Advice at a glance:
Veteran instructors speak:
Instructors from the Sciences:
It is important for instructors to model critical inquiry. When discussing the professor’s area of expertise, the temptation is to become too technical. It’s import for professors to model the ways they go about learning about a topic as a scientist. The topic should be something that the professor is passionate about, but it is important to be able to communicate it to a broad audience. Pick provocative content, topics that students will react to and engage with. Put students into small groups of just a few students, so that they can feel comfortable presenting their work.
--Paul Bingham and Joanne Souza, What It Means to Be Human
Don’t teach them like you would teach senior students. Use more visual ways to motivate the students. The workload should be reasonable. Don’t make it too hard. It’s too early to make it too hard for these students.
-Joe Zhou, Fundamentals of Robotics
I would say, pick a topic you love, and pick what sorts of assignments you want the students to do, what skill you want to focus on (are you going to have them write?). To me, oral presentations make the most sense for that course, because you don’t want to have them spend a lot of time outside of class on preparation, because it’s just not enough credits.
Think about scheduling and how you want to do the scheduling, because it doesn’t have to be one hour a week every week for the whole semester. It can be something else and still meet the requirements. We did it 2 hours a week for seven and a half weeks. We had a one-hour meeting the first week and seven more two-hour meetings where half of the last meeting was a party. Doing it that way, instead of doing it every week (we did every other week) made it less of a burden for me and easier to have time to do the demonstrations.
Make sure you’re getting the students involved; whatever activity should be different from a lecture course.
--Nancy Goroff, Chemistry of Cooking
Instructors from the Arts and Humanities:
[Create a kind of] self-contained workshop, but still give them a sense of the intellectual challenge and intellectual pleasure of thinking deeply about something. I would spend part of the time in class to read through some of the parts [of the reading] that I knew were crucial, and then get them to think hard about that in that moment. So don’t try to do something that requires a great deal outside reading, it’s not going to happen, because then you will just be frustrated. Design something that is manageable within these constraints, but is still rigorous. Give them an element of choice. They have a lot more stake in it if they have chosen it.
--Susan Scheckel, Early 20th-Century Immigrants in NYC
Realize that the classes are very short. Don’t try to do too much in each class. That was my biggest problem in my 12 plays class. It takes that amount of time to see if the kids really read the play. Stick to the mission and the mission is to get to know the students, and let them get to know you, so be personable.
--Steve Marsh, Hamlet, Monologs, 12 Plays You Need to Know
First, [my advice] is to find a subject matter that one is enthusiastic about, because the students are not necessarily enthusiastic. And it is a difference I have felt from teaching the other courses. For better or worse, when I teach an Italian course, the students have self-selected themselves. They know they want to be there. In the 102, they don’t necessarily want to be there, which is a very dire condition to teach a class in. One has to be enthusiastic oneself in order to keep the enthusiasm going, because the students will not necessarily reciprocate.
The other thing I would suggest is to leave room for modifications. If something doesn’t work, cut it. Try to find something that works with that particular class. Of course, every class is different and every student has his/her own interests. Save room to be flexible. Don’t go in with a full-formed syllabus. I had one, and I had to change it many times. Keep in mind that it is a 1-credit course, so don’t overload them.
--Giuseppe Gazzola, Gender and Ethnicity in American Comics
Though the content of these courses is certainly important, there are several subtexts for their design that will be helpful for faculty to recognize. One is to create a sense of community, so lecturing at the students is a poor way to accomplish that goal. The more interaction you can inspire or require, where students take responsibility through presentations for the course content, the more successful the course will be. Secondly, the courses were designed so that first-year students, who are often in huge classes with little contact with faculty, get to know a faculty member to help advise and negotiate the big university. So the faculty's mission in such classes is to be more than a teacher of a subject but a welcoming mentor. Creating a comfortable environment for students to express their views should be part of the design of a 102 syllabus. Also, since this is a one-credit course, the coursework should not be onerous or out of proportion to the credit given. Woody Allen says that he observed in giving speeches to graduating seniors that "short, funny speeches go over better than long, boring ones." So it is with course assignments for 102: they should be designed to be engaging, perhaps even controversial where possible, and the course format should give students a chance to express their views.
--Perry Goldstein, Hamlet on Film, King Lear on Film, Art and Culture at Stony Brook