Reasonable Self-criticism?

I do not have much teaching experience but last week I had the opportunity to do one lecture and one discussion in a team taught class for graduate students (Advanced Immunology, 12 students).

First, a comment on team teaching. In a team taught class you are somewhat constrained by the format set up by the person coordinating the class. For example, I had a hard time knowing how to grade the two students assigned to write supporting materials for my topic since no guidelines for grading were distributed to all the people teaching. Since all students are not turning in supporting materials to every teacher, this means variations in grading could lead to one student’s excellent effort receiving a lower grade than another student’s mediocre effort depending on who is grading the assignment. In my inexperience I probably erred on the easy grader side of things, figuring I needed more “a** in my britches” to be a tough grader. Lesson learned for next time: ask for expectations for assignments and grading guidelines to be distributed to students and teachers before the team taught class begins.

Now, how did I do? Well I tried to have some interaction in my lecture class. I started the lecture by telling everyone I’d like to have interaction during the lecture. I tried to get buy-in by saying that interaction has been shown to greatly increase retention of material and that it was easier for me to drone on but that I wanted it to be easier for them to learn. Several students seemed comfortable interrupting so at least some were enthusiastic about an interactive class. I left one slide blank and asked for suggestions of mechanisms from each person in the class. That went pretty well, every student really had something valuable to say which indicated to me that they were understanding the material. Other than that I didn’t have as much planned interaction as I would like. I’ll have to improve this in the future. I did try to be funny or a least a little goofy and conversational during my presentation because I think that keeps people more engaged. I am also a fan of pictures as a means of illustrating concepts (e.g. next to the cell death bullet point is a picture of a tombstone, next to the bullet point that says “all medicine is poison, depending on the dose” is a picture of a bottle of poison. Challenge for next time: building at least three interaction moments into the lecture.

So that was the lecture class, needless to say the discussion class was very interactive. We did a paper discussion. One student introduced the topic then each figure was presented by a different student. I let the student explaining the figure struggle through it, if they were struggling, and then tried to ask questions to lead them back on track. My happiest moment was when one student asked a question (in part she was confused because she couldn’t attend the lecture class) and about four students responded, trying to explain. The students did a great job explaining! It was also very interesting to hear the students’ perspectives on the paper, which I knew quite well. The students were able to easily point out difficult and confusing terminology in the paper. Honestly, I came away thinking the clarity of the paper could have been improved with their suggestions. As for my areas for improvement, I should have shared my expectations for the lecture class to the students further in advance of the class. I also wish we had more time to discuss weaknesses in the paper and possible future experiments. If I had better prepared the students for what to expect in the discussion class, we may have been able to cover the figures more quickly. Lessons for next time!

None of this introspection is double-loop thinking but I am trying to ponder whether a graduate biology class can be taught without lectures. Food for thought.