- The first item is a mouthful. It is a run-on sentence. Sorry in advance.
- Avoiding mistakes increase the probability of doing something right.
- Stand on the shoulders of others and do not do this stuff! Please.
It seemed like a good idea at the time…
As we have stated elsewhere, we do not have not met any instructor who wakes up in the morning and thinks about how to be a poor instructor on purpose. All instructors we have met have honestly thought that they were trying to be a good instructor, and were probably a good instructor. Unfortunately, this self perception and confidence in this perception can lead to extremely sub-optimal teaching.
Our #1
- you have been a student,
- you are called an instructor,
- you are being paid to instruct,
- you have students to teach,
- you are passionate about teaching,
- you love teaching,
- you think students love your teaching,
- you get great course evaluations, and
- you might have been teaching for a number of years.
Assuming you know how to teach because
- the domain you are teaching,
- learning and cognitive development theory, and
- teaching methodology theory.
The above activities allow you to become familiar, and demonstrate your familiarity with the domain, but do not result in any actual skill and expertise without study, learning, and deliberate practice in
Our other nine, in no particular order (except for the first one)...
- Using class time to simply copy out notes that students then copy down; or to rely on edutainment in lieu of actual learning.
- Focusing on memorization and fact/definition/recipe recitation.
- Minimal assessments during the term and unfair, heavily weighted finals.
- Assuming that your course is the most important course and deserves more of the students' time and effort than other courses; being proud that it is a heavy course.
- Not respecting the students' time and context with respect to other courses, activities, situation, planning.
- Not pre-testing assessments and projects to make sure that you know what is involved and what the students will have to do.
- Failing to design the course so that the average student with average effort and skill can obtain an average mark.
- Teaching too much, too quickly; not using threshold concepts to teach less, teach better.
- Failing to satisfy the necessary and sufficient conditions for teaching methods; knowing when to use them, how to use them, being prepared to follow through and not cut corners.
Further reading
- https://helpfulprofessor.com/why-college-professors-are-bad-teachers/