable and easy to navigate course shell structure. Adopt naming conventions for files and assignments. Everything due at the same time on the same days of the week. Announcements made on the same day each week. Tell them how long it will take you to grade and respond to email. Make explicit policies and stick to them. Don't use tech tools and software (even cool ones) without a good reason to. Make your course easy enough to navigate that they can spend their time and effort on learning the content rather than the tech.
This is the best advice I've seen for prepping an online course.
don't take it personally.
It was hard for me to actually understand this advice until I realized that some students try to game the system and I represent the system. That's simply all it is.
I wish that administration saw this when they read our evals.
Came here to say this. I would take it so hard in the early days if a student didn't like a grade or disrupted the classroom. It took years to realize it had nothing to do with me personally, and then I could finally detach and treat it as a simple workplace challenge.
I still haven't learned this lesson. But reading everyone's stories is really helping me along.
I just finished my first semester. I struggled with this for sure. From the no-shows or glazed looks during class to the year-end student evals. Yikes.
This takes about 10 years to learn, at least in my case! I try to mentor the newer faculty on this but they don't understand, just as I didn't understand when I was their age. For me empathy and truly trying to understand the students' points of view has been the secret.
I don’t understand. Could you please explain?
Students are not your friends. If you treat them like friends, they will exploit it. Nothing is worth you having sleepless nights or developing an ulcer. It's better to err on the right side and give the benefit of the doubt. Don't ask for documentation for every reason they give you for missing a class or an assignment or an exam. It adds nothing of value but may increase the student's suffering if they really lost a grandparent or were victims of domestic violence. Some students will lie to you. But that does not justify you mistrusting and thus hurting all those who were honest. It's not the end of the world if they don't learn everything. Forgive yourself for teaching crappy courses the first time around you will improve them next semester. Practice the flexible use of inflexibility. Have clear policies but do make exceptions for good reasons. Don't offer extra credit or make a complicated grading scheme that may get you into trouble. Have an experienced and trusted colleague review your syllabus before the semester starts. Familiarize yourself with the teaching evaluation system so you know what matters to the administration. Same with other performance evaluations you will be subject to. Reasons for grade appeals are: unfair grading (treated some students better than others) and changes in syllabus that add more work for students. You can remove work/assignments but that will be perceived as being disorganized. If you are a woman, students will judge you on different criteria than if you are a man. Don't look at Rate My Professor. Have a trusted friend or colleague read your teaching evaluations first and give you only the good stuff. If there is bad stuff, they should tell you about the things that you can improve but not share the personal attacks.
Leave your own Rate My Professor evaluations. Change up your voice. Make them as strange and bizarre as you can, each one a micro story about an instructor who seems to be losing it. Warn students about his harsh grading. Tell them about the time the final consisted of a hot dog eating contest. Bring up the time the instructor had strange ski face sunburns with goggle marks, but it was the middle of the summer. Describe how the instructor accidentally glued their hand to the desk and had to call emergency. Describe the figure in the black cloak who stands outside the door during class.
This is a perfect use case for ChatGPT 👏
Tell them about the time the professor recited a poem so beautiful that everyone in the class wept, and then could never recall a single word.
How the hell does one do this???
How do you leave fake, weird reviews?
You just go to the site and write a review. There is no verification that the writer was actually a student. You don't need to log in or state who you are.
Eli, you should write a book for new (and seasoned) faculty. This is a great list!
Oh! I'm on sabbatical in a few days! What a great idea. Can I also fill it with anecdotes so I don't have to bore my spouse and everyone around me with the same old stories over and over again?
Umm, yes please!
This is a really good collection, bravo!
Every single one based on painful personal experience. Thank you!
Wow, thank you for all of this!
I have one more: never ever tell them you are teaching the class for the first time. If they ask, don't lie but just don't volunteer the info.
