This is advice Prof. Mitchell gave me at the beginning of our time co-teaching Phil 117: Nature & Environment.

May it come in handy for you!

1. Always put a brief outline on board

This really helped me during my time teaching Phil 117, but I had to let go of this approach for teaching Phil 127. My reasoning behind it was that I wanted to allow myself the space to digress, which I think is actually quite helpful for first year students in their first semester. I wanted to have the opportunity to speak on the nature of academic philosophy and offer advice for these students that are completely new to academia. Such a handholding was not necessary for Phil 117, which, as a class in Spring, welcomed young academics, but not complete novices.

2. Don’t try to cover everything in the text, focus on most important 3-4 points

Probably the most important piece of advice I have received with regards to teaching in the U.S. Back at home in Germany we would walk very slowly through the texts – such a meticulous work has not been possible for me here. But with 3, sometimes even just 2 topics to cover, I was able to compensate a lack of breadth with depth.

3. Practice timing yourself delivering lecture from notes out loud. Get a sense of how many minutes a page of your notes takes to deliver so you can adjust on the fly and not panic

In all honesty, I only did that once or twice, and that was only to test my general speed over 50min of teaching. As mentioned earlier, I like to digress and I like to preserve space for my students to ask questions and engage in discussions, so I don’t want to stick further to any kind of script beyond my presentation

4. Plan each lecture as a whole, i.e., with a beginning, middle, and end. 

I intentionally plan my classes this way, and I think such a structure occurs naturally. Before starting a new text I would have to introduce the topic and the author and then gradually increase the complexity of the content I am presenting. This would culminate in open questions and/or the application of our concepts and arguments to real life situations and phenomena. And that is how I would send my students home, with something to think about!

5. End on time and even if you don’t get to the conclusion you planned, spend last minutes of class reviewing what you did, as though it were a whole you intended.

I kinda managed to do that. The students most of the time didn’t know how much content and how many presentation slides I had planned for the class, so it was pretty easy to convince them we would stop right where I wanted to stop.

6. Write your lecture notes to facilitate all this, they shouldn’t be a detailed summary of the book

This I was able to realize the moment I started using presentations. That’s where all my notes were, concise enough as to not overwhelm the students, like a red string that guided me through my lecture. Extrapolating based on that turned out to be fairly easy for me.