I'm about to start a social sciences PhD and am required to lead 1st year undergraduate seminars. I haven't taught before and am nervous about how much I can cope with on top of starting the research. I was wondering what are your experiences of how many hours of teaching would be manageable per week on top of planning and marking? Thanks!

During the semester, I typically have 6 hours of teaching (and on top of that maybe spend 1-2 hours on prep) per week, and then I'd get the associated marking, which is typically a report and an exam for each student I teach, and mostly falls within a month of the last week or two of a semester (yes that means over christmas, too).

First thing to be careful of is that often your teaching will be described in terms of contact-time, so it is easy to overload yourself by thinking that the contact-time is the whole amount of time you'll actually spend - often your prep/marking time will be outside of that amount.

If you can, I'd recommend getting more than one class/group on the same module/seminar - then you're more effective i.e. 1 hour of prep to do the same seminar three times vs 3 hours of prep to do three different seminars? Unfortunately my department doesn't let us do this, and the ineffectiveness of it baffles me (and it also means that people teach on modules that they find absolutely boring, which makes it a hard job to engage students)

I'm the same, I do about six hours a week. After two years of teaching I spend very little time on prep as I teach the same modules each time!

Marking can take up a big bulk of your time, and usually over the holidays as PerceptualLenna says. I'd give yourself a week or two at least. Same as with teaching, it gets easier with practise.

I agree it does get easier with practice - marking especially. The first (2000 word) paper I marked took me about three hours. And it took a while to speed up because I was totally off-kilter with the criteria, and the comment-style to use, and the number boundaries for each grade etc. Two years in, I spend an hour or two getting used to the rubrics etc and then each paper takes maybe 30-45 mins.

I have been constantly told since starting that I "shouldn't be" spending more than 20 minutes per student. Well...if I didn't, they wouldn't get done.

Well this is reassuring that the 6 hours per week (3x 2 modules) I have been allocated is manageable if I am strict with myself! The trouble is that I'm going to have to do a lot of revison in order to teach the modules as I don't draw on the content in my most recent work! Did you receive much support from departmental staff, module leaders etc. when first starting out? As you can tell, I am more anxious about the teaching than my research!

I was the same, I had to read a lot of papers and familiarise myself with the lectures as the content wasn't something I was familiar with. Usually when you start out teaching it won't be areas that are related to your own PhD research, something that a lot of PhD students complain about but that's the way it is.

I did receive a lot of support but I have to approach them, lecturers will rarely chase you up asking how it's going. You could do some of the reading and think of some ideas for the sessions, then see what the module leader thinks?