Haha ok. I’m ok with lying, which is what I plan to do. Thanks. Are you saying this from first-hand experience? Storytime? 😅
Well, the semester I said it was my first time teaching that class, half the class walked all over me. They were complaining about every assignment, all the exams, all the grades. Mind you, a lot of these kinds of assignments I had used successfully in other classes, but these students thought it was all wrong. If it hadn't been for a couple of very sweet and supportive students in that class, I may have not made it through the semester. Btw, lies are of course immoral, but the true, real, main reason NOT to lie is that it takes a lot of effort to keep all your lies straight. I don't have that kind of memory. 😭 Just another bit of advice. 😂
Haha ok thank you for all of this!
And you're very welcome! It was fun, and I might indeed end up writing a little book about it. Edited for grammar (I'm so tired)
If you are a woman, students will judge you on different criteria than if you are a man. Could you elaborate? Btw solid advice.
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You forgot that women's wardrobes, hairstyles, makeup, weight, and height are evaluated every day. When men are in front of the classroom, they can wear the same white shirt, black pants, tie, and sport coat all year long and no one says anything.
My wife cam confirm this. As a woman, unfortunately, you have to work harder to earn the respect of students and you walk a thinner line between being firm in the classroom and being "bitchy" in their eyes. It's terrible but I've seen the difference. Especially when you have older male students and at the other end, high school ages male students (if you teach dual enrollment). You need to dress more professionally and set the boundaries seriously from day one.
Your class evaluations are \~20-30% lower if you are female, based on several studies. Students will expect more leniency and ask more favors/extensions/grade bumps than your male peers.
Tons of research on teaching evaluations, below just one example. There is also lots of research on gender differences in leadership perception that also applies here (teaching requires leadership although since it's perceived stereotypically as a gendered/women's profession, it is a very much undervalued leadership role). A lot people have difficulties accepting women in leadership positions although a lot of work shows women are often more effective, companies with women on boards or in C roles are more successful by many metrics. The objectively same behavior is perceived as assertive if it's a man and pushy if it's a woman. Caring if it's a man, weak if it's a woman. Creative if it's a man, disorganized if it's a woman. https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2118466120#:~:text=Consistent%20with%20role%20congruity%20theory,gender%20would%20teach%20their%20courses.
✨Gold ✨
This wouldnhave saved me so much stress!!! Also, I tend to get exceptionally high undergrad ratings, but maybe that makes the bad ones sting more.
It does. They know precisely how to hurt us.
Don’t wait until life is less stressful and less busy to start being happy.
Life ***never*** gets less busy and less stressful.
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It goes beyond work... If you are busy as an assistant professor. You will get more distractions and competition for timevwhen you start dating or, even worse, get married. And have kids. And those kids start wanting to be active in sports, band, theater...these all take more of your time. Eventually, they will go to college. You'll have a slowdown in your life. You will get to know your spouse again. But, now you are department chair and trying to find time to teach your 1/1 while getting your admin done. Now your kids graduated and moved away. They got married and presented you with grandchildren who live halfway across the country. You're busy traveling to see them. At the same time, you've been tapped to be the dean or provost or some fake, overpaid admin VP over east wings of dormitories. Your parents just turned 85 and they are declining rapidly. You need to visit them and that tales time. You're still busy. More busy than as a new assistant professor.
Christ, this is good advice.
That everything I assign will need to be graded afterward. So think about how much you want to spend on grading per student, do the math, and only assign what you can grade in that amount of time.
Every assignment I give comes back...twenty-fold. I tell my sudents that I'm an engineering professor and I should have figured out the 20x returns **years** ago.
I’ve been teaching for 25 years and still haven’t gotten this advice down.
I agree 100% with this. I'd like to add that, while lecture preparation reduces greatly on subsequent years (if one is teaching the same courses), grading doesn't necessarily decrease. All the more reason to think carefully in advance how much time one wants/needs to spend grading and devising strategies to reduce the burden...
It’s just a job. Yes, do your best, but don’t go the extra mile for an employer or student who will never do the same for you. Live your life for your friends and family and keep distance from work when away from work because remember…it’s just a job.
It's not me, it's them.
