How to Avoid Stage Fright

How can I avoid stage fright?

* Be well prepared! Have a comprehensive lesson plan with alternative back-up activities in case you finish early or some part of your plan does not go as you expected. Don't just wing it. This is not fair to your students. They have paid dearly for your time and expertise.

* If you are a GTF assisting a professor, present yourself as an experienced student rather than a teacher. You have majored in this discipline, attended the lectures, taken the tests, and written the papers. You are the primary conduit between the instructor and your students. You are there to facilitate their understanding of the material and to help answer their questions. You are not, in most cases, a content expert; you won't know the answer to every question your students ask. With your help, however, they can find those answers.

*Write your agenda for the class on the board to help you track what needs to be covered for the period. This way you are free to move around the room.

* Think in terms of communication rather than performance. Your students are not theater critics waiting for you to flub a line. They're probably more empathetic than judgmental, and if you take a moment here and there to refer to your notes, or back up and explain a previous point, you'll enhance the clarity of your presentation.

* The longer you talk, the more your nervousness will subside. Pay attention to the process: I'm better already. . . better yet. . . still better.

* Speak to one person in the classroom at a time. Make eye contact. Try smiling!

* Take it slow. Pause and give people time to catch up with you; they're working as hard as you are.

* Consider going through a practice run with a staff member in the Teaching Effectiveness Program. We can give you valuable feedback and suggestions on lesson plans, good icebreakers, lecturing techniques and overall course organization.

- University of Oregon, Teaching Effectiveness Program

How to give lectures more impact

From the UO Teaching Effectiveness website:

* Watch Susan Glaser's video on "Effective Lecturing." It is available through TEP, and you can arrange to check it out via email.

* Use visual images to describe your point -- a striking demonstration concerning physics or a visual analogy to describe a poem.

* Use language that appeals to the senses: "This smells to me like the Pythagorean Theorem!"

* Use many examples; they make lectures come alive. A vivid example has far more impact than accumulated data.
For example: no matter what Consumer Reports tells you, if your uncle owns a lemon of a Volvo, you will be wary of Volvos for a long time.

* Figure out ways to make lectures interactive. Get students bumping into each other to simulate particle diffusion, or have half of the class argue for an issue and the other half argue against it.

* If there are a few points in the lecture that are crucial to understanding the big picture, figure out how you are going to phrase the key concepts of an entire lecture. It might not be necessary to memorize the words you will use, but get familiar with the approach you will take.

* Begin with a simple story related to the topic of the day.

* Have outlines of your lecture available for your students either online or on reserve in the library. These do not need to be extensive, but should give students the structure of what you are going to present.

Teaching Early Morning Classes

Teaching Early Morning Classes

by Robert Sommer, distinguished professor of psychology emeritus at the University of California, Davis

I wasn't unhappy when my summer school class in 2006 was scheduled for 8 AM. As a morning person, the hour was not a problem. I had avoided teaching early morning throughout my academic career because this was prime writing time. My head is clearest early mornings and ideas flow more freely. I'd estimate that over 90% of my writing has been done in the early morning. Because teaching an 8 AM class was a novel experience, I kept detailed notes.

An unforeseen advantage of the early morning class was greater thermal comfort. This geographic area has a Mediterranean climate with mild winters and hot summers. It gets very warm during the day in July and August but cools in the evening. Early mornings are always pleasant. Instructors who teach later in the day, especially in the afternoon, must travel to class and return in intense heat. At 8 AM my classroom was cool, clean, and the air was fresh. Later in the day, instructors faced stuffy rooms, smudged blackboards, chalk dust in the air, and floor litter. Teaching the first period of the day allowed me to come early and set up the A/V equipment without needing to rush the preceding instructor and students out of the room. A disadvantage of an early morning hour was difficulty in recruiting a Reader. Most preferred to come to campus later in the day.

