27 Preparing lecture content
What’s your procedure for preparing lecture content? Put differently, how would you describe your lecture development workflow?
BF: I was teaching remotely during the pandemic and was only doing a synchronous lecture about once a month. All the other weeks I was recording a 20-30 minute slideshow of lecture material based on the readings for the week, and I had promised to have those up by noon on the Friday before. I found I’d do some of the readings on the weekend or Monday evening, then begin writing the lecture script (since that was posted as well) and the slides together simultaneously on Tuesday, finishing them and recording them on Thursday so that I often had them posted on time. The more I did, the better I was at deciding which material to include or exclude, and getting the length consistent. Based on my guest lecturing experiences in the Before Times, I’d say the workload was close to the same as it would be if I were doing an hour’s worth of in-class lectures, but without having to build in extra time and questions for student responses… which was mostly a shame, because I love classroom interaction, but it certainly made the script more controllable.
I think part of what has to happen as you go is realizing you can’t mention every cool or problematic thing about a piece of work, or whatever, because there simply isn’t time. I found I was informally choosing a theme or through line for the lecture, to give it a structure and keep me focused, even if I never stated it outright.