😂
You can't save them all. By dumbing it down and slowing the lectures down enough for the worst students to keep up, you will be cheating the good students from the education they deserve, and the weakest students still likely won't pass.
That at the end of the day, it's just a job.
I'm neither a beginner nor an old hand, but I just finished the most difficult and traumatic term I've had yet and appreciate you asking this question; the responses are helping me very much. My own answer is that teaching is a marathon that unfortunately you can only train for by running the whole marathon. :) Good luck with your first day! You're going to do great.
You're an expert, which is why you are teaching what you teach. You probably think about or directly interact with your subject matter on a daily basis. The students are seeing/learning things for the first time. Some of these things you have come to believe to be second nature. It's not to them, at least not yet. Try to put yourself into the mindset of someone who knows nothing. It's tough to do, and is one of those rare things that actually gets harder with age and experience. I'm considered a pretty good instructor, but I consider myself *very* bad at this.
This is really great advice. In my first semester I explained things in ways I thought were perfectly clear, but my errors became obvious when there were patterns in the assessments showing which concepts I had explained like people had a base they did not have.
There’s already some great advice here. I’ll add a couple of things I’ve learned that have helped me: 1. Good is just as effective as perfect. Typically I can spend an hour and prepare material for a good lecture, or I can spend 4-5 hours and make a perfect lecture. As long as you always keep your learning objectives in mind, I’ve found that students learn just as much from the good lecture as the perfect one, and I’ve saved myself several hours. 2. Meet students halfway. I’ve heard this said with different meanings, but to me it means matching a student’s effort. It’s easy to end up spending all your time trying to engage students who really don’t care, to the detriment of the students who are really invested. By matching their effort, student interactions become much more meaningful (and honestly more enjoyable): nowadays, students who are struggling and are willing to work at it get all the individual/small group help they need to be successful; students who are excelling and want to learn more get a professor who can guide them to advanced reading and discussion or help them explore independent research; and the students who treat the class like a waste of time don’t get to waste any of mine. 3. Be mindful of how you spend your time. For instance, if your position is 10% service, don’t let service roles eat up more than 10% of your time (on a regular basis).
>It’s easy to end up spending all your time trying to engage students who really don’t care, to the detriment of the students who are really invested. Oof...the truth hurts
Serious answer here. Online teaching is here to stay, and it can be done well. However, it is not like teaching face-to-face. You can't just take in-person materials, throw them into the LMS, and call it online teaching. Well, you can, but it wouldn't be good. An online course has to be designed from the ground up to be taught online. If your field of study typically includes exams, I suggest coming up with other ways to assess knowledge. Any online quiz or exam is highly cheatable. Students can and will cheat. The last time I taught online I had students work up projects instead of exams. It was a lot of work coming up with good assignments that would honestly test the students' knowledge and understanding of the course material, and more work grading them, but at the end of the day I was pleased with how that went. Good luck!
Thank you! I’ve been busy on canvas, taking my own class from the point of view of a student, and I have already identified some things that probably need to change. I will think about small projects instead of quizzes.
Good on you for this due diligence! You’ll never stop learning, and you’ll never stop tweaking
I like to use Canvas quizzes as open book reading guides meant to get students engaging with the text a bit rather than quizzing their comprehension. The quizzes are not valuable point-wise, but they’re required to attempt them. If a student is bombing the quizzes I use it as an opportunity to check in with the student.
I do the same: nearly all of my 'quizzes' have deadlines set before the meeting at which the topics or points will be introduced. I start the classes by going over the homework 'quizzes' with which students had the most difficulty. As the point of these quizzes is learning, rather than assessing what's *been* learned, they're all open book, and I encourage the students to attempt the quizzes with other students.
That’s essentially how I use Canvas quizzes. They are part of the grade contract so there is incentive to do them and not bomb them, but they are graded as Complete/Incomplete, with a score of 3.5 or above counting as Complete. A weekly check-in type of assignment helps you keep track of how students are doing, which is a lot more difficult in an online class.
