Hi guys. I'm just posting to ask for advice or tips on how to fill a lecture. I did my first lecture tonight - a 1 hour lecture and 45 minute discussion and 10-15 minute break (factoring in time spent getting in, distributing sheets etc.). I had spent about 3 days preparing the lecture doing out my lecture slides, doing the necessary readings and writing out my lecture but still feel it fell flat. Now maybe it was because it was my first time lecturing (I've done smal discussion groups for 3 years) but I kept tripping myself up, realised there was a lot of repetition in my notes. I felt confident walking in but then when I went to start I found my throat and mouth were so dry, I had to stand in the one spot and read off my paper (when really I would like to be able to walk around and ad lib). The lecture is not really my thesis topic so it's hard/impossible to ad lib as I don't know the material well enough. The group are also all a lot older than me. I'm 20 something, they're 40 something and someone even asked me my age the minute I walked in and was I the lecturer! I think that might be a factor in my nervousness. But as I said I didn't feel nervous at all until I went to speak because I knew I was so well prepared so I just don't know why I kept repeating myself and was unable to think. Very worried now about whether students will leave in their droves from my lecture and the impact it will have on my PhD. Have any of you lectured? How did you find it when you first started? How did you cope? How did you fill an hour? I want this course to be enjoyable for them and myself and I did do the work but my performance fell flat. Any tips? Thanks peeps :-)

======= Date Modified 12 Sep 2011 22:03:43 =======
I am a senior lecturer with seven years experience, but my first lecture was very much the same as yours.  There is no quick fix I am afraid, just keep delivering the lectures and you will develop your personal style and you will improve every time.

Delivering a 2hr lecture without notes, is difficult, it took me five years to develop my subject knowledge to the point where I could arrive and just talk around the topic without any written notes, so please don't worry about that.

Remember every lecturer started just like you, I remember the first module I taught, being a complete disaster, but now my lectures go really well, it is just down to experience.

To give you one piece of advice, not all students will like you, not all students will attend, some will fail (usually around 20%) and some will walk out of your sessions. This happens to everyone, whether your a Professor or a PhD student, so don't worry about it, in fact external examiners get seriously worried with 100% pass rates!  If you can put up with that you will do just fine.


Finally, no one has ever been asked to leave a PhD because of one or two poor lectures, every one of us delivered awful lectures when we started out, in fact I think your inaugural lecture went rather well (up) compared to mine.

Good Luck with it, your doing fine.

Forgot to say, hence the edit, the dry throat, is very normal, I suffer from it every September, its just because you are not normally delivering lectures so your mouth and throat are not prepared.  I take a small bottle of water to every session for the first three weeks of every academic year, while my throat adjusts.

Hi JStanley, I've given quite a few lectures during the 5-6 years I've been a sessional - probably an average of about 6 -7 per semester (although much more last year), so nothing like as many as full-timers. I find things go much, much better if the subject matter is close to my research topic, and like you I tend to repeat when I'm not sure of a subject - as if I am going over it for myself. It is hard to be confident when you don't really know what you are talking about - and everyone expects you to be the expert.

I am in awe of people who give dynamic engaging lectures week after week! I hope to get there one day...

Thank you Tester for your wise and encouraging words. They were very pertinent for me.

I think it depends on your subject. I've done quite a few lectures during my PhD and its quite easy to engage the group on some level because what we teach them is related to their experience (which they have to have to get on the course) and so during the lecture I can stop and ask for people's opinions/experiences etc. Could you do that with yours?

Hii Sneaks, yes I have found that asking questions is a good way to engage the studes, but the degree of success you might get with that approach can depend on group size. With 45 it's great and you can get a really good patter going, but, I have found with groups of 90/100 plus it's not so good; although still better than just talking 'at' people. My teacher training taught me that just talking is the worst way of teaching people - making them passive, and they'll quite quickly switch off and stop thinking about the subject. I suspect this is why I don't really like giving lectures. In my ideal world there would be no lectures, just interactive sessions.

