NOTE: Upon rereading this when I got up this morning, I realized that it is more than a little self-indulgent. But it was already written and I didn’t feel like writing something else. So here ya go.
Because you need to know this, I’m going to let you in on the process I go through when I prepare to teach a class for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at William and Mary.
First, I have to find a topic. Because I was a high school history, government, and economics teacher for 25 years, these are the subjects that are generally on my mind as I observe what’s going on around me. I think about the things that I would like to have emphasized in my classes, but couldn’t because of the time constraints of having a prescribed curriculum. (Don’t get me wrong – I think that’s a good thing. The teachers who have my students in class next year have to be able to trust that I taught them some core concepts this year.)
After a couple of years of teaching Osher classes, I realized that I often move from topic to topic based on a class I was already teaching or on some other event I was thinking about. Here’s an example of how this has worked.
Donald Trump’s presidency and the accompanying social media gabbling about a “Second Civil War” from his more insane followers made me think about the causes of Civil War. This was the origin of my class “Why the Civil War Happened and What We Can Learn From It.”
HINT: The answer is something like “when the institutions that are supposed to solve problems break down, violence follows.” The “what we can learn from this” is self-evident.
In researching this class, I came across George Washington’s 1796 “Farewell Address” as he left the presidency, and decided that this was the starting point for the eventual disruption of the Union. Washington focused on preserving the Union at all costs – and this meant lawmakers ignored the issue of slavery for more than 60 years, allowing its poison to fester and eventually challenge the nation’s existence.
As I tried to figure out the context for Washington’s address, I got caught up in the 1790s – a decade that is given little attention by most survey history courses. We tend to teach history from war to war, insinuating that the things that happen between the wars are somehow less important than the wars themselves. Since wars are always fought for a combination of unresolved political, economic, or social problems, ignoring these problems makes it impossible to understand war. So I decided to teach a course on the 1790s.
In researching the 1790s, I had to go back a bit in history to set that decade in context – and I encountered Benjamin Franklin in ways I had not expected. So I decided a course on Franklin was in order.
The Franklin course made me think about a future course comparing Franklin with Thomas Jefferson. That’s on the back burner right now, but it may appear in the next couple of years.
The 1790s course also got me thinking about the Pinckney family of South Carolina. They were everywhere in the early years of the republic – ambassadors, candidates for Vice President and President, congressmen and Senators, and state governors. Two of them were delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention. I was surprised about a couple of things – that they were as important as they were, and that I knew so little about them. A book about one of them – Charles Pinckney – is called “Forgotten Founder,” and I decided to resurrect him and his family. They are a fascinating family – possibly more important than any other single family of this era. I’ll be teaching this course for the first time in March, and it’s shaping up nicely.
Once I decide on a topic, I have to put a course proposal together. Proposals are usually due about six months before the semester when the class will be taught. The proposal process is usually pretty simple. The form asks for the proposed title for the class and an extended description of what the course will cover. I usually don’t know enough about the subject at the time I’m writing the proposal, so I don’t include an outline. Some instructors do. The proposal form also asks for information about the sources you plan to use; I haven’t usually identified them at this point, so I say something generic. The form also asks for the instructor’s qualifications to teach this course. Because I’ve taught for the program for a while, I don’t say much in this part of the proposal.
Once I’ve submitted the course proposal, I get to work. The first thing I do is browse Wikipedia. I know, I know, this is not a reliable academic source. But I have found it invaluable for defining, structuring, and limiting the content of a class. Many Wikipedia articles provide a list of sources at the bottom of the entry, and I use those to work backward into the more scholarly literature.
Then I go to World Catalog (https://www.worldcat.org/) to identify the relevant authors and books I need to access as I prepare the class. This also helps identify which libraries hold the books I’m interested in. I’m lucky to live in a town where there’s a university research library, so I can access a lot of the materials I’m looking for. In the course of preparing a course, I usually take my spreadsheet of books and spend a day or so at Swem Library at the college, where I skim the books and identify the ones that seem most essential to the course. I also Google the names of the books – I can sometimes find that they’ve been scanned and put online (or that significant parts of them have). I find journal articles, on JSTOR (https://www.jstor.org/) an online digital library of scholarly books, articles, and research reports. I have a free account with JSTOR and can find lots of things I need there – to either read online or download.
Once I find and download a bunch of online information, I compile it into a book that I publish through Lulu.com. I don’t make this available to anyone but me – it is a working document that is more convenient than clicking through a bunch of saved websites. This is way cheaper than printing the pages at home or at a copy center – a 200+ page bound book ordered through Lulu costs about $20. It takes 10 days for the book to arrive at my house.
