A Short Guide to the First Day of Class (As a Teacher)

Jake C.

The first day of teaching as a graduate student is daunting. Especially if you are expected to teach on your own for the first time and have no prior teaching experience. The butterflies are going to go crazy! The common advice we get is to be confident, rely on our advanced knowledge, and prepare for class. Unfortunately, this advice doesn’t help everyone. How do you prepare for class when you’ve never prepared a class before? What if you’re coming into the sociology program but have a degree in geology or international relations? How can you be confident when you’re already freaking out which is why you searched google desperately looking for answers? No worries. Let’s tackle some of these issues now.

Step 1: Preparing yourself and the classroom.

It might sound tedious but go view your classroom before you teach! Do you have the necessary connections to connect your computer? Do you understand how to make them work? Many new teachers are excited to teach and prepared extremely well but your hopes can be quickly doused if your technology fails you. If you don’t know how to use the technology in the classroom, call the Office of Information Technology and get some help! Remember that technology opens you up to problems, have printed slides ready or printed versions of the assignments if you’re not sure if your computer will work well during class. Nothing is more stressful than your computer going on the fritz ten minutes into class.

What is the student seating like? Are they already at group tables or individual desks? The spatial design of the classroom environment has a significant effect on your teaching and student learning abilities. Students who are set up in group environments are more likely to engage in discussions than students separated by individual desks or all forced to face forward towards the professor. How can you use this space? If the desks and tables aren’t mobile, you might have to rely more on lecturing and pairing students together to discuss material. If the desks are mobile, you can shift the students in and out of lecture mode and into discussion mode by making them move the desks around and talk to one another. How are you going to move throughout the classroom? It sounds simple but desks, chairs, bags, and ill-designed walkways can hinder your ability to move around the classroom and engage with students. If you’re a walker, you might want to make some adjustments before class begins.

Step 2: The Various Versions of Class Prep

Preparing a class requires considering multiple factors: professors expectations for what students need to learn from your class, your knowledge, your guidelines, the time available, and student attention spans. Often, even the best teachers forget one or two of these aspects and the classroom learning environment breaks down and you, the teacher, get stressed when things don’t seem to go well. Let’s avoid that and think about these issues.

The first thing every TA needs to do is figure out what the professor wants your students to learn. Without this key information, your class could be wandering off into discussion areas that the student’s do not even find useful. Having regular conversations with the professor that teaches your class helps you prep before you even really sit down to prep. Is your class supposed to delve into the readings? Maybe your recitation is supposed to be a place where students can ask questions about the lecture and have group discussions about alternative examples. Talking to the professor first and understanding the goals of your class will simplify your preparation process for every class.

Now that you’ve received a class goal/idea from the professor, next is to prepare yourself, your knowledge for the upcoming class. As I mentioned before, some graduate students enter their PhD programs from other fields of study. Doing the required reading for the class might not be enough. Don’t be afraid to set up meetings with your professors and ask for/write outlines of what the professor wants the students to understand from the reading assignments. The Teaching Assistantship is not just your job, its also another learning experience. The professors we work for have years of knowledge and teaching experience, teaching meetings can help you build report with your professor as well as gain confidence in the work your doing. If you still don’t feel like you have enough knowledge regarding the topic, there’s more options. Try asking your fellow graduate students if they would be willing to guest lecture a topic they enjoy but you don’t know much about. Find alternative learning sources. It takes some time, but YouTube is full of educational videos on tons of topics. A good learning or example video gives you time to rest your voice and the students a break from constant discussion or lecture. Look for outside readings or blogs (like this one!) to help explain the difficult topics to you. Going into the classroom feeling confident requires knowing that you have the knowledge the students need. Improve your teaching by improving your own knowledge base.

Next, prepare yourself a structure that guides you through the class, as well as the students. Some graduate students enjoy making PowerPoints and simply clicking to the next slide to keep the classroom discussion moving. Others need lecture notes or a class outline with instructions to move them through the class time. What will you have in front of you to make sure you don’t forget any of the material or get stuck in a brain fart? In both cases, preparing good questions, examples, and outlines can help any discussion or lecture. Creating your outline also helps you gauge the timing, the next aspect we need to discuss. Most recitations here at CU are 50 minutes long. Divide up that time on your outline. Group discussions usually take 2-3 minutes, if the students they will tell you or you can ask. Make sure there’s enough time to show the video you chose. Always leave yourself a minute at the end and at the beginning because students are always ready to jump out the door and you’re not always ready to start lecturing on the hour. If you plan out your time well, then the next section will only improve your classroom environment further.