Ditto to the responses so far but I just wanted to add something on the 'feeling young' issue. I'm really sorry that one of your students was mean enough to ask your age and to doubt that you were the lecturer - but remember it says more about him/her and their ageist assumptions than it does about your ability! After all, someone has given you a contract to teach because they think you are perfectly capable. I have though been in the exact same position - a class made up almost entirely of mature students, who were not happy to have late 20s me teaching them, and made this attitude clear on day 1. It did get better with the majority but there were two people who were difficult throughout (frankly by the end of that semester I was close to murder - to this day the words 'university of life' send shivers down my spine). My top tips from that experience - look as professional as you can in dress, communication etc - it gave me a bit of extra confidence. It's better to say I don't know when asked a question you can't answer than bluffing. Respect their professional backgrounds but never lose sight that you're there to deliver academic material and that's what they get assessed on. A bottle of water is invaluable not just for the dry throat but to give yourself a few seconds breather if you feel panicky. If you are worried about finishing earlier, take a couple of links of youtube films or similar that you could show if you feel your timing is off. And good luck - it will get better.

Just to add to this, one good piece of advice I was given when starting my lecturing was that if I was asked a question I didn't know, to simply reply along the lines of "I don't know the answer to that, I'd be interested to find out, would you look into it for next week's session?"

I only had to use it once (on a particularly awkward mature student) and it definitely worked!

Lol! Noctu’s last response there is so funny. I must remember that one. If anyone asks me I’ll say I don’t know and will you look into it. That’s a way of ensuring nobody asks awkward stuff ;-)
Firstly, thank you Tester for bumping the thread to the top. I had assumed no-one would ever respond so thank you very much. Your kind words made me feel a lot better. It was good to hear someone as experienced as you now are let some of us less experienced people in on the secret that you senior lecturers were once nervous just like us! The dry throat thing… I practiced and practiced my lecture notes for the second lecture and think that may have been the reason I didn’t get dry this time. I had my bottle of water but didn’t need it too much which was amazing. So I think you’re right that you’ve just got to get your throat used to all that talking! I really knew what I was talking about this week and amazingly was able to ad lib! Unfortunately it won’t be like that every week as for some weeks I really don’t know the material at all so I’ll need to do a lot of work to pull that off those weeks. I was told to cover some particular areas and so I had to include some stuff that I knew nothing about.
Yeah people walked out in my first lecture which was worrying but as you say you can’t please everyone and my performance was not good that week. The second one went really well both lecture and discussion. I had to prepare very well and practice it about 3 times before the real event and then was confident enough to just go in and do it.
So thank you Tester as your comments really made me feel a lot better. Also, Eska I agree it is so much easier if the topic is related to your thesis (as the second week was) as you know it then and are much more confident but as I said that’s going to be a problem for some weeks. Sneaks – yep the discussion works very well and it is material they can relate to everyday life so the discussion for the second one was great.
Bewildered – thank you very much for your comments. Yeah, I have been told I look younger than I am so that’s another problem in this case. Yes, quite right the person was very rude to ask making me feel like I couldn’t possibly be the lecturer. I guess I should have been stronger and had a comeback but it was so difficult being my first time. I agree about the dress thing. I think power dressing is a good point. It’s like putting on a persona. I even noticed my accent was slightly different. I think I pronounce my words better when I lecture! No-one would understand me in my real accent ;-)
Cheers folks. Twas fab :-)

