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On Course, by James M Lang
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You go into teaching with high hopes: to inspire students, to motivate them to learn, to help them love your subject. Then you find yourself facing a crowd of expectant faces on the first day of the first semester, and you think “Now what do I do?”
Practical and lively, On Course is full of experience-tested, research-based advice for graduate students and new teaching faculty. It provides a range of innovative and traditional strategies that work well without requiring extensive preparation or long grading sessions when you’re trying to meet your own demanding research and service requirements. What do you put on the syllabus? How do you balance lectures with group assignments or discussions—and how do you get a dialogue going when the students won’t participate? What grading system is fairest and most efficient for your class? Should you post lecture notes on a website? How do you prevent cheating, and what do you do if it occurs? How can you help the student with serious personal problems without becoming overly involved? And what do you do about the student who won’t turn off his cell phone?
Packed with anecdotes and concrete suggestions, this book will keep both inexperienced and veteran teachers on course as they navigate the calms and storms of classroom life.
- Sales Rank: #117648 in eBooks
- Published on: 2009-06-30
- Released on: 2009-06-30
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
I wish I'd had this book when I began teaching. Lang's countless practical suggestions could help everyone from the new teaching assistant to the most senior professor. He challenges us to be better, more creative teachers. At the same time, his description of the strains in learning to teach-- especially the anguish we can go through when grading-- are both funny and comforting.
--Paul Umbach, University of Iowa
James Lang's On Course is a marvelous book, full of wisdom, wide-ranging and well-synthesized research, and honest advice about what to do, what not to do, and how to get yourself out of many a pickle through knowledge, cleverness, and courage--all qualities that are in the book intself. The book clarifies, demystifies, and inspires.
--Emily Toth, author, Ms. Mentor's Impecccable Advice
Briskly moving through the basics, [Lang] tackles the hard questions...with humor and insight...On Course is a vital resource for educators, even those who don't fit the first-year college-teaching market. My copy is dotted with notes about new ideas to try out in my lecture class this fall. Happily though, I took away from Lang's guidebook much more than techniques.
--Barbara J. King (bookslut.com)
If you are looking for a [college teaching] job, get a headstart by buying and reading this book. If you already have one, your teaching still stands to gain much from it.
--Greg Garrard (Times Higher Education Supplement 2008-09-04)
About the Author
James M. Lang is Associate Professor of English at Assumption College and former assistant director of the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University. He is the author of Life on the Tenure Track: Lessons From the First Year.
Most helpful customer reviews
62 of 63 people found the following review helpful.
Conversational and Humorous
By Daniela Newland
Lang's "On Course" was recommended to me by a friend who also teaches at the university level on a one-year contract. To prepare for my first "real" job after grad school, I bought and read a selection of teaching guides, and "On Course" complemented my little library nicely. The first thing that struck me is its humorous, conversational tone (never too casual, though), and I caught myself laughing out loud several times. The humor that springs from this book is born from insight and ample proof that the author still remembers his time in the classroom and is more than acquainted with the challenge of a group of tired undergrads who routinely rely on their instructor to get them through the day.
The title, Lang admits, is really "a conceit," as a true one-to-one application of each chapter to the responding week in the semester might not be practical. I pretty much read it all the way through, likely skimmed some chapters because they did not directly apply to my particular teaching situation, but I've already, as Lang recommends, reread certain passages and will continue to do so.
Everything in here, from teaching tips, what to wear, first-day-of class advice, university politics, the mid-semester doldrums to the recognition that new instructors probably do spend too much time prepping for class is just a bit off the beaten path--colored by very recent classroom experience, it seems. For example, teaching guides typically herald the use of some type of ice breaker. Lang, while recognizing the ice breaker's virtue, realizes that its mere use can clash with an instructor's personality and comments that new undergrads are typically subjected to an overkill of ice breakers anyway. Likewise, Lang's chapter on the use of technology in the classroom surprises: while most teaching guides tend to advise, almost push for, some kind of technology in the classroom, Lang discriminates between the many uses of technology and, once again, recognizes that its use has to match the teacher's personality. He then offers suggestions on how to gradually add technology--essentially, staying in our chalk-and-blackboard comfort zone while dipping our feet into the vast ocean of electronics. This chapter, like every other one in this book, offers a variety (I really wanted to say 'treasure chest') of material and suggestions, as well as a section on resources.
It's a strength (and, one could argue, a weakness) of this book that it targets TAs, one-year lecturers, MAs, and tenure-track PhDs at the same time. The reason I imagine it could be called a weakness is because it doesn't dive deeply into specific issues either one of these groups encounters. Then again, the common address serves as a reminder of how closely we work together in this microcosm--always good advice at the start of a career.
