Staying Ahead of Your Students: Advice from a Grad Fellow

As we near the end of the semester, your calendar might be filling with extra meetings and deadlines, and you might have a stack of tests and papers still to grade. Amid the end of the semester crunch, how do you stay ahead of your students as you lesson plan? I have just a few thoughts.

The first and most important thing to know is this: you are already an expert in this subject—that’s why you’re teaching it! Especially if you’re a graduate student or a postdoc, it can feel like you don’t know enough about something to really teach it—after all, you’re still developing your research program and expertise. In reality, though, your students probably haven’t met someone who knows differential equations, or hydrology, or whatever you teach, as well as you do.

Accepting that you really are the expert in the room can offer you two things. First, a confidence boost, which should help you plan class time more efficiently. Without spending time worrying about your qualifications, you have more time freed up to actually get a class session ready (or take a break).

Second, owning your expertise can take some pressure off content coverage. When I was a subsection leader for an interdisciplinary course on the American presidency, we spent one week reading excerpts of memoirs written by first ladies. As a student of American literature, I was tempted to do a deep dive into the American autobiographical tradition from Benjamin Franklin onward. Helpful as that information might have been, it wasn’t necessary for our course purposes. My job was for students to identify authenticity as the main theme of political memoirs, and to understand the multimedia contexts in which they were produced. My students didn’t need to know everything about the genre of a first lady’s memoir. They needed to make clear progress towards the course objectives, and I could manage that without a sleepless night or dozens of hours of prep.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that we should all slack off or ask little of ourselves or our students—if you’re reading this newsletter, that almost certainly isn’t your brand. Instead, remembering that you’re already an expert and focusing on clear and limited goals in a class session can help focus you and your students, and leave you with some time to do all the other things you need to do.