Hi there
Just a short reply to say I totally know the feeling about not knowing your subject matter! After my PhD I started a lecturing job which was like a total shock to the system. I was hired on my particular subject expertise and then quickly shuffled around the department teaching anything and everything for any staff who were too busy or wanted to reduce their teaching. I'm still in the job, and have taught a whole range of topics to final year and MSc students, including stuff I've never even studied myself, not even remotely related to my area, never mind something I specialise in. It's totally nerve wracking when you are faced with students at that level and having to teach stuff you have only started learning about 4 days before, technical subjects included.
One thing I found was handy was discussion groups. When faced with a class who just don't answer if you ask questions, either due to shyness or just laziness at having to think for themselves, I would tell them to discuss something in groups for 10 minutes. Then I'd walk around and chat to each group, helping lead discussion and make sure they are on the right track. It lifts the class, and gives you a much needed break from holding the fort and talking for an hour. Also, if you can, learn a diagram and instead of just putting it up on a slide, use a white board and interaction with the class to draw the diagram together. It helps them understand it much better, and uses up some time too! Hope this helps for some of the scarier classes!

they're some really good tips AQ, thank you! I'm just about to start lecturing full time (well hopefully not actually lecturing full time, but its a FT post). I'm going from doing lecture/seminars (i.e. all in one time) to lectures, then seminars. I'm guessing my lecutres have to be quite 'presenty' i.e. no group discussion. And the seminars focus on the discussion etc. So how do make the lectures less 'dry'?

Nah, keep lectures interactive or students will switch off and it's hard to get them back! I keep seminars/tutorials for proper group activities, like going over a paper and discussing it like a journal group, or extended group work where i present or teach something for first 10 mins and they work on it for the rest. But for lectures, you just need to get them to interact for a few minutes every 15-20 mins or so and it'll be fine. The first revision lecture I did was a total surprise for me. As it was a revision class I let them pick a topic that they were unsure of, and basically retaught it, but in a much more relaxed style, going over some things really slowly and then firing questions at them out of the blue. Example..."so organophosphates are nerve toxins, as they interfere with the nervous system ..."(then I'd just swing round and call out) "What do organophosphates interfere with?!" I think the first few times I did it they were like WTF???...but by the end they were smiling and answering straight away, and they had to listen cos I'd keep asking, and perhaps most importantly, as they were really simple questions they didn't feel too self conscious shouting out the answer, and they actually remembered it better and understood it better. The best bit was when one student came up at the end and said it was my best lecture yet. I guess everyone finds their own style, but I found that helped me stop them from snoozing! :$

lol that sounds great! I'm a little worried, I'm used to teaching classes of about 50, but I think this will be 100-150 and they're only 55 min slots :$

55 mins is no problem, stick in less content and put in links to the rest as extra reading. A lot of students forget that directed learning is only a small percentage of their course, and that they have to do their own stuff. Also, there is a thing called turning point in my uni, do you know if you have access to it? It's basically a set of buzzers, that link in with powerpoint, so you can ask a question, and instead of waiting for students to answer, they can each 'vote' for which ever answer they think is best, a la Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, and then you can use that as interaction that works well for larger classes. Or I used to have a lecturer who stuck in a random slide half way through as a 'break slide' to lift things a bit. Good luck Sneaks!
And JStanley, I look a lot younger than I am too, I still get refused alcohol without ID and one of my students parents was quite rude when she met me saying she couldn't believe I was a lecturer etc. But I just brush it off and say to them "oh lucky me, you'd never know I'm grey underneath from all the work of getting my PhD" ;-)

hmm, I've heard of turning point and asked about it - particularly good for stats I think where people get embarrassed if they don't get it. BUt I've heard its a bit of a hassle to set it up?

Hey all! They use the 'turning point' thing at the uni I'm at (although I never knew that's what it's called until now!). I haven't been involved with it personally, but I know they use it with statistics classes so that the lecturer can assess whether the students are a) listening, and b) getting it, and also so that the students get a chance to get some feedback on their progress. If most of the students are giving the wrong answer to a question, then it gives the lecturer instant feedback so they can go back a few slides and explain something again. When I was teaching undergrads last year they were raving about what a good tool it was- and apparently they all get a little remote control device to keep with them all year, which they were particularly excited about! It does sound like a good way to keep people interested- here the undergrad lectures in psychology in first and second year have up to 350 people in them so it's not possible to be more personal until the elective modules later on in the course (although of course there are seminars etc as well). Best, KB