Enrollment was significantly lower than in previous offerings of the same course at later hours. This is a popular class, often oversubscribed. Due to its large size, I relied on multiple-choice examinations scored by Scantron machines. My 8 AM class was under-enrolled with only 50 students, a size that allowed me to make the course more interactive and participatory. I included a required term paper and added essay questions to the examinations. Comparing enrollment to sections of the same class I taught the two previous summers at later hours, enrollment was 32% lower, and attendance on the last day (when the teaching evaluations were handed out, providing an attendance record) was 58% of enrolled students, relative to an average of 72% in the two sections of the course taught later in the day. Overall teaching evaluations for the course and instructor were virtually identical (4.2 average on a 5-point scale) in the 8 AM class and the two previous years when the course was taught at a later hour.

Student numbers in the 8 AM class were even smaller when attendance and punctuality are considered. Although I did not call roll, I counted the number of students in the room when class started and midway through the 2-hour session. Excluding exam days, attendance when the class began averaged 15 students, and midway through the period, averaged 24 students, which represented approximately one-third and one-half the course enrollment respectively. The early birds tended to be the same students every period and I made it a point to know them by name. There was another group of tardy but interested students, of whom I knew a few, and about half the class whom I barely recognized. I should point out that this course is highly structured and transparent, with syllabus, lecture outlines, and previous examinations with answers posted online, and lecture notes from previous classes available through a student-run note-taking service. Based on class evaluations and other indices, I am a good (but not outstanding) instructor who teaches a good course, so I don't take it personally when students skip class and pass examinations by reading the assigned materials and archival notes.

I saw myself as having two classes, one of motivated and interested students who attended lecture and a second class of phantoms who showed up primarily for examinations. For the first hour of the two-hour class, I had essentially a seminar with 15 students, and later in the period, a small class of 24 students. This was a welcome change from the large lecture courses I taught for so many years. Still, I was concerned about the number of students who came late or not at all. My laissez faire side said this was none of my business so long as students passed the examinations, but my values as a college teacher said that students who paid tuition should be attending classes. I could not increase attendance and punctuality through penalties, as these practices are explicitly prohibited by academic senate regulations.

My ambivalence about attendance came into play when I requested summer school teaching for the following year. I was torn between requesting an 8 AM class which would mean smaller enrollment and more personal instruction at the cost of poor punctuality and low attendance. For me to request later teaching hours would require other instructors to teach at 8 AM. The campus has room utilization standards and the registrar will not leave classrooms unoccupied because faculty don't want to teach certain hours. I can choose a class time that most instructors avoid in order to receive its benefits (smaller, more participatory class and greater thermal comfort) and accept its liabilities (lower attendance and increased tardiness) or not request the early morning hour and shift 8 AM teaching to other instructors for whom it might be more of a burden.

Accepting the campus prohibition against penalties for absenteeism, there are measures I can legally take to increase attendance. I could give "snap quizzes," thereby penalizing absentees. I could decrease the availability of course material through other channels (put less material online, deny the student note-taking service permission to cover my class; refuse to make previous exams available). I could deliberately introduce lecture material not available from other sources and increase examination coverage of lecture material. Instead of the existing 50-50 split between lectures and readings on tests, I could announce that exams would be based 75% on lectures.

I suspect that any of these measures would increase attendance, and together would have a significant impact. Yet adopting them diminishes my self-image as a college instructor. My role in the classroom has dual objectives- to teach a subject matter and to develop mature, responsible adults. To reduce the transparency of my course by withholding material seems irresponsible and immature on my part. From the start of my teaching career, I have made previous exams available, encouraged the campus note-taking service to cover my classes, and urged students to buy the lecture notes for classes they miss. I choose a comprehensive textbook and evaluate student response at the end of the semester, so I know it is a "good textbook." The idea of reducing coverage of textbook material to 25% of the exam seems poor pedagogy.

