Lesson Plan 11

What students had as an assignment: Assignment 9

[110 mins] Part 1: Discussion of Student Selected Topics

As an instructor you’re doing a lot of triaging, and making decisions of what you can and can’t do with your limited time
An important part of being a successful teacher is deciding what not to do and not putting too big a burden on yourself
You are a person that life happens to, and occasionally maybe you will have something that keeps you from class, and its ok to cancel class for one day, the world will not fall apart. Take care of yourself
Sometimes life breaks in in ways that are more intrusive than just missing a single class, and if you have something really hard going on its ok and helpful to rely on your colleagues. Its important to be in a place where you’re respected and supported and to accept the help when you need it. If you’re going through a real hard time, don’t feel like you have to keep it to yourself– tell people and accept the help.

Honestly: You’re not going to make as much money as a teaching track faculty member as you will at other places. But theres things you can do to supplement your income
Common example side hustles: teaching executive education courses, consulting, being an expert witness, teach extra classes or teach classes over the summer, lisencing class materials (dependning on your institution), write textbooks, admissions tutoring, academic tutoring

The average teaching track contract is 3 years, but it depends on the institution so you should ask about it (e.g., during job interviews)
Its also worth asking what the terms are if your contract doesn’t get renewed (e.g., some schools will give an extra year for you to find another job)
Its important to ask about what criteria are used to judge whether you are reappointed, and you should ask multiple people because often different people will have different perspectives on this, even at the same institution.
You can also ask during job interviews, if anybody has not been reappointed and ask for the specific reasons why they were not reappointed
This can also give you a useful indicator of how much the department values teaching
As a teaching track, you should be thoughtful about balancing your internally visible vs externally visible service and how that could relate to potential letter writers for your promotion
On the teaching track promotion is often not clock-forced, and you can usually decide to go up for promotion when you’re ready. (promotion and reappointment are different, reappointment is usually clock-forced)

The experience with you TAs is going to depend a lot of on the class
One challenge is your relationship between you and your TAs will change drastically depending on the number of TAs you have for the class. If its 1-3 usually it will be a closer, more collaborative mentoring style, if its 3-5+ it will look a lot more like managing
Its important to set up systems that ensure interrater reliability, so there is consistency between graders and systems to make sure TAs are submitting their work on time
Its important to get TAs to commit to deadlines of when they’re going to be done with their work (ideally a public commitment in front of the other TAs for accountability)
Its also important as an instructor to be aware and thoughtful of what the TA culture is for your classes, and if it is what you want to be
It can also be helpful to rehire TAs to reduce onboarding efforts
When working with TAs, its important to maximize the number of things they’re doing that are strengths of theirs, and minimize the number of things they’re doing that are weaknesses of theirs.

Different faculty have different perspectives on this, and it will also depend a lot on the school’s culture
It can be very difficult to prosecute AIVs, and it can create a class culture of surveillance and distrust rather than it being a welcoming and encouraging
Most cheating happens because students are stressed and in a bad place and they have a choice to make and make the wrong choice.
You can put your students in a position where cheating is difficult by designing the assignments and tests in a mindful way. E.g., for exams give extra points on cheat sheet which removes the cheating opportunity, or start a two part assignment having them design user stories, and for the next part make them implement the user stories (but don’t tell them about the second part before they submit the first one). That way they can’t copy another students implementation because it has to match their own user stories.
It can often be helpful to have a ‘regret’ period where students can come forward about cheating after the submission deadline with fewer repercussions

Start with master class group activity, where a student shares their teaching statements via google docs.
- All students take a couple minutes to read over the statement
- Then the class has a group dialogue
Q: Does anyone have any positive things they liked about this statement?
Common feedback about statements include:
- People are going to skim it, so highlight things that you think are important and put them at the top. Optimize for skimability
- Be specific about the things you did, provide concrete example of something that brings the reader into your classroom
- If you can cite some literature surrounding at least one of the principles you mention that can help make your statement seem more serious (it could even be one or two chapters from how learning works or one of the other books we’ve read this semester)
- Paragraph 1 should explain why you want to teach, you should aim to convince the reader that you’re excited
- Paragraph 2 can lay out what else is in the rest of the statement, it can also be a good time to mention the three principles you plan to discuss in the rest of the paper (and probably don’t make active learning as one of your principles because lots of people mention that one)
- Picking the principles you discuss: Try to pick principles that you can provide actual stories about that are interesting, that you can demonstrate that you have brought to life in the classroom.