The Lecturer's Re-entry Plan: Designing an Encouraging First Week of Teaching

<p>The fortnight before teaching is the only period in the year when you have full, undivided attention. Use it for decisions, not for decoration.</p> <h3>Decide what you are actually going to change</h3> <p>Returning lecturers tend to over-change. You redesign every slide, rewrite every reading, restructure every assessment, then arrive in week one with nothing finished and a class that senses the churn. Aim the opposite. Rebuild the spine, keep the skin.</p> <p>Sort every element of the course into three buckets, and be ruthless about the third.</p> <ul> <li><strong>Keep.</strong> Anything that worked, that students use, and that you can explain in one sentence. In most courses this is 60 to 70 per cent.</li> <li><strong>Change.</strong> Anything that depends on a dead assumption: a pre-requisite nobody teaches any more, an assessment format students hated, a schedule that assumed a week of preparation you now know does not exist.</li> <li><strong>Retire.</strong> Anything kept from habit, guilt or because deleting it felt like admitting the course has no content. Delete it. A course with fifteen readings instead of twenty-five is a better course.</li> </ul> <p>The rule for week one is specific: <strong>no new required reading</strong>. Students arrive with a reading backlog they did not choose. Start the term with material you know cold, then add the demanding reading from week three, once the class has settled.</p> <h3>The fourteen-day plan</h3> <p>Do this in order. Each day should take 60 to 90 minutes of actual work, most of it on a single screen.</p> <table><thead><tr> <th>Day</th><th>Task</th><th>Minutes</th><th>Output you keep</th> </tr></thead><tbody> <tr><td>14</td><td>Audit the course against last year: what has to be rebuilt from scratch</td><td>90</td><td>A one-page list of broken elements</td></tr> <tr><td>13</td><td>Write the one-paragraph course promise: what a student will be able to do by week 12 that they cannot do now</td><td>45</td><td>A single sentence used in week one</td></tr> <tr><td>12</td><td>Rebuild the session skeleton for weeks 1 to 4: 90-minute sessions, minute by minute</td><td>90</td><td>Four session plans</td></tr> <tr><td>11</td><td>Choose the three readings for week one and check each one is readable in under 40 minutes</td><td>60</td><td>A short reading set</td></tr> <tr><td>10</td><td>Design the low-stakes diagnostic: 8 questions, 10 minutes, ungraded, no notes</td><td>60</td><td>A question set with answer key</td></tr> <tr><td>9</td><td>Publish the deadline map: every assessment, every week, in one table</td><td>75</td><td>A single image or PDF the students can screenshot</td></tr> <tr><td>8</td><td>Set up the feedback channels: where students post questions, where marks appear, office hours</td><td>45</td><td>Three links, all tested by you personally</td></tr> <tr><td>7</td><td>Test the technology end to end: slides, audio, screen share, polls, recording</td><td>60</td><td>A tested run-through, plus a backup plan on paper</td></tr> <tr><td>6</td><td>Write the first email to the class: short, warm, contains the three deadlines and one question</td><td>30</td><td>A sent email</td></tr> <tr><td>5</td><td>Prepare the first session opener: a 90-second example of what the subject is for</td><td>60</td><td>A script, revised twice</td></tr> <tr><td>4</td><td>Draft the group activity for session 2, with roles assigned on paper</td><td>60</td><td>A role sheet and a task sheet</td></tr> <tr><td>3</td><td>Re-read one classic piece of your subject and note where students usually get lost</td><td>75</td><td>Three marked trouble spots for slides</td></tr> <tr><td>2</td><td>Build the retrieval warm-up bank: 20 five-minute questions across the course</td><td>90</td><td>A reusable question bank</td></tr> <tr><td>1</td><td>Walk the first four sessions aloud, timed, with a colleague if you can find one</td><td>90</td><td>A rehearsed week one</td></tr> </tbody></table> <blockquote><p>If you only do six of those days, do days 13, 12, 10, 9, 7 and 6. Everything else is improvement; those six are the course existing again.</p></blockquote> <h3>The three artefacts you must have before students arrive</h3> <ul> <li><strong>The course promise.</strong> One sentence, in the students' language, describing a capability. Not a topic. Not a discipline. A capability: you will be able to take a raw dataset and defend a claim about it in writing. It goes on the first slide and in the first email, unchanged.</li> <li><strong>The deadline map.</strong> One image, every assessment, every week of term, marked with weight and due date. This is the single most useful thing you can give an anxious class, because it converts an unbounded task into a finite list. Mark the two heaviest consecutive weeks and say, in writing, that you know it is heavy and have spread the load.</li> <li><strong>The low-stakes diagnostic.</strong> Eight questions, ten minutes, no marks, no notes allowed. It exists for three purposes: to tell you where the class actually is, to give students a win in their first ten minutes, and to give you a baseline to compare with the same eight questions in week six.</li> </ul> <h3>Rebuilding rather than starting over</h3> <p>After a long break you will feel the urge to redesign the entire course from first principles. Suppress it for the first year back. Rebuilding the spine is safe and visible; rebuilding the philosophy is neither.</p> <p>Concrete rebuild steps:</p> <ul> <li>Take last year's slides and cut 30 per cent. If a slide has more than 60 words, cut it or split it.</li> <li>Find the one concept students always get wrong and give it twice the space you used to. Check your old feedback, your old exam comments, or ask a colleague who taught it last year.</li> <li>Replace the first 15 minutes of every session. Not the content. The opening. A retrieval question, a worked example, a poll, a puzzle.</li> <li>Rewrite the assessment brief so that it names the artefact and the standard, not the topic. Students comply with specifications; they flounder at essays titled A reflective essay on learning.</li> </ul>