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About to give your first lecture? Read this first
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Teaching is an invaluable skill for any academic, but it often isn’t a major focus of PhD programmes.Credit: SDI Productions/Getty
Ľubomír Tomáška still remembers the first university lecture he gave more than 30 years ago. He was a first-year PhD student when a senior teacher asked him to cover an introductory genetics class. The topic was DNA replication: a seemingly “easy ride” for Tomáška, who was doing his doctoral research on a similar topic. He read a chapter from the textbook and prepared a thick stack of transparent slides to project in front of the class — “this was pre-PowerPoint” — and walked in feeling set. “I was ready to go, but in ten minutes, I noticed that I had lost the attention of about 90 per cent of the people in the lecture hall,” recalls Tomáška, now a geneticist at Comenius University in Bratislava. “I felt like a cyclist climbing a steep hill without water and energy.”
Tomáška’s experience is familiar to many early-career academics. Across academia, especially during doctoral programmes, the focus is often on fostering research skills, rather than teaching skills. “PhDs teach you to be scientists and researchers, not teachers,” says Olivia Bizimungu, a PhD candidate in neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
Despite this, some graduate programmes require students to take on teaching responsibilities, even if they have limited experience doing so. Tomáška, now a sagacious university lecturer, says he often has PhD students enter his programme and immediately begin teaching. But even if you’re very familiar with a subject, it is not all smooth sailing. “Knowing the subject for university teaching is not enough to give a good lecture or seminar,” he adds.
Here, ten PhD students, postdocs and faculty members share their advice for anyone preparing to teach at university for the first time.
Before you embark on your first lesson, you should prepare course materials, such as lecture slides and handouts. Luckily, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There is usually an existing course that you can — and should — work off. “Don’t start from zero,” says Aeriel Leonard, a materials scientist the Ohio State University in Columbus. If it’s appropriate, then you might consider using old homework resources or assignments.
Tomáška also suggests that researchers see whether it is possible to undertake formal teaching courses at their universities.
There’s also another great resource — academics themselves. Like Tomáška, when Melanie Ortiz Alvarez De La Campa — who earned her PhD in pathology at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, this May — first taught undergraduate courses, she assumed that having subject knowledge alone would be enough to teach well. Realizing that students process information at different speeds, she sought advice from experienced colleagues. “I learnt a lot from just talking to actual professors,” says Ortiz Alvarez De La Campa. “If you have the opportunity, sit in on some courses where you’re going to teach and see which professors resonate with you in terms of what they’re doing, and talk to them about it.”
The students aren’t the only ones learning. Once you have your material, you should also take time to learn it by heart. “Re-read and revise your teaching materials and practise delivering your lectures,” says Nirodha Weeraratne, a postdoc at Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, Australia. “Guess what questions will be asked during discussions, and be ready with plausible answers.”