Preparing to Teach
As you prepare to become a professor, you want to gain teaching experience and get ready for full-time teaching. The resources on these pages are designed to help you tackle those challenges. This collection of resources is an outgrowth of the annual Preparing for an Academic Career in the Geosciences Workshops.
Jump down to Getting teaching experience * Course design * Daily class planning * Documenting your teaching
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Getting Teaching Experience
Many students get some teaching experience in graduate school, either as laboratory teaching assistants or as course instructors. However, you may not have as much experience as you'd like. How can you get more?
Course Design
Even if you've taught a course in graduate school, you probably followed an existing syllabus. How do you create your own course, from scratch? How will you formulate course goals, organize content, and assess your students (and your own) success? Even if you are not yet teaching, thinking these questions through now will allow you to "hit the ground running" when you get a job -- and will impress interviewers when they ask how you would approach teaching a particular course.
Daily Class Planning
Whether you've been asked to teach a class as part of your on-campus interview or you're about to start full-time teaching, now is the time to think about how to plan a class period. Sure, the syllabus says "introduction to minerals," but what will you actually do for the allotted 50 minutes of class time? The resources on this page help you to identify your goals for the day, learn about teaching techniques that work, and find existing exercises (or design new ones) that accomplish your goals via those techniques.