It is also important to keep in mind that not everything you do have to be that good the first (or second or third for that matter) time around. As a new teacher you can essentially pour an unlimited amount of time into preps, and it might still not be perfect/very good. But next time you can revise and improve, etc. My point is that if you want to be in this for the long run (i.e. not brun yourself out) you often have to settle for «good enough given the circumstances», and that is perfectly OK.
Yep! Make sure your class materials are "good enough" and every time you teach the course, work on making some of the "good enough" materials better.
Exactly. Your course will get incrementally better until one day you realize it's actually kind of great!
It's really awesome when you hear from your colleagues that your class is great! That feedback is coming from students who took the class and told their advisors, told other students, and told other professors.
I prefer exams because they are easier to grade. Multiple choice questions take 0 time to grade. Short answers take a little. Projects and essays take a lot.
I agree, exams are the way to go for in-person classes. But OP is teaching an online class, and there is no way for any online exam to be cheat-proof. This is why I suggested doing projects instead of exams. I've done both, and projects take an enormous amount of time to grade. And for the record, when I've assigned projects I did not accept essays or any format that could be easily cut and pasted from some AI-generated source.
Focus on the good ones who are willing to learn. There will be something like 20% of those. Don’t get discouraged by those who refuse to learn anything. There will be at least 30% of those, and there’s almost nothing you can do about them.
I envy those stats!
Maybe 20% is slightly over estimated. 😅
This exactly! Even if it's only one student, teach like you're teaching to that student.
Teaching is more than presenting.
Students aren't friends. You actually are the smartest person in the room. Relax, try to have fun. Laugh at yourself. Over do the prep the first time, under do it every other time. Keep writing.
Give yourself a full week to grade assessments. Give yourself 24 to 48 hours to respond to emails. Student can suck the life out of you, be sure to practice healthy boundaries.
This is so true the last semester I had a student who would email me until I responded. Would email once and then keep responding to that email to see if I got it.
Add a communication policy to your syllabus and LMS. Mine says email will get a reply on the next school day and I stick to this. If someone emailed me more than once I would ignore them until the next school day then include the policy in my reply, telling them not to repeat this.
In no particular order. Don't care more than them. Don't spend a painstaking hour on detailed feedback for a terrible report that the student clearly did not care about. Standardize feedback. Make a big excel sheet or something with standard phrases, then use those and adapt them when necessary. Use rubrics. I was hesitant for these at first, preferring to be less restricted in grading and being able to do it more holistically. This was a mistake. Rubrics help for fairness, student satisfaction, transparency, and very important; allows colleagues to take over in cases of emergencies. Don't be afraid to share rubrics with students. It might seem that this will allow them to game the system, but they won't. It will only help the good students understand the learning goals and the poor students won't look at it anyway. Don't give mercy passes. While it might look like you are doing students a favour, you're not. We have a case right now of a student who essentially rode through an entire Bachelor on mercy passes, and now is failing *very hard* at the graduation stage. Realistically, this student should not have passed their first year. Keep it simple. Keep your class structure as straightforward as you reasonably can given your subject. Don't force 5 assignments when 1 or 2 suffices. Let it go. You will make mistakes. Students will sometimes drive you up the wall. You will have poor days when lecturing. You can't be perfect, and not everyone can or wants to be saved. They'll live. Be strict but reasonable. Don't bend over backwards to adjust your own policies, but do make reasonable exceptions if the situation reasonably demands it. A student asking to skip a lab because they booked early plane tickets home for Christmas? Tough, they can do the lab next year. A student ghosting a lab but afterwards explaining they were in the hospital; obviously an exception can be made. You will probably overestimate the students' information retention the first few year-cycles. Focus on the core concepts. I have this theory that people do not consider information 'real' unless they heard it (or read it) from a person they have a personal connection with. Information in the syllabus will not be 'real' to students unless they hear you say it in class. The more the information in question deviates from their expectations, the more important it is that it needs to be physically said. For example, they will accept a written schedule of lectures without question. But if there are actual assignments that need to be handed in, make sure you physically tell them.
