Five Things To Consider When Lecturing (and Possibly an Essay on Teaching)
Call me a bitter undergrad, but everyone's about to get the pedagogy lecture. (We know I've jumped the shark because I said "pedagogy" with a straight face.)
First: if you are writing on a blackboard, stop talking.
Second: if it's important, put it on the blackboard. Like this: "important term: means this." Corollary: no tangent should be longer than two minutes.
Third: if you are drawing a graph, label your graph, just like freshmen are forced to do in 100-level classes: title, axes, units. If you draw multiple lines on the graph, label the lines.
Fourth: if you put up an equation, put up what the pieces mean. Telling me that No/(Nt - No) = e^-[nF*(psi-psi0)/RT] is only useful if I know what psi0 represents, and also that No is Nopen, not Nzero.
Fifth: if you can't do any of these things, and it's a 400-level class, find your sub-discipline's equivalent of Albert's all-encompassing Molecular Biology of the Cell. Tell your students about it. If it costs more than $150, put it on reserve at the library. You should do this anyway, but if you're hitting your marks in lecture, a good fallback textbook is gravy, rather than essential.
Bonus: powerpoint is like salt. A little is a good thing, but a lot will kill you. Dump it at the door with the rest of the trash.
Bonus #2: I have never seen anyone go wrong with colored chalk, except by forgetting to bring it.
I have had classes where the professor made 70 powerpoint slides and tried to get through them all in 75 minutes. I have had classes where the professor filled the blackboard and my notes said, I have no idea what's going on. I have had classes where the teacher stared at the board for two minutes (and in a 50 minute lecture, that's 4% of your timeslot) because he had no idea where he'd gone wrong in the mechanism. I have never survived a class because the textbook was more essential than lecture, but I've had classes where lecture and textbook reading were my right and left feet. (Try getting ahead with one foot missing!) Possibly I could have done that this semester with biochem. The point is: there are a hundred ways to make your students hate you. Fortunately, there's a hundred ways to make them like you, and the material.
So I took bioinformatics this semester, and in one lecture the prof described a class exercise he'd done a couple years ago. He hand-copied a passage from Gravity's Rainbow and gave it to two students to copy. Those students hand-copied it, and each gave their copies to another student. Ultimately, everyone in the class copied it, and the class used bioinformatics techniques (geek speak: multiple sequence alignment with Clustal, then a parsimony tree) to study the relatedness of the final copies. And this was really cool: the prof explained the basic concepts, and then put an interesting twist on them. Phylogenetics is a topic that can glaze eyes, and the prof made it interactive for that class. You can use the Gravity's Rainbow example as a metaphor: changes in the hand-copied texts are like mutations in DNA. It gets students looking at the material in a different way, which can be really important to getting them comfortable with the ideas and capable of manipulating them in a scientific setting.
So in one of my classes we did a lot of mathematical modeling, and it was awful. The five things I started out with are mostly pulled from that class. One major problem I had was just getting a handle on the material: the weekly homework assignments were supposed to force students to get used to the funky and counter-intuitive world of the nano scale, but they did so by tossing us in at the deep end and leaving students to flail. (I feel really bad bashing the course, because the prof had the patience of a saint in office hours, but it was worse than the biochem of "45% is still a B!" fame.) And I feel like a little more organization, defining of terms, and making students think about the material in lecture would have helped.
How do you make a good teacher? Find someone who knows his or her material, and knows his or her essential talking points, and knows how to organize those points into a logical structure. Bonus points for off-the-wall ideas that make students look at the material from a silly light. (Personally, I still want to do glow-in-the-dark corn.) How do you make a bad professor into a good one? If I knew, I'd tell the people who are obviously trying, but haven't managed it yet. There are a hundred ways to be a bad lecturer, and possibly just as many ways to be a good one. Find the method that works and stick with it. I bet it involves colored chalk.
Good news: I wrote my rant! Bad news: I still don't understand voltage-gating in channels. Busted on the procrastination front.
First: if you are writing on a blackboard, stop talking.
Second: if it's important, put it on the blackboard. Like this: "important term: means this." Corollary: no tangent should be longer than two minutes.
Third: if you are drawing a graph, label your graph, just like freshmen are forced to do in 100-level classes: title, axes, units. If you draw multiple lines on the graph, label the lines.
Fourth: if you put up an equation, put up what the pieces mean. Telling me that No/(Nt - No) = e^-[nF*(psi-psi0)/RT] is only useful if I know what psi0 represents, and also that No is Nopen, not Nzero.
Fifth: if you can't do any of these things, and it's a 400-level class, find your sub-discipline's equivalent of Albert's all-encompassing Molecular Biology of the Cell. Tell your students about it. If it costs more than $150, put it on reserve at the library. You should do this anyway, but if you're hitting your marks in lecture, a good fallback textbook is gravy, rather than essential.
Bonus: powerpoint is like salt. A little is a good thing, but a lot will kill you. Dump it at the door with the rest of the trash.
Bonus #2: I have never seen anyone go wrong with colored chalk, except by forgetting to bring it.
I have had classes where the professor made 70 powerpoint slides and tried to get through them all in 75 minutes. I have had classes where the professor filled the blackboard and my notes said, I have no idea what's going on. I have had classes where the teacher stared at the board for two minutes (and in a 50 minute lecture, that's 4% of your timeslot) because he had no idea where he'd gone wrong in the mechanism. I have never survived a class because the textbook was more essential than lecture, but I've had classes where lecture and textbook reading were my right and left feet. (Try getting ahead with one foot missing!) Possibly I could have done that this semester with biochem. The point is: there are a hundred ways to make your students hate you. Fortunately, there's a hundred ways to make them like you, and the material.
So I took bioinformatics this semester, and in one lecture the prof described a class exercise he'd done a couple years ago. He hand-copied a passage from Gravity's Rainbow and gave it to two students to copy. Those students hand-copied it, and each gave their copies to another student. Ultimately, everyone in the class copied it, and the class used bioinformatics techniques (geek speak: multiple sequence alignment with Clustal, then a parsimony tree) to study the relatedness of the final copies. And this was really cool: the prof explained the basic concepts, and then put an interesting twist on them. Phylogenetics is a topic that can glaze eyes, and the prof made it interactive for that class. You can use the Gravity's Rainbow example as a metaphor: changes in the hand-copied texts are like mutations in DNA. It gets students looking at the material in a different way, which can be really important to getting them comfortable with the ideas and capable of manipulating them in a scientific setting.
So in one of my classes we did a lot of mathematical modeling, and it was awful. The five things I started out with are mostly pulled from that class. One major problem I had was just getting a handle on the material: the weekly homework assignments were supposed to force students to get used to the funky and counter-intuitive world of the nano scale, but they did so by tossing us in at the deep end and leaving students to flail. (I feel really bad bashing the course, because the prof had the patience of a saint in office hours, but it was worse than the biochem of "45% is still a B!" fame.) And I feel like a little more organization, defining of terms, and making students think about the material in lecture would have helped.
How do you make a good teacher? Find someone who knows his or her material, and knows his or her essential talking points, and knows how to organize those points into a logical structure. Bonus points for off-the-wall ideas that make students look at the material from a silly light. (Personally, I still want to do glow-in-the-dark corn.) How do you make a bad professor into a good one? If I knew, I'd tell the people who are obviously trying, but haven't managed it yet. There are a hundred ways to be a bad lecturer, and possibly just as many ways to be a good one. Find the method that works and stick with it. I bet it involves colored chalk.
Good news: I wrote my rant! Bad news: I still don't understand voltage-gating in channels. Busted on the procrastination front.