Principal Reference: R.M. Felder and R. Brent, Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide, 2nd edn. (2016), pp. 37–43.
Let’s say it’s early in the summer, and in the fall you’re scheduled to teach a new prep–a course you’ve never taught before and may not even have taken.
As anyone who has ever done it knows, preparing a new course (or significantly revising an old one) can be life-consuming. Even if you start on it months in advance, just figuring out what topics you have to cover and what additional topics you’d like to cover can take a lot of time…and once you’ve taken your first cut at that, writing and revising lecture notes and making up assignments and exams can swallow almost every available minute you have. You usually find that you can’t do it all in a 40-hour work week so you end up spending evenings and weekends on it, times when you were planning to do other things like working on your research and spending quality time with your family and friends and exercising and eating and sleeping. The only good news is that you may someday reach a point where you’ve taught most or all of the courses you’re called on to teach, but it can take years to get to that point.
So is there an alternative to that gloomy scenario—a way to cut down on the time it takes you to prepare a new course that doesn’t sacrifice important content or compromise the quality of the course but still allows you to have a life outside of work? Yes, there is. On pp. 37–43 of Teaching and Learning STEM (TLS), there’s a section titled “A rational approach to course preparation and redesign.” What follows is a greatly shortened version of that section. Consult the book for details.
Obtain course materials from colleagues and modify them to fit your needs.
It’s much easier and faster to begin with good existing materials (lecture notes, slides, assignments, tests, etc.) and modify them to fit your course than to develop them all from scratch yourself. Many teachers will freely share their course materials with colleagues if asked. Try to identify some (preferably good teachers) who have taught the course you’ve been assigned to teach—maybe department colleagues, or faculty members where you got your undergraduate, graduate, or postdoctoral training. If you find any, ask them if they’d be willing to share some of their materials with you.
Use open educational resources.
Table 3.2-2 of TLS lists digital resource libraries and open courseware sites that provide free instructional materials for hundreds of courses and topics. You can also enter the type of resource you’re seeking (lecture notes, slides…) and the topic into a search engine or a large language AI model like ChatGPT, Copilot, or Gemini, and get a wealth of suggestions.
Focus on need-to-know material in the course, and minimize nice-to-know material.
In a common teaching practice, instructors attempt to cram all human knowledge of a course topic into their lecture notes, which takes a massive amount of preparation time. The instructors then race through the lecture notes to cover all of their content, and eventually skip some topics–often including some that are need-to-know–because there’s not enough time to cover them.
To avoid that situation, ask three questions about each body of material you plan to cover:
- Is this material addressed in my course learning objectives?
- Would I ever include the material on an exam or major assignment?
- Are instructors of courses that follow mine likely to assume that I covered the material?
If the answer to one or more of those questions is “Yes,” that material is need-to-know and should be covered in the course. If the answers are all “No,” the material is nice-to-know. Instructors who cover much nice-to-know material may just enjoy teaching it, or they may think that even though the students won’t be held accountable for knowing the material, they all should be exposed to it. “Exposure” is highly overrated: if students are simply shown or told something and never use it, they will almost certainly not learn it.
Many courses contain large quantities of nice-to-know material. If you drop most of it from your course, nothing important will be lost except the extensive preparation time it added to your load, and the students will benefit from the increased focus of the course on the material most important for them to know.
Curb your perfectionism!
“You can spend two hours preparing a perfectly fine class session and then another six hours polishing it, endlessly revising the session plan and tinkering with slides to make them look prettier. Don’t! `Good enough’ is good enough.” (TLS, p. 41) Of the four recommendations in this blog post, this one probably has the greatest potential for keeping your course preparation time (and more generally, much of the rest of your life) manageable.
