I recently received this query from a colleague:
I’m two weeks into my first course (Intro to Soc) and trying to make some rigid rules about prep time. I am realizing (as I’d been warned) that I could prep and prep and prep all the time. Do you have rules about how much time you spend prepping for class?
I spend *a lot* of time prepping my classes, especially the first time I teach them. It’s important to me to feel good about my teaching and, since I’m still pretty new at this, thoroughly prepping new courses seems a reasonable investment (indeed, one of the great things about being in my second year has been being able to open folders full of detailed reading notes and class plans for the courses I’m now teaching for the second time). That said, it’s been more than suggested to me that I, too, could benefit from some rules/goals/structure re: course prep.
So, what would y’all recommend?
17 Comments
I can say that I often had to re-prepare classes from not spending enough time the first time to take good notes on everything, so I agree with the investment concept.
I’m thinking about devoting one day a week to a combination of prep and me time. Work on anything else is a violation. That way, I have PLENTY of time to prep (14 hrs or so if I really wanted to use them all).
However, I am also constantly aware that my personal time is being eroded the longer I prep. And I value my me time. Very much.
I’ve been posting a bit on this myself. One of the books I have read cites a study that successful teachers/researchers have about a 2:1 ratio (prep 2 hours per hour of class), less successful people (measured by poor teaching evals and performance reviews) actually have a higher ratio of 4:1. The idea is that new teachers tend to overprep - resulting in poor evals because they give students too much information and try to cover too much. The other basic piece of advice is that every hour after the first two results in greatly diminished returns to the quality of your lectures.
I’m trying to follow this but I’m also doing 3 new courses and it’s been pretty difficult to keep to this. Anyway, that seems to be a common suggestion in a number of things I have read, fwiw.
I’ve tried several different approaches over the past six years and each works well for different reasons. Also, my priorities, work habits, etc. are not necessarily yours, or the “best”.
That said, the approach I’ve liked the most to set aside “teaching days”–the two or three days per week that I’m scheduled in a classroom–and I do all my teaching-related work on those days. Thus, I schedule meetings with my TAs, hold office hours, do ALL my grading, answer ALL student emails, etc. My teaching prep is also scheduled for these days. I typically set aside an hour or two before class to prepare the day’s material. Whatever I decide in advance, I stick to in practice. That said, I have smaller classes with students who are accustomed to discussion-based formats, and I’m adapted to leading class discussions on the fly. Also, I now have about twelve semesters of student reviews, with very little variation among them, and I’m at an R1, so I feel the freedom to take this approach.
I would add–I have been told that tenure-track female faculty members should downplay the amount of time they spend on their teaching lest the perception of the quality of their research suffer as a result. I suspect this is an urban myth (a sociologists’ myth?) but it has stuck with me.
newsocprof: Hmmm. That makes sense. But the causal direction could be backwards: perhaps bad teachers spend more time because they don’t know how to do it well. As one who has done some bad teaching in my day, the depressing thing is that it was often after intense over-prep. Trying to do too much is my middle name. Of course, I have also done some bad teaching due to under-prep. “Just right” seems to be the motto for a lot of things. But also knowing what you should be doing so that you do it efficiently. So maybe the advice is to try to hold to the 2:1 ratio and if you are not doing well, try to get help with what you are doing, rather then just spending more time on it.
It depends a LOT on what kind of class you are prepping for. When I do a big lecture-type course (350+ students) where it’s all you putting on a show, the first time teaching the course generally takes me about 8 hours to fully put together a 1.25 hour lecture (complete with Audio/Visual, demonstrations, jokes, and actual material). Prepping for a full-on discussion day with 15 students is much different, especially if the reading is reasonably familiar to you.
I agree that it is easy to over-prep, when that means coming up with too much to cover and going into too much detail in the class. Those are my worst days as well. But it doesn’t necessarily take less time to get it right.
I would also recommend thinking not just about prep time, but total teaching time spent–in addition to prep there is grading, meeting with students and TAs, actually being in class, etc. Think of a reasonable goal for total time spent per week on teaching and try to structure the course so you can meet that goal. For example, if I’m teaching a giant class for the first time and having to do all that lecture prep, I’ll set it up so the grading load is low that semester, or teach another class that has lower demands, etc.
Olderwomen (I have trouble addressing you as such but…): I worried about causal direction too — the same author has another article where he has the teaching problem people do less prep and their evals go up (but there were other methods problems).
I guess my strategy as a newbie is to go with advice that tells me to do less than my natural inclination. It’s pretty overwhelming when you add up the teaching hours as Blue Monster suggests so anything that tells me to stop before I normally would is helpful. That said, I’ve always had good teaching evaluations so the main problem for me is time management. I’m aspiring to good teaching this time around and will shoot for outstanding next year. :)
I was relieved to hear blue monster talk about prep for a huge lecture. I’ve taught big lectures and small discussion-based classes, and the big ones took me at least 8 hours per class. It wasn’t because I was cramming too much in each class; it was because I also needed to look for multimedia, make demos, jokes, etc. etc. Of course, this was a class far, far out of my area of expertise, and so I also had a lot of miles to tread.
I’m on the lighter side when it comes to prepping and it seems to taper off even more as the semester goes on. Of course, one of my preps is a class I’ve taught every semester since ‘04, so I only make minor changes. However, I don’t ever remember putting a lot of time into prepping it in the first place. I do, however, spend what I think of as an above average amount of time grading and giving students feedback.
I think it’s really easy to overprep and that prepping classes can become a save-haven that new professors use to avoid thinking about research or other stresses of being an assistant. It’s good to try to wean yourself out of that and just make sure you have a sprinkling of great classes over the semester.
that should have been safe-haven
This is assuming that the prof’s main role is research and not teaching. This isn’t true of all people.
You’re right, Angela. However, I think that it’s true even that people whose main job is teaching shouldn’t over-prep. While I don’t have any experience, it seems like the two models where teaching can take precedence are the selective liberal arts colleges and the 4-4 load regional public schools. At the liberal arts college, while it’s important to prep some, there should be plenty of room for discussion and class involvement and over-prepping can hinder that. Plus, a great deal of the student-professor interaction is outside of class and one needs to have time for that or they’re overburdened. And at the 4-4 schools, there’s just too much teaching/grading/etc. to spend too much time on each course.
It’s interesting to read about prep suggestions. I think over-preparation assuages fear, a little. What have you found to be your “best practices” in the classroom for discussion/lectures (50-60 students, which is a strange in-between type of class structure)?
Jessica: Yeah, I get what you mean now.
muleer: It’s a good point; I think I over-prep to keep myself from worrying too much about how class is going to go. (I personally have never taught 50-60 students. 15 at a shot, yes. 100, yep. But not in the middle, really.)
Many, many thanks for all your comments, suggestions, strategies, insights, and sociologists’ urban myths!
This was very helpful to me (and, I trust, also to my colleague, who is a Scatterplot reader).
Yes! It was very helpful! (I am said colleague). I think I’d better just muddle through my first course as best I can, basically–and then think about some firmer prep rules for future classes.
Thanks to all.
My first class I spent about 3 hours per lecture getting it ready, then 30 minutes before the lecture going over everything. And every semester I find something new to add/change as I go along. Good luck! And try to have fun with it!