Attention spans are surprisingly small, even in college. Technology continually distracts students and your students have tons of other things going on in their life. Keeping their attention is key to building a successful learning environment. At the beginning of class, start with the boring stuff. The students start class with more energy so use that time to get the important material in before moving into more engaging forms of teaching. This might be the lecture section or maybe a quiz or whatever needs to get done. Next, remember to include a mental learning break half-way through the class. The halfway point is a good opportunity to reinvigorate the classroom with a video or activity that significantly differs from what you were doing first and what you plan to do last. Some other options: reorganize the discussion groups, quick reflective writing assignments, or example videos help break up the monotony of the classroom and give students time to think about the material. Lastly, save your most engaging material for the end. This is the period when rapid-fire discussion questions, one-minute responses, or group activities will be most successful. You’ve prepared the students with the knowledge, now have them put it to use.

Step 3: Adopting New Perspectives of Teaching

You analyzed the classroom environment. You prepared your class to the best of your ability, but you still feel unprepared. It’s because you are! Here’s where I want to introduce some new perspectives on teaching for you.

You can never be fully prepared.

After all the preparation, reading, and video searching, something during the class is still going to catch you off-guard. Students ask weird questions or sometimes very specific questions. Be comfortable with saying, “Hmm, I don’t know but I’ll get back you on that.” In my own teaching, I enjoy having students google the answers to questions I don’t know, especially the specific ones like, “What are the salaries of labor union CEO’s compared to business CEO’s?”. Alternatively, you can always do research after class and present it at the beginning of the next class. Spontaneity and tangents help students learn by making connections between disparate topics. Learning how to accept variation and unexpected interruptions is key to being a successful teacher and lowering your stress levels in general.

Your first day of teaching never ends.

Every semester, there will be a new first day. Every class has a new topic. Every new activity, writing assignment, discussion question will create new and sometimes unforeseen conversations with your students. Your first day, you will be confronted with tens of new faces, unfamiliar faces of students that will make your adrenaline rush and your nervousness peak. This new day mentality can help you get through everything. If you have a bad day of teaching one week, look forward to the new day of teaching next week. If your activity is a big hit in one class, improve and get excited to try it again with a new topic or new class. Think your students hate you or think you suck at teaching? You’ll be getting new students in the next new semester. Newness is refreshing. Instead of feeling nervous about our first teaching experiences or any other firsts, get excited about the new experience and learn from it. If you’re still worried about the first day, try starting class with some new music to help you find your zone or grab the students’ attention.

Most learning happens when you don’t plan.

Don’t worry the irony of saying this wasn’t lost on me. I just wrote an entire first day of class preparation instruction guide and now I’m saying, don’t plan. As I’ve said before, you can’t be fully prepared, but this is different. Learning happens when you provide the space and the tools for it to happen. If your entire class is scheduled out minute by minute, when will you be able to address a student question that turns into an interesting tangent. If a student made a homophobic comment or some other microaggression, would you have the time to address it? Learning opportunities happen all the time and often professors or TA’s push on with the material. If your students aren’t asking questions, then either you’re an amazing teacher or your students are at a loss for words. Sometimes stopping the class and giving them time to reflect and write about the material or learning experience helps everyone. Don’t get caught up in the material. Make sure you evaluate the classroom learning experience regularly and jump on learning opportunities that happen at random.

The first day of class is only the first step towards becoming a great teacher. The classroom is not only a place for us to share our knowledge with students but also where we can improve our public speaking skills, learn new teaching skills, and engage with new knowledge pathways maybe we haven’t previously been down. Altogether, teaching is another learning process and hopefully this post provided you with some material to prepare you for your first day of learning how to teach. Don’t be afraid to ask questions! Feel free to reach out to me or any of the other page contributors. Good luck on your first day!