24 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
This is the one!
By Lohas addict
I had already read 3 books on how to teach college courses, and looked at two others. Now I wish I had started with this. Nothing but very specific, practical advice. I've TA'd several times before, I'd read those other books, and I have my research to do, so I have little patience for books that tell me what I don't need to be told or that wouldn't make much difference anyway. I can say that this book has no wasted space; I was grateful for all of it. No vague generalizations. Every point gets exactly as much space as it needs and no more. No BS, no platitudes, no rehashes of common sense. Just the right amount of allowance for the fact that different teachers will find that different approaches work for them.
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
Useful advice, but needs retooling for science teachers
By Jordan Bell
I'm a PhD student preparing to lecture a course (differential equations) for the first time this summer, after having been a teaching assistant for several years. I will first write about some useful advice I have taken from Lang's book, and then present a weakness of the book.
Writing the syllabus is a concrete way of planning the course. When you plan what you are going to do in the course, you should be thinking about what do you want students to know, not about a list of topics to cover. This shifts the emphasis from disembodied topics to what students will understand. "Put more broadly, when students walk out of the final exam, or hand you that final paper, in what ways will you have changed them?"
In the course description say why the material matters. Why are the students learning this material? Be honest and concrete. Why do you think the material is important? Be more concrete than just "This is something that someone who wants to do this field needs to know"; explain why in this field we need to know it.
When asking students if they have any questions, don't wait two seconds and then return to speaking. Wait ten seconds. This will feel uncomfortable, but if you don't give long pauses students won't have time to put together a question, and also if there is an awkward pause they will want to break it with a question.
Students have much higher retention for material at the start of a lecture. So front load it. Say what you are going to say, and then say it, so at least they remember your summary. The best is to break the lecture into 20 minutes chunks, because that is a period students can remember well. This doesn't mean you need coffee breaks between the pieces, but segment the material this way.
You don't have to teach everything in the lecture. You can assign reading that the students are responsible for knowing. In a lecture, summarize, highlight, and clarify. Practice good exposition: repeat important points and emphasize them when you are speaking. Stating them at beginning and at end is a good idea.
Get students to write about how the course is going partway through the semester. This will get them to think about the course, will let you know what is working and what isn't, and will also make students feel that you care about their learning.
Lang gives advice from Robert Boice about "active waiting". You don't need large blocks of time to prepare for classes. First make preliminary notes on a class well in advance. Second, you can start formal preparation before you have figured out the perfect way to say something. Finally, prepare in short sessions over a long period, rather than in one burst. Then instead of having a constant low level of anxiety about your upcoming all day preparation session, you have ideas for the class in the back of your head, and this is a more useful expenditure of mental resources.
I will now present a flaw in this book. I am quite detailed in this criticism, but I think for an author publishing under the Harvard University Press imprint one can hold them to a demanding standard.
The big flaw in this book is that Lang gives no useful advice (beyond general advice that applies to all teaching) for science instruction, aside from mentioning the birthday paradox, which is one of many striking ways one could start a probability course. Here are two examples of how shallow Lang's advice about science teaching is. For art history and philosophy, to get ideas of students' ideas about the subject he asks them questions about the content of the subject. For biology, rather than asking some question internal to the subject, all he comes up with is asking them what careers might depend on biology (p. 33). I don't do biology, but if I were writing a book like Lang's I would have taken the time to read a first year biology book and find some interesting internal questions in the discipline. When Lang writes about group work, which I think is an excellent idea for mathematics tutorials, his suggestion is to "Complete a complex mathematical equation, or solve a problem". I don't know what it means to complete an equation and I don't think Lang does either. I think he was trying to give a nod to science; it would be better to say he knows nothing about science and won't try to give advice, or to actually attend a science class and see what they spend their time doing. Solve the equation? Derive an equation from physical principles, like the heat equation? I think this is merely an instance of someone who knows nothing about math associating math with equations. At its best what he might have meant is writing out a chemical reaction; I guess he said complex because completing one equation didn't sound like a weighty enough task. To earn the right to speak about a subject doesn't mean that one must enter the discipline, just that they should sweat enough through it to have learned one thing that they can talk about.
I have never seen a classroom discussion in a mathematics course either when I was an undergraduate or a graduate student, and Lang doesn't give the concrete advice one would need to try this. What the literature on college teaching needs is general advice on teaching from a mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, etc.
But although Lang could have done a more thorough job with the book by reading the basics of various subjects, he has still done good work and written a useful guide.
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