Teaching tips we wish they'd told us before we started, small college class edition

Abstract

Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee..." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844. At the SIGCSE Symposium in 2007, we presented a panel in which seasoned teaching faculty from four large, PhD-granting universities shared the teaching tips we wished we'd known before starting our careers [1]. The difference from earlier "Teaching Tips" panels [6] was that our suggestions were meant to be hidden gems less often highlighted by our colleagues or by some of the best-known teaching resources [2, 3, 4, 8, 10, 11]. We clustered our tips into several categories: Lecturing, Office (hours), Staff (mentoring), Exams (authoring & administering), Labs (authoring & running), Section (TA-led discussion), Projects (and homework; authoring & supporting), and Meta (advice spanning categories). The session was received quite well, and the audience contributed many of their own teaching tips throughout the presentation. Since all of the presenters in 2007 regularly taught large, hundred-student classes, many of their suggestions (e.g., lecturing in a large venue or managing an army of teaching assistants) were not relevant to the experience of teaching small classes. Quite a few attendees suggested there be a follow-up session with presenters who could address the challenges specific to small college or university classes. To that end, we present the "Small College Class" edition, with seasoned educators who have expertise teaching smaller classes at their university or college. The position statements that follow offer a random sampling of two of these "hidden" pearls; presenters will share many more during the session, and time will be provided for audience participation. We'll endeavor to capture all the tips for an online collection. Complementing the categories above, we have added two more that capture the intimate setting of small classes: - Classroom (organization, interactions, and incentives) - Personal (fostering relationships).