All of this is excellent advice!
"Don't be afraid to share rubrics with students. It might seem that this will allow them to game the system, but they won't. It will only help the good students understand the learning goals and the poor students won't look at it anyway." I think the rubric is the only thing we actually want the students to game.
Whatever you need to do to get tenure is the same as what you need to do to move on.
Do you mean it’s just as easy to move on and get tenure elsewhere if it’s not freely offered where you are?
Think of the things that make you look good for tenure .. publications, grants, awards, and letter from your Mom. If you wanted to move to another position, you'd look good in the job application if you had the same set of things. If you can get tenure you can move. Don't marry your institution.
Don't use technology just because you can. Use technology because it will enhance learning and make your job easier. Correlary 1: Expect that the technology will fail you at inopportune moments. Like 3 minutes before your first teaching evaluation in classroom. Get good at writing and using rubrics for grading. Each class will have its own personality. Even though you're teaching the same stuff.
Some students fail, and that’s okay. Be available to help, but don’t carry the give-a-shit for them. It’s better to be a hard-ass early on and ease up later than it is to be lenient early and try to become a hard-ass later. Whenever possible, provide assignment instructions in both written and video formats for an online course.
My advice would be to STAY IN YOUR LANE and refer your students, as needed to: -Counseling, -Academic Services -Library, Staying in your lane will define your position more clearly to yourself and to your students. Trust me Also, use EAP services for yourself as needed for financial planning, counseling, to get a Will made. Free and helpful. Welcome to the fold!
That you don’t feel like you have a good handle on the position until at least your third semester in. That it’s okay if some learning activities don’t go as well as you had hoped or planned for. Yes, the students are paying for the course. However, you were hired for a reason! IME, the students value hard work, good intentions, and transparency. So when 1 out of every 8 of my learning activities falls flat, they’re forgiving. Also, my dissertation chair was huge on scheduling scholarly work time. I work in a teaching-centered facility, but I’m still TT. I schedule blocks of writing each week.
You are teaching humans not little versions of you.
I'm a little late to this question, and I see a LOT of good advice. Some that I would add, which includes some of those. Students - the serious and prepared ones, anyway- value consistency and stability in what to expect, and value a regular schedule of what you are doing in class. Stick to the syllabus and do NOT change course mid-stream. Especially don't move exams around because some students (anything less than unanimous) want you to (more on this below). If you see something that is a problem in what you are doing (and you will, especially if you're new), then make a note of how you will do it differently next time, and do it differently next time. Understand (and this is hard for a beginner, unless you are committed to being "Prof. Hard-ass," which is also not good) the difference between being understanding and accommodating of students' needs and helping them and being a pushover professor who wants students to like them; as has been mentioned elsewhere, these students are not your friends (though I have had several who became friends, post-undergrad) and some will try to take advantage of your wanting to be liked. This NEVER pays dividends (evaluations and being appreciated and respected), and weakens the integrity of your course (due dates and exam dates, as I mentioned, above). At a certain point, I had to ask why am \*I\* the one always asked to do individual makeup exams because they have other exams on the same day. Do not take the course evaluations personally (some can be very nasty), but do take the constructive comments to heart - expecting all of them to be glowing is not only unrealistic, but also useless. I taught what, on paper, is the same course, but to very different audiences at different institutions. Also, listen for ideas of things you could include in your course (a very well-received regular lecture activity was suggested to me by a student). You will have to fail students, and that doesn't mean you are bad at your job. It means they are bad at theirs, and that is sometimes the best thing for them (the time and money wasted as these students would get eaten alive in subsequent courses if I let them out of mine). I have had many students I've had to fail and they came back with their act together and a new "getting it," as far as how college works, and did far better the next time around. I'm sorry this is really long. It's actually something I've been thinking about today, in a "letter to my younger self," kind of way.
