You signed your first university teaching contract. Congrats! Now what? As an adjunct entering the academy, there’s a good chance you’ve been hired last minute with little time to prepare. Even if you secured the gig with lead time, you have other responsibilities (likely, a whole other job!) and need to be efficient and effective in getting ready. In either case, don’t feel bad and don’t panic. Just follow these steps.
Play to your strengths
Your first order of business is to determine your strengths. As a new instructor, you won’t have teaching experience, but you will have traits and skills that you have gained over years of working as a professional. Your number one strength is subject matter expertise, perhaps the most important trait when leading a college course as an adjunct. Students respect an expert.
Another immediate strength is your real-world experience, which is essential for providing context to the curriculum. But beyond those, you will have accumulated multiple other strengths that will benefit you in the classroom. From project management to public speaking and presentation skills, to problem-solving acumen, to expertise in a particular industry software, to humour and approachability – all these can come from you.
Do this next: during prep, write down three strengths that you are most confident in. Then, ask yourself: How can I run a course that leverages these strengths and offers students something beyond what they’ll get in their readings? Are you a communicator? Rely on storytelling. Do you have relevant real-world examples? Use case studies to enrich basic principles being learned in class. Are you a maker? Create visuals and physical demonstrations. And, of course, mix and match these options as desired.
Caveat: play to your strengths, but maintain balance. If you’re a natural orator, absolutely incorporate lectures into your plans. But remember lectures are the protein in the main dish. Gen Z students need active engagement, so keep those pithy monologues to 15-minute chunks so you can add vegetables and spice, like quick polls, reflective writing or group debates.
Get a syllabus ready
The syllabus is the planning document used by all and read by none – until someone misses a deadline. If you recall your time in school, you may be surprised that universities now more than ever treat the syllabus as a pseudo legal contract. As such, it contains pages of required statements, like health and safety procedures, support services and accommodation, academic integrity and non-discrimination policies, just to name a few.
But the syllabus isn’t just bureaucratic legalese. It is both a planning and a communication tool. Done well, it will save time, codify expectations and support student learning at the outset. Use the syllabus, a regular calendar, and an academic calendar to lay out the whole semester. Take special note that university holidays and breaks will likely be different from your work holidays. Set deadlines, major deliverables, testing dates and incorporate “flex” time. Also, be extremely clear on grading policies and late work, and establish communication etiquette. While it is easier for regular faculty to be lenient or make other exceptions, contingent faculty don’t always have the same luxury, given their other professional obligations. That said, you must be fair.
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Pro tip: get your hands on old materials. If the course has been taught before (for adjuncts, that will be the case 90 per cent of the time), ask the department chair or administrative assistant for the past few years’ worth of syllabi. They’ll give you an idea of what’s already been covered, what students should expect from that course, and how much leeway you as the “instructor of record” will have to make modifications. Even if you don’t copy from them verbatim (which is valid to do for a regularly offered class), they’ll help you avoid reinventing the wheel.
Once you have much of the syllabus constructed, begin to incorporate assignments and assessments that lean into your strengths. Maybe you want to incorporate more discussions into your assessments. Maybe you want students to use spreadsheet software to complete computational work. We both came from professions that used progress report meetings and found that those translate very well with students – they clear up confusion and frustration and put students on the right path to completing the course.
Assemble your tools
You are not the first person to teach a college class so focus on teaching smarter, not harder. Although your first experience will inevitably be a bit experimental, you can speed up the acclimatisation process by focusing on these three areas: active learning, using simple systems and giving students clear expectations.
Active learning is when you blend or sometimes replace the stereotypical 75-minute lecture with batched activities like short discussions, “think-pair-share”, “clicker” questions and quick writes. These strategies allow your students to build knowledge with you. Active learning increases engagement and places ownership and responsibility on to the learner. Pro tip: if you are unfamiliar with how to employ active learning look to your university’s centre for teaching and learning for help.
Simple systems will get you through the semester. Here’s a big one: teach less each session by setting only two to three major goals. We have learned the hard way that a 14-goal PowerPoint slide deck doesn’t work in a single class session.
Finally, be sure to set clear expectations. In-class assignments should be clearly explained, and assessments should match your objectives (eg, assessing critical thinking may not pair well with a true-false quiz). Student behaviour, participation and accountability should be expressly stated. The key is to be transparent. When you give an assignment, tell students why they’re doing it, how it connects to learning goals, what percentage it counts for and how you’ll grade it (Pro tip: learn to use grading rubrics).
Teaching your first college course is both exhilarating and nerve-racking, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Follow these pearls of wisdom that we’ve collected over several decades and you’ll be on your way to being a valuable albeit contingent member of the academy.
Daniel Martínez and Robert Sanford are former university faculty and authors of The Contingent Professor: Advice for Adjuncts, from which the advice in this article is derived.
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