Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
Ten researchers recall what surprised them about their first lectures and what they wish they had known
Nature asked ten PhD students, postdocs and faculty what surprised them about teaching for the first time. Their answers are recollections about preparation. The piece reports no student outcomes.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- Nature's careers section collected accounts from ten PhD students, postdocs and faculty members about what surprised them when they started teaching at university.
- Geneticist Lubomir Tomaska was a first-year PhD student covering an introductory genetics class on DNA replication when, ten minutes in, he says he had lost the attention of about 90 per cent of the hall.
- Olivia Bizimungu, a neuroscience PhD candidate at McGill University, says doctoral programmes train scientists and researchers and do not train teachers.
- Melanie Ortiz Alvarez De La Campa began asking experienced professors for help after she realized that students in her undergraduate courses were processing information at different speeds.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint There are no student outcomes here and no comparison group, so a department cannot rank the three remedies on offer: a formal teaching course, sitting in on colleagues' classes, or leaving the new lecturer to read the textbook.
- decision A programme that puts first-year PhD students in front of undergraduates is choosing to spend a real cohort's contact hours on someone's first attempt, and the only fixes available inside that term are reused materials and a room walkthrough.
- capability Equipment is the part a first-timer can eliminate in advance, since a dongle, a microphone and a lectern login can each be tested days before the class. Delivery skill cannot be tested that way.
- cost The remedy most of the contributors reach for runs on experienced faculty hours: classes observed, conversations held. The piece never puts that time in a workload model.
Two of the contributors put subject mastery narrowly. "Knowing the subject for university teaching is not enough to give a good lecture or seminar," Tomaska said [6]. Melanie Ortiz Alvarez De La Campa, who finished a pathology PhD at Brown University in May, assumed when she first taught undergraduates that subject knowledge alone would be enough to teach well [12]. Insufficient and counterproductive are different charges. The piece reports neither student outcomes nor any comparison of lecturers by depth of subject knowledge [22]. Across the quoted accounts, one figure appears, Tomaska's estimate of 90 per cent [21].
That estimate comes from a class he gave more than 30 years ago, prepared from a textbook chapter and a thick stack of transparent slides [2][4]. "I felt like a cyclist climbing a steep hill without water and energy," he said of the lecture [5].
Nature reports that academic training, especially in doctoral programmes, tends to concentrate on research skills over teaching skills [7], and that is the least anecdotal claim in the piece. Some programmes require students to take on teaching anyway, with limited experience of it [10], and Tomaska says PhD students entering his programme often begin teaching immediately [9].
The advice divides by whether a beginner can act on it at all. Nirodha Weeraratne, a postdoc at Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, said: "Guess what questions will be asked during discussions, and be ready with plausible answers" [15]. Guessing well takes a sense of where a cohort gets stuck. A first-time lecturer has not acquired that sense yet. Liza Bolton's checks are mechanical. "Log into the lectern, test your slides and check your connections," said Bolton, a statistician at the University of Auckland [17]. "Do you need a USB-C or HDMI dongle? What is the microphone situation?" [18]
On materials, Aeriel Leonard, a materials scientist at Ohio State University, said: "Don't start from zero" [11]. Tomaska suggests researchers find out whether their university runs formal teaching courses [20]. Ortiz Alvarez De La Campa went to colleagues instead: "If you have the opportunity, sit in on some courses where you're going to teach and see which professors resonate with you in terms of what they're doing, and talk to them about it," she said [14]. Bolton sets the expectation for a first attempt low. "The preparation you do for lesson 1 will look entirely different from lesson 100," she said [19].
What to watch
- A matched or randomised evaluation of first-lecture training that measures student exam performance. These ten accounts do not attempt one.
- Whether graduate programmes that require teaching add credit-bearing pedagogy courses of the kind Tomaska points students toward.
- Whether departments start recording who sat in on whose classes, making the senior-colleague time the advice depends on visible in workload models.