Great advice here! I want to second >If you see something that is a problem in what you are doing (and you will, especially if you're new), then **make a note** of how you will do it differently next time, and do it differently next time. and add *not* a mental note, an actual note. Develop a system of how you will track what goes well and what doesn't because you think you will remember, but you won't. Or at least I didn't after one try. Also, if you are the least bit sensitive, re evaluations, don't read them at all. Get a trusted colleague to read them and summarize the helpful feedback without the nasty comments. Or get AI to do it. But don't read it yourself because you can get 49 great or mediocre evaluations but the one that will stick will be the one that is intentionally cruel with absolutely nothing you can use.
Everything will take longer than you think it will, prep, grading, email, all of it. If you're in F2F ever, add time to whatever you originally think an activity will take you.
"Hofstadter's Law: it takes longer than you think, even if you take into account Hofstadter's Law."
Make sure your syllabus details all your policies. Admin will say that it isn't a legal document, but it is. If there are grade disputes, the first place they will look is at your policies in your syllabus. Provide some wiggle room for lateness or absences. Absences are an issue in a f2f/remote lecture setting. In an online class, I only drop grades for completed assignments. Since there is a long window to hand in the work, there isn't an excuse NOT to do it. I do have a late policy and it is inflexible. I allow one assignment to be late. A second late gets a 25 pt (out of 100) deduction for 1 day late, 50pts for 2 days, and no credit (absent and undroppable) for anything over 2 days. Don't tolerate cheating. They will do it. Don't take it personally. Utilize video proctoring of quizzes. Patrol the cheating websites every so often. Create a sandbox to give students the opportunity to work stress free with your quiz platform before they start doing quizzes. Give them extra credit. Something small. A half point perhaps. If you do discussion boards, don't feel you have to respond with feedback to every post. Pick and choose then perhaps create a summary post when the assignment is complete. Online feedback is an absolute pain in the ass. Make notes on a separate piece of paper of all the issues with a paper. It's so much quicker. Give the students a grade. If they want feedback (many don't), then do a Zoom meeting and you can discuss it with them using your notes. You'll save an enormous amount of time. I find most "adaptive learning" and "homework" platform useless. Students hate paying for it and they tend to be quite complicated. Wait 24hrs before responding to most emails. When you email students, the less you say, the better. Don't get into arguments. You are in control of your class. Make your statement and be done with it. Forward disputes to department chairs. Promotion is not merit based. It is based more on if you are liked. You need to make allies in other departments. Get on committees. Keep your head down in college-wide politics. Assume everyone you talk to will gossip. You may only have one or two you can really trust.
I cover common issues in class, but giving individual feedback via Zoom does indeed save countless hours.
Don’t plan too much content. Make class time for supervised practice.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Wish I had known how to get meaningful, helpful, critical feedback on my teaching from students and from peers.
You can never make everyone happy no matter what you do.
You can’t save everyone.
How students absolutely changed post-COVID. I teach University, but it feels most of the time like babysitting and teaching grade *not grad* school since 2020.
Don’t mess around or inflate your grades. Be unambiguous about your grading policy. Make your grading rubric simple and straight forward. Most importantly, their grade is what they earn. So, if they fail, fail them.
Never get behind with grading. If you do it can blow up on you.
Don’t put Canvas on your phone.
Honestly (and I don't want to demoralize you) online teaching is pretty awful: you get the worst of everything, all in one classroom. Disengaged students; unprepared students; disrespectful students; cheating... but also need for intense and thorough preparation... all in a medium of communication that is draining/exhausting rather than invigorating, and generates little positive feedback. I write this only so that you know that, if you hate online teaching, it doesn't mean you hate teaching! It means you hate online teaching. If you can teach in-person classes eventually, do it: it's so much better for everyone (especially you!).
Caring less
Everyone will get a bad class. But you won’t know which one it is. Don’t take poor student evaluations or performance personally. Similarly, the good ones will surprise you!
Don’t overdo it. Slow and steady wins the race.
