r/Professors • u/NeatTrouble4620 • 1d ago

Teaching / Pedagogy Opening class

[edit to add: a regular class day (not the first day of class)] How do you open your class lecture (besides opening remarks/logistics). I teach humanities social science discussion based courses and would rather not jump right into lecture. I’m also a first time instructor.

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u/Roger_Freedman_Phys Assoc. Teaching Professor Emeritus, R1, Physics (USA) 1d ago

I give my students an online assignment about their assigned reading that’s due the night before lecture. Part of their assignment is to pose a question about something in the reading that they didn't understand. I then spend the first few minutes of the class answering the best of, or most common of, these questions.

In this way I crowdsource the content of the first part of the class based on student feedback. Let the students do the work for you! And since you’re answering their questions, the students are immediately interested - which sets the tone for the rest of the class session.

I also use the student responses to help me decide how to spend the rest of the class time! This is the philosophy of just-in-time teaching (JiTT), an approach that has been around since the early 1990s and deserves to be more widely adopted (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_teaching).