A couple of comments from another industry adjunct 1. the terms 'lecturer', 'lecturing' and 'presenting' all lead down the wrong path: 'lectures' which is one

A couple of comments from another industry adjunct 1. the terms 'lecturer', 'lecturing' and 'presenting' all lead down the wrong path: 'lectures' which is one person standing at a board talking. I prefer to call it 'classroom time' which gives me complete discretion on the format. People learn better through interactive experiences. Lectures are not interactive. Showing code is a demo/'applied' but it is not interactive. Interactive means the students are highly involved and are co-driving the class. To give an example - here is how I taught agile: - I went to a party store: bought one gold crown, one gold birthday hat, 5 blue hats and two different colors of stickies - I opened out the lecture with "there are many agile development processes. I think the best use of time is to rather than talk about it is to do it. So, if you choose, we can either role play it which requires your involvement or I can kill you with slides. What do you want to do?" (their choice was obvious) - I picked a few volunteers - the 'user' got the gold crown, the product manager got the gold hat and the 5 engineers got the blue hat. The stickies were for features or tasks. - We then role played two sprints for an airbnb clone from scratch which was possible in 75 mins. (yes I covered scrum != agile) - It was a lot of fun and the issues that came out in the role play were perfect and gave me the opportunity to stop the role play and talk about the theory, issues and how to resolve. (engineