“How will I know when I am ready?” Is this the question you ask yourself as the clock strikes midnight while you are frantically adding content to your discussion slides after working on it for 6 hours straight? Maybe you have the first draft of your thesis due to your advisor in two days. But you haven’t even started working on it because the slides you need for your class tomorrow aren’t ready. You feel like you never have time to write. Your research has taken a back seat as you constantly worry about being prepared in front of your students.

If any of these scenarios sound familiar, then you are falling into the trench defined by education aficionados as “The Teaching Trap.”

Why do some of us have a tendency to over-prepare for a TA discussion/lab session? There could be a number of different reasons. For example, some of us have an inherent inclination to provide all-encompassing coverage of information. Some of us feel the need to utilize every minute of class time to put new information into our students’ brains, and some of us are anxious that we’ll run out of material before the end of the period, so we cram every inch of every slide with dense information. Studies claim an alarmingly high number of TAs who are non-native speakers, women, and people of color spend a disproportionate amount of time preparing for their class so as to guarantee the recognition and respect of students

[Image Description: Moira Rose, from Schitt’s Creek, turns to the viewer while tilting her head and says “That doesn’t sound right”]

Pictured: When you tell us that it takes 6 hours to prepare for a 50-minute class

 

Is there a way we can save ourselves from over-preparation? Of course, there is! With the help of a simple student-centered solution called “Pattern Teaching.” As the name suggests, it is a teaching strategy to develop a regular structure (pattern) for the class. Below are 5 components of pattern teaching used to build a toolkit. You can arrange these distinct components together like Legos to build a meaningful learning environment for your students.

1) Getting Students Ready to Learn

In-class time: 5-8 minutes

Preparation time before class: Maximum 15 minutes

Depending on whether you teach a morning, afternoon and evening section, your students are coming to your classroom from lunch, from another job, from soccer practice or straight from their bed! Your biggest challenge is to redirect their focus from outside of the classroom to your lessons. To hook their attention, I find this to be an ideal time to both highlight the learning objectives of the lesson, as well as to make announcements about the next worksheet. You may also:

• Start the class with a writing exercise: Ask your students to write 3-4 sentences in response to a question relevant to the previous day’s material/assigned readings. You don’t need to grade these writing assignments, but you may want to use them for participation points. This exercise helps students to retrieve the information they have previously learned, as well as gives you an opportunity to assess success (or lack thereof) of student learning. Another useful approach is to utilize this time to make students develop their own learning logs. Learning logs require students to reflect on their learning/studying habits, something which many students rarely do. Therefore, the following questions yield answers that increase the likelihood of students adjusting their current learning habits to more effective ones:
  • Today I had a problem trying to...Tomorrow I will try to solve the problem by…
  • Today I made an important breakthrough in my understanding. The thing that helped me with this breakthrough was…
  • Today I was finally able to make progress because…
  • The easiest (or hardest) part of (the research for this project, this assignment, etc.) was…
     
• Review of material learned in the previous session: You can also utilize this time to highlight 3-4 key points from the previous session.
   
• Homework Review: It is a good idea to prepare a shortlist of 3-4 common mistakes you noticed in their last assignment and discuss those errors with your students at the beginning of the class.

 

[Image Description: A group of Minions looking towards something with anticipation and excitement.]

Pictured: Your students getting all excited as you start the class right!

 

 

2) Introducing New Material

In-class time: 10 minutes

Preparation time before class: Maximum 30 minutes

Remember, minimalism is the key here. For a 50-minute discussion, I usually prepare a 10-minute mini-lecture hitting all the key topics I aim to cover during that time period. Then, I prepare a set of questions related to the topic. After the mini-lecture, I ask these questions to the students. Sometimes students want me to explain a particular concept once more, and I may then go over certain portions of the mini-lecture again. You will see this takes a lot less time than preparing a lecture meant to cover all 50-minute.

 

• Limit and chunk information: If you are instructed by the professor to give lectures often, consider dividing your lectures into 10-15 minute chunks. Intersperse short activities between these chunks or encourage the students to discuss and rework notes in pairs.

 

• Short Youtube videos elucidating a concept: A visual illustration immediately engages students, particularly visual learners. Some additional sources for educational videos are Big Think, Brightstorm, and CosmoLearning.
   
