Doing a great job of teaching a course for the first time—or even just a decent job—isn’t easy. It takes a major effort and a ridiculous amount of time to identify your course learning outcomes (the knowledge and skills you want your students to develop) and learning objectives (the things they should be able to do—define, describe, calculate, analyze, evaluate, create, etc.—that show how well they achieved the outcomes), plan your syllabus and lessons, and make up your assignments, projects, tests, and schedule. Doing all that for just one new course can be a full-time job or more. On top of that you may have a research program and (hopefully) a life outside of your job to attend to. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the stress level for faculty members teaching new courses tends to go through the roof—especially  relatively new faculty members, who often have to teach several new courses at a time.

I’m not going to tell you that designing and teaching a new course can be made fast and easy; if there’s a way to do that, no one has found it yet. I am going to tell you that you can make it much faster and easier than it usually is. This post suggests three ways to do it.

Don’t go for perfection: good enough is good enough [1]

You can only be certain of one thing when you teach a new course. No matter how much work you put into preparing it, you won’t get it right the first time. Just give it your best shot—keeping in mind the next two suggestions—and accept that even if it doesn’t go as well as you’d like it to (it won’t), the sky won’t fall (it won’t). Immediately after each class session and each graded assignment and test, spend a few minutes jotting down notes on what worked well and what you wish you had done differently, and make the required changes while they’re fresh in your mind. When you teach the course again, you can again be certain of one thing: it will be better. When you’ve taught it three times, it will be pretty much the way you want it, and after that your preparation time should be minimal.

Don’t reinvent the wheel [2]

Even though a course you’re getting ready to teach may be new to you, you’re probably not the first one who ever taught it. If a colleague in your department or a friend at another university—preferably a good teacher—has taught it, ask if you can use some of her or his course materials (syllabus, schedule, lecture notes and slides, handouts, assignments, tests) as a starting point for yours. If the answer is yes (it probably will be), go ahead and use the materials, making changes when you think they’re necessary and leaving the parts that suit you alone. Doing this will save you tons of time and the course will probably be better than it would have been if you had spent more preparing it. To find out why, keep reading.

Don’t try to stuff everything known about the course subject into the course [3]

If you’re like most instructors, when you’re teaching a new course your office looks like a tornado blew through a library and dumped a large amount of what it swept up onto your desk. The course textbook is of course there, along with other books on the same subject, journals, photocopies of articles, and possibly your notes and exams from when you took that course. Just assembling that stuff took you a whole lot of time. You then spend a large portion of your life pulling information from all those sources and integrating it into your lecture notes. It’s an endless task, because there’s always more information out there and every time you add some you have to reorganize what you had previously assembled.

Yet despite all that hard labor, it’s likely to be a bad course. You’ve crammed so much material into your lectures that the only way you can get through it all is to put it on slides and flash them at a subliminal rate, leaving little time for questions, discussions, interesting digressions, and activities. Most students can’t absorb the course content at the rate you’re fire-hosing them with it and so they’re bored in class, many bomb the tests, and your end-of-course evaluations may be mediocre or disastrous. Meanwhile you have little time for everything else in your life, including writing proposals and papers if you’re involved in research, and your anxiety level steadily climbs.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Information presented in a course falls into two broad categories: “need-to-know and nice-to-know.” Need-to-know information directly addresses the instructor’s learning objectives and has a good chance of showing up on assignments and tests. Nice-to-know information is only slightly or not at all related to the objectives and unlikely to appear on assignments and tests but it’s in the course anyway, either because it’s always been in the course or the instructor believes that all students taking the course should be “exposed” to it.

It turns out that exposure is overrated. If you talk about something in an information-packed lecture and don’t give the students an opportunity to do something with it and don’t test them on it, most won’t absorb it and you’ve wasted valuable class time. Sadly, if you look at the content of most courses, you’ll find that a large percentage of it falls into the nice-to-know category, which means the time and effort the instructor spent preparing it was also wasted.

So don’t do that. Before you start to pull a large slug of material from those books and articles on your desk into your course, ask yourself if the students really need to know it. If the answer is no or probably not, put it aside. If the answer is yes, then put it in your lecture notes and slides, make sure to create plenty of opportunities for the students to work with it in and out of class, and include it on your study guides and tests. Only when you’re sure you can effectively cover all of your need-to-know material and there’s still room in the course, choose some (not much) of your favorite nice-to-know material and put it in. If you take that approach, your course preparation time may drop by an order of magnitude, the course and your ratings will be better, and you’ll enjoy much more of your life outside the course.

References

1. Felder, R.M., and Brent, R. (2016). Teaching and learning STEM: A practical guide. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp. 41‒43.
2. Felder, R.M., and Brent, R. (2007). How to prepare new courses while keeping your sanity. Chemical Engineering Education, 41(2), 121‒122. See also Reference 1, pp. 41‒46.
3. Felder, R.M. (2014). Why are you teaching that? Chemical Engineering Education, 48(3), 131‒132. See also Reference 1, p. 44.

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