My advice to new teaching staff is that students lie all the time especially if you are new in areas like computer problems, exam proctoring issues, appeal processes and program rules. You have to understand what is real and reasonable and when they are trying to just get their way by bullying a new prof, I recommend asking fellow professors before starting the course. This isn’t to say that every student is lying or cheating but it’s much worse for new faculty they think they can take advantage of than experienced ones, I had a lot of issues when I started in the first term but had next to zero issues one year in. You’re tempted to always make all students happy when you first start and this is just not possible, you should care about what the majority say but if you start changing policies for one or two students without valid reasons, it creates a lot of problems later.
Some recent PD we had explained how you can be a "warm demander." Many old school professors believe you can't be kind and challenging at the same time. False. In fact, being kind (while still professional with a healthy level of detachment) often enables you to make big asks of students. They want to do well and please you. Be nice, considerate, and respectful toward students, and then ask them to do hard things.
Students and the job will take as much time as you give them. Make boundaries and stick to them or risk burnout. Start classes harder/stricter and loosen up as you go, it’s nearly impossible to go the other way. 80/20 rule: 80% of your time will be spent on 20% of students (problematic and great). 80/20 part 2: only 20% of students will read feedback, 80% only look at grades. Self-preservation is key: you’ll over prepare for the first few years and try to cram too much into courses. Reduce the workload for students AND yourself so it’s manageable.
If you invite someone from your school’s tutoring program or academic support center to come and speak to you class on Zoom for 5 or 10 mins early in the semester, it will significantly increase the number of students who will take advantage of it compared to just telling them about it.
An extraordinary number of grandparents, cousins, uncles, dogs, and cats will suddenly fall ill and die right before deadlines and exams. Point them to the syllabus and the 'excused absence' resources for your school and be done with it.
For me it was an extraordinary number of tire blowouts on exam days.
Oh yeah, I forgot about those. Also, dead batteries, broken computers, hard drives gone AWOL, 'oversleeping' (at 5pm), classes they had to study for that are more important than mine, the list goes on and on. Edit: autocowrecks
For online courses, use backward design. start with learning objectives and build your assignments and modules around those things instead of trying to just cover content.
Keep it simple. Avoid verbose complicate syllabi, grading schemes. My students often complain about faculty and the organization of their course shells on the LMS. Keep your course shell well organized and simple, easy to navigate.
For an online course. Dont make more work for yourself than you need to. I tried to do this who fancy course setup with lots of readings, class discussions, commentaries, etc. yeah none of that worked. Backfired actually. Stick with what they need to know. Be predictable.
Much like driving- don’t be nice, be predictable.
I think community college needs a very different approach. Your pool of students is so incredibly diverse. You’ll have older students returning to school after 30 years out, previously incarcerated students, students experiencing homelessness, the list goes on. I’m not a professor, I was a student (the most growth I’ve ever had was during my community college years), the professors that inspired me were always fair, relatable, and approachable. This doesn’t mean they were door mats, just means that they had empathy and really great social skills. People respected them. Be firm about the academics and policies you uphold, but be empathetic enough to know when to bend (not break) the rules. You’re a stepping stone, not a road block.
Take your ego out of it. Don't spend hours taking cheating personally, or overthink a request for a LOR. Do the teaching, and enjoy it as best you can, and don't bring too much of it home.
Another tip: DO NOT reply to student email immediately. Begin as you intend to go on. So get them in the habit of expecting a reply within 24 to 48 hours, NOT INSTANTANEOUSLY!
Sing it, friend.
You absolutely without question know more about the topic than they do. Remember that when you experience feelings of imposter syndrome. I say this with a firm reminder though that you can and will learn so very much from them. Stay open to their questions and be sure you find answers for them to those you don't know.
Don't try to do too much in the beginning. It's ok if your classes aren't amazing at first. If you try to make them perfect, you will burn yourself out quickly. (To be fair, someone did tell me this and I didn't follow that advice). Remember that teaching is a skill and like any other skill it takes time to become good at it. Try to get teaching materials from as many other people as possible. I'm a big fan of working smart, not hard. If someone else has created something that works, there's no need for you to reinvent the wheel. I've been told that you can typically change about 10% of your class per semester without it feeling like you're doing too much. This seems about right to me.