• Set aside a specific time for mini-lecture preparation and stick to it: As you should spend no more than an hour and a half for teaching preparation per 50-minute session, plan ahead of time when you will do your prep work and be sure to adhere to this schedule.

 

[Image Description: In a classroom full of students, a man nods his head and says, "That's smart."

Pictured: Your students, after your mini-lesson and thought-provoking questions 
 

 

3) Let Students Engage with the Material

In-class time: 20 minutes

Preparation time before class: Maximum 20 minutes

This should take the bulk of your class time. Deep learning occurs in your classroom only when students are actively engaging with the material- reading, discussing, or writing that requires higher-order thinking. Therefore, we will focus on activities that develop student skills rather than activities that passively transmit information. You can use one or more of the following activities to engage students:

 

• Group/partner activity: Stop in the middle of a presentation and ask students a question. Have them think and note down ideas on their own for two minutes. Afterwards, ask students to discuss their answers with neighbors. Then invite a few pairs to share their findings with their classmates. This segment can also include activities like Send a Problem (making each group of students solve the same problem by rotating the problems among groups in a closed envelope), Case studies or Strip sequences (having groups arrange jumbled items in a sequence or find missing items in a sequence).

 

• Advanced Graphic Organizers: Ask students to generate concept maps or fill in tables that include blank cells.

 

• JiTT (Just in Time Teaching): Design a web-based assignment which may include responding to a prompt based on reading a book chapter/review article. The prompt should be due shortly before the class. Therefore, you will be able to read student submission in time to adjust the face-to-face session and respond to student needs you identify through their provided answers. My recommendation is to make the prompts progressively difficult. If students encounter a difficult prompt right at the beginning of the course, they may feel that they have nothing to contribute and immediately disengage from the material.

 

• Student presentation: The ability to communicate ideas to others and to be able to work in a collaborative environment are the two major employable qualities of an undergraduate student. It is also an opportunity for your students to challenge and expand their understanding of a subject by addressing others’ questions. You may also consider inviting guest speakers.

 

 

[Image Description: Theodore Templeton from The Boss Baby presents confidently in front of other babies in Baby Corp as they watch in admiration]

Pictured: Your students becoming effective presenters ready to take on the world!

 

4) Debrief the Outcomes of Student Discussions

In-class time: 10 minutes

Preparation time before class: Maximum 10 minutes

This activity should not take a lot of your preparation time but will need sufficient class time to conduct. A fraction of your students might lose sight of the point of the discussion or even the point of the section in the 20-25 minutes of small group work. I ask one or two students to volunteer to summarize for everyone their findings from their group activities. Bingo! All the students now immediately know the point of today’s session.

• Discussion leaders: You can assign the role of discussion leader to a pair/ group of students at the beginning of the quarter. This has the following benefits: 1) In case you have a quiet class, and no one wants to volunteer to share their discussion outcomes, then you know on whom to call. 2) This helps to prevent certain students from monopolizing the classroom and everyone (including the shy ones) gets a chance to speak.

 

5) Prepare Students for the next session

In-class time: 2 minutes

Preparation time before class: Maximum 5 minutes

This segment serves as an overview for the next session. Give the students an idea of what they can expect for the next session and how it connects to the session you just finished. Since you just concluded a wonderful, engaging class session, students will be more eager for the next class if they know how the next session is going to contribute to their overall knowledge.

[Image Description: Emma Watson carefully listens to something and then gets excited in agreement]

Pictured: You, after realizing how easy it is going to become prepared for your next session

 

 

Now that you have all of the components and pedagogical tools for pattern teaching, you can create a lesson plan by using ideas from one or more of these suggestion blocks. For an example, if one of your Monday sessions starts with a short writing activity followed by a mini-lecture and then a think-pair-share activity, you can start the next Monday with a video and then go over the home-works. And that it takes much less time to plan!

One last piece of advice: always be flexible! Sometimes you will see that after you have shared a new concept or shown a video, students end up asking you several questions. As you start to clarify these questions one-by-one, you realize that you don’t have sufficient time for the case activities you had planned to discuss. And that is OKAY! As long as you are engaging your students with the material using one or more of the techniques above, you are doing a great job! After all, great instructors tweak their lesson plans depending on the learning needs of their students.

Regardless of your teaching needs, the TADP team is always happy to help you with questions that you might have. Email us at tamentor@ucr.edu or tadp@ucr.edu to schedule a time to meet.