Notes on teaching from a mediocre teacher

I am not a naturally talented teacher. I lack the empathy to understand how students think and how to explain things from their perspective. I have a tendency to speak too fast and to stutter. Interaction with other humans tire me rather quickly. I am awkward in social situations except with very close friends. Nevertheless, as a working academic I have taught a lot, as everything from Teaching Assistant to Course Supervisor. My teaching usually goes well, in the sense that students provide positive feedback and seem to learn what they are supposed to. Below you can find my notes on how I structure my teaching.

For most of my teaching responsibilities, I have had great leeway to change things as I saw fit. Much of the advice may not be applicable if you are required to teach someone else’s vision. I have also mostly taught practically oriented courses (programming and systems material), and the way a successful theoretical course should be structured may be different.

Teaching Assistants

At the University of Copenhagen, we can expect the university to fund one Teaching Assistant (TA) for every 25 students. Every TA is hired for 130 hours for a course. Utilising the TAs effectively is a core aspect of running a successful course. It is also important to treat your TAs well, not to overwork them, and not to assign them excessive responsibilities (although some will ask for this): not just because it is immoral to do so, but because word will spread, and nobody will want to be a TA in your course next year.

The Coarse Course structure

I structure my courses as a sequence of assignments that must be submitted in order to qualify for the exam. Usually the assignments are weekly, but bi-weekly can also work. The assignments are graded by TA on a simple point scale (such as 0-4).

To qualify for the exam, each assignment must receive at least one point, and students must receive at least half of all possible points in the assignments. The idea is not that exam qualification should be difficult, but rather to encourage an even workload. The simple point scale is to avoid TAs having to spend too much time deciding on fine-grained point decisions. This also means that you do not have to spend much time ensuring perfect consistency between TA grades, because there are usually plenty of points for students who follow the course. It is common for every student who hands in every assignment to qualify for the exam.

I usually prefer that the assignments have no impact on the final grade (i.e., only performance on the exam affects the grade). If the assignments influence the final grade, then you have to spend more time ensuring that grading is consistent. This can be impractical on larger courses.

Structure of the assignments

Weekly assignments should not be too large and have too many degrees to freedom, as that will also make them very time-consuming to correct. I prefer to structure programming assignments as implementing a program according to a very rigid provided spec (almost always with a code handout). The students are also asked to write a short report where they have to answer specific qualitative and quantitative questions about their code. See this example.

One technique, that has worked well for me, is for the assignments to involve extending code developed during the exercises (see below). In this setting, the exercises involve writing exactly the code handout for the assignments (or as close as you can get). This avoids two common problems.

  1. Students get stuck trying to grasp a nontrivial code handout.

  2. Students feel that the exercises are pointless. (In many courses they are.)

I tend to reuse assignments every year, usually with only minor changes and corrections. The main advantage of this is a low error rate, and that the assignments will not have an unpredictable workload. The downside is that students can usually find solutions if they look for them. However, if the assignments merely serve to qualify for the exam, this will not have a positive influence on their final grade, so they have an incentive not to do this.

Lectures

Lectures, understood as a teaching situation with a single teacher in front of a large group of students, are an inherently poor learning environment. Due to the quantify of students, communication is necessarily one-way. You will also rarely have a good grasp of how well the students are following along, and individual attention is quite impractical.

I prefer to use my lectures to demonstrate my own way of working with the material, in order to transfer some of my own intuition to those of my students. In my best lectures, I do not use slides at all, but instead write programs in a text editor (shown via a projector). This makes the ideas very concrete, as the students can see mistakes in my coding, the limitations of my approach (and the solutions that are perhaps the purpose of the lecture), and overall see every practical detail of how to work with the material - including how a presumed expert (me) uses the tools available. This is rather similar to how mathematicians often do their entire lecture on a blackboard.

When using a projector to display slides or code, use a black (or dark) text on a white (or bright) background. You can not generally assume that the lighting conditions in the auditorium will make white-on-black legible.

Exercises and Exercise Classes

Exercises are voluntary and are not graded. They usually serve to prepare students for solving assignments (see above). Exercises are almost always coupled to exercise classes, which is classroom teaching in smaller groups (at most 25 students, usually less) overseen by a TA. The idea is that students work on the exercises, or assignments, and can ask help from the TA. I trust my TAs to run their exercise sessions as they see fit, although I am of course willing to help if desired. I usually recommend that the exercise sessions are strongly student-driven, with the TA only talking to the entire class to clarify common mistakes they have noticed, or other very general messages.

Exercises must have solutions, and these must be available to the students. I also strongly suggest writing your own, rather than merely copying from a textbook.