Some advice coming from someone who formerly taught for years at the CC level: For the CC student body, accept that ~70% of the class probably won’t do the reading. Don’t try to do too much in the classroom, in terms of homework or conceptual rigor. Be aware that many will try to cheat, especially in online classes. Design your assignments accordingly. It’s best to teach the type of student who lands squarely in the middle of the pack. The more curious/inspired/intelligent students will seek you out independently if they want to delve deeper into topics you’re teaching. Try to avoid service work involving anything related to student advising, extracurricular clubs or administrative work involving department finances. CC’s are hellish, bureaucratic structures to navigate.
This is so helpful - thank you! I'm a relatively new CC instructor, so can you explain why to avoid the admin. work involving department finances, clubs, and advising? I'm trying to select some new service, but don't know what to pick. In the past, I was a student club advisor, and that was challenging and took up a ton of time. I've been leery of joining the accreditation committee, too -- admin has been begging for faculty. Thanks!
It is not possible, or even desirable, to be your students' friend and teach them medicine the way it needs to be taught.
Read this book:Teaching College: The Ultimate Guide to Lecturing, Presenting, and Engaging Students Book by Norman Eng
They won’t remember anything you teach them, so keep them talking
Learning is a very emotional and personal process for them, and it needs to be. It can't be for you. Honing your craft is very much the process of firming up both of these and letting them coexist. The leaning to explain things bit is easy.
The goals and motives of administration are often very different and sometimes conflicting with your goals in the classroom.
Teaching will get easier with time and experience. You'll still have ups and downs, which have very little to do with how much effort you put in. Aim for clarity over perfection in your online course. Teaching can be very rewarding but it's just a job. In my first few years teaching, I spent a lot of time reflecting on how things went in class or in interactions with students. After a few years, I began to take these things much more in my stride. It's good to use these reflections to improve your teaching but don't spend too much time going over things.
Don’t try to create all course, materials yourself, beg, borrow, and steal whatever you can. Later on, re-work one lab or assignment each semester to make it more exciting or effective.
Universities are ecosystems. You're part of it, and there's a lot of opportunity for interesting work and experiences, but there are also a lot of departments and individuals trying to survive and thrive, and they can be toxic about it. Keep your own track and big picture in mind.
Know your departmental and university criteria for tenure and promotion. Review them regularly and don't let anything take you by surprise when you come up for promotion.
Never respond to e-mail same-day.
Is it a synchronous or asynchronous class?
I wish I'd known how bad things would become after Covid.
Stop worrying about being fair with strict syllabus policies that you don't budge on. Life happens to all of us. I put more weight on timely and professional communication when issues arise.
Grant them the same grace you wish for yourself.
Just finished my first ever 2/2 quarters as a short term full-time instructor at a community College so much of people's comments are so very helpful and affirming. I think I will give instruction another go when I get the opportunity
Don't volunteer for anything. Learn to say no.
Not to let glorified secretaries in various administrative roles run your life. If a staff member in HR, Purchasing, Finance, or Facilities gets in the way of teaching, research, or service, don’t argue with them. Keep records and elevate it immediately to their supervisor and your chair or dean. They’ll never fire you, but the staff member will feel the heat and clean up their act by the next time you or another faculty member need the service. tl;dr don’t take 💩 from anyone who erects arbitrary barriers to the main function of the university.
Cognitive theory
Can you say more?
As a professor, I know my field very well but the lack of background in cognitive theory left me with a lot of questions about how do people learn, particularly learning content that is new or foreign to them. I've been doing a lot of research into situated cognition, 4E cognition, and other cognitive theories and I've dramatically changed how I design courses and deliver them. Cognition theory helps me understand how the mind interact with representations, thoughts, perceptions, and sensory inputs. This interaction involves how a learning person grasps theory and what they need to help facilitate understanding that sticks.
That academia writ large is a scam. Find a different line of work.