Ask HN: Learning How to Teach
My experience is college-level teaching and faculty mentoring.<p>There&#x27;s a huge literature of both popular and scholarly books on developing effective teaching. You can look into the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning to find lots of references. Most colleges and universities have Centers for Teaching, and their pages will usually contain resources intended to help new professors and grad students get better at teaching.<p>If I had to recommend one book, I&#x27;d go with <i>Small Teaching</i> by James Lang. It&#x27;s accessible and rooted in learning science, with an emphasis on techniques and tips you can begin incorporating into classes right away. It builds on, rather than replaces, your existing pedagogy, and the techniques work across disciplines.<p>The area where most new professors struggle is in course organization. When you know something well, there&#x27;s a tendency to see it as a gigantic blob of interconnected content. To teach effectively, you have to set overarching goals (at the course level, unit level, and even daily class meeting level) and design your activities to support those goals. The general term for this approach is &quot;backwards design&quot; and the standard text is <i>Understanding by Design</i> by Wiggins and McTighe. It&#x27;s aimed at K-12 education but everything in it applies to other levels.<p>The dominant trend in pedagogy, for the past decade, has been the movement away from lecture-dominated presentations and towards active learning. Classes should include a combination of short presentations on content, but supplemented with quick discussions, hands-on activities, or conceptual check-ins to make students engage with the material while it&#x27;s being presented. Lang&#x27;s book has a bunch of techniques, and any search for active learning will turn up more ideas. From a scholarly perspective, Carl Wieman&#x27;s work on physics education has been highly influential.<p>For teaching across the organization, I&#x27;m familiar with work on how faculty cultures around teaching evolve, and how faculty adopt new practices. The key seems to be having small groups of colleagues that trust each other and share tips and advice.<p>Last point: assessment is another layer that you may or may not care about. If you do, think about how to integrate assessment into the design of your course to support the overall learning outcomes. Wiggins and McTighe describe different kinds of assessments that are appropriate for different part of the class (e.g. daily formative assessments vs. unit or course-level summative assessments). A starting point for thinking about effective assessment is Bloom&#x27;s Taxonomy, which lays out a hierarchy of complexity for different assessment tasks. I&#x27;m a big believer in Specifications Grading, where almost everything is assessed on a two-level satisfactory&#x2F;unsatisfactory scale.<p>Teaching is a big part of my life, so let me know if you have follow-up questions and I&#x27;ll do my best to answer.