If I come across books that I can’t find at the library (or that I think I want to keep longer than the library will let me keep them) I look for them on Amazon. I can buy most of these books used – my cutoff is about $15.00 a book, although I can get most of them for under $10.00. I usually buy fewer than 10 books as I’m preparing a class.
While I’m waiting for my Amazon and Lulu orders to arrive, I begin to set up my presentation. I use PowerPoint, and I’ve gotten pretty proficient at it if I do say so myself. My first steps are to decide on a theme, font, colors, and so forth. The program offers some pre-formatted designs, although additional templates are available online at no cost. I find that this is one way that I waste time while I’m “working.” I can spend hours juggling fonts, themes, colors, visual effects, and so forth.
I start with a projected broad outline for the class – what I intend to do on each of the three days that the class meets. Then I begin to break down each session into its two segments – before and after the break, which occurs after the first hour of the two-hour session. I like to reach an information pinnacle of some sort before I break – I don’t want to stop in the middle of a point because it’s break time. As my research progresses, I always alter this – once I know more, the information always comes together in different ways.
I do almost all of my actual writing and note-taking for the class on the slides themselves. I don’t take notes on separate paper and then copy them to the slides. On my slides, I draft the language I want to use, copy and paste images (including portraits, maps, buildings, significant landscapes, etc), and write suggestions or pose questions to myself so I don’t lose track of them. I make sure I make note of the sources of things on the slides themselves – once again, there’s less chance of losing things.
After I have a reasonable draft of the course’s content, I start looking for more interesting ways of presenting the information. A presentation that is just one text slide after another isn’t very interesting – I look for images that represent what I want to say. My presentation gradually evolves into a narrated slide show with interesting images rather than a series of slides with bulleted text. I also look for video I can insert into the slide. YouTube is a great source for video that explains an event or concept. When you embed a video in a slide, you can also snip it so that it shows just the minute or so that makes your point – there’s no reason to watch five minutes when one minute will do.
Once I have the draft in reasonably good shape, I take another run through my sources to see whether I missed anything. I sometimes can scoop up stuff that I overlooked or that wasn’t available earlier.
Then I begin to think about what I want to say in conjunction with each slide. Some instructors write a complete script for themselves, but I don’t do that often (although I did do it when I taught via Zoom – it’s much harder to control the pace of a class when it’s online, and I didn’t want to run overly short or long). I usually write a set of talking points for each slide, which I either print separately for myself or include in the “Notes” section of the slides, which displays on the instructor’s laptop during the presentation. This way, I don’t forget to say anything that I intended to include.
This helps me identify places where the flow of the presentation is awkward; either the slides are out of order or there’s not an obvious connection between a sequence of slides. Then I fix that, either by moving slides, adding or omitting slides, or editing my talking points to make the transition.
Next, I tinker around with the appearance of the slides. Are they visually appealing and interesting? How are they positioned on the page? Will class members be able to read the words? Is there good contrast between the color of the print and the background color? Do I want to animate parts of the slide so the content appears as I’m talking about it? How can I emphasize elements of a picture or map that I want people to focus on? (Frequently, that involves inserting circles around important details and having them appear when I want people to focus on that detail.)
Finally, I go to the room where I’ll be teaching to test to see that everything works – that the projector/laptop connection is live, that the microphone works, that my slides are clearly visible throughout the room, and so forth. Fortunately, the Osher program offers “tech training” in each classroom space a week or so before the semester begins.
I should not have said “finally” above – I continue to mess with things before the first session begins and in between sessions.
Lest you think I’m complaining – far from it. These activities keep my brain working and give me finite deadlines to get things done. I thoroughly enjoy the hours (and hours and hours) that I spend at my desk each day.
I don’t know if other instructors plan this way because we don’t really talk about it.
Ann's right. I recently started a portrait painting class, which I dropped when I learned that the "teacher" had no plan for the eight weeks, no plan for the first class, no experience teaching, was self-taught - nothing wrong with that except that she was totally unfamiliar with the "laws" of facial structure - and that while the class was described as "learn to", she really intended to have a studio session in which she could offer suggestions.
On behalf of anyone who will be taking your classs, "Thank you" for doing your job!
Whoa! Karen, I don’t think this essay is self-indulgent at all. Rather, it’s a guide I hope you keep as a reference for our instructors. And truly, what aren’t we talking about it? And thanks for the photo of your Happy Place! Nice!!