Postscript 2007:

I was asked to teach both summer sessions and requested my two classes at 8 AM. For interested students and for me, this will mean a smaller, more personal class with more frequent opportunities for interaction, greater thermal comfort, ease in setting up A/V equipment, and increased use of essay questions and term projects. The 8 AM time will also be a boon to the Registrar who wants to maintain occupancy standards during non-prime hours, and a favor to colleagues who aren't at their best during early morning hours.

Although I have reservations about capitalizing on student aversion to 8 AM courses in order to secure a smaller, more interactive class, my department and the registrar are happy about my decision since it increases classroom utilization. Yet I feel guilty about pandering to motives that I do not respect and choosing to teach at an hour that I know most student will avoid. This decision means less work for me and no complaints. What else should I want or expect?

Lecturing and Presenting

Lecturing and Presenting

From the Center for Teaching Excellence, Kansas University

William E. Cashin in his Idea Paper titled, “Improving Lectures,” provides several suggestions for effective lecturing and presenting of material. First, the appropriateness of the lecture format is dependent on the goals of the course, and the instructor should evaluate the course aims before determining whether a lecture-style course will most effectively achieve the course goals. The strengths of the lecture are that it “can communicate the intrinsic interest of the subject matter, and it can present the newest developments” (Walker & McKeachie, 1967).

Other strengths of lecture formats include their ability to restructure information into a unique manner, relevant to the course directions. Lectures are also useful in that they provide a large amount of material to many students at the same time. Finally, they can also be used as examples for how professionals approach an intellectual question.

Faculty lecturing:

The negative aspects of lecturing include the lack of feedback that students receive, the presumption that all students are learning the material at the same pace, and the problem that lectures are not as well suited as other teaching methods for higher levels of thinking, such as what is involved in synthesis and application. To overcome these hurdles, Cashin offers several recommendations for increasing the effectiveness of lectures:

*Fit your lecture to your audience, by gathering information about your audience beforehand.

*Prepare an organized outline with 5-9 major points, and decide which minor points you will include. Present this outline at the beginning of class.

*Present multiple sides to an issue, to make your audience aware of the various viewpoints, or to help strengthen an argument you are making.

*Repeat the points you are making in two or three different ways, and stress the points you deem most important.

*Look at your audience, include discussions, and solicit questions.

Another way to enhance your lectures is with effective visuals—using the blackboard, overhead, document camera, or computer. Students’ notes are often an exact copy of what appeared on the visual, with very few additional points or connections. Effective board work highlights and emphasizes the organization required in problem - solving or the evolution of an argument. Remember that even the best students will occasionally lose the thread of a lesson or forget the original objective of a discussion. The visual is their major, and often their only, resource for reentering the lesson unless you are making your presentation available before or after the lecture. Therefore, be organized, use headings, write clearly, and when solving problems on the board, show each step in a logical sequence. If at the end of a lecture, you can stand back, look at the board, and reconstruct the lecture using what is written, then you are developing good board skills.

If you want to encourage higher levels of thinking through lectures, consider this. In the book, What’s the Use of Lectures? Donald A. Bligh addresses how to promote thought using lecture. He recommends the following:

*Make sure the your lectures encourage application and discovery of the material as opposed to only serving as a platform for the presentation of material. In this way, students learn how to use the information provided to analyze novel situations.

*Second, ask questions throughout the lecture, focusing on questions that promote critical thought, not rote memorization.

*In order to assist student thought, provide a visual display of the presented material, include handouts so that students can focus on thought rather than note taking *Recommend that students pre-read the material so that lecture is not their first exposure to it, and watch the speed of your lecture.

Bligh (1974) found that students performed best with thought-provoking questions when the lecture material was presented at a slow speed, as compared to when the lecture was presented at a faster pace, because a slower pace allows students time to think about the material itself.

Resources:

Cashin, W.E. (1985). “Improving Lectures.” Idea Paper No. 14. Kansas State University: Center for Faculty Evaluation & Development.

Bligh, D.A. (2000). What’s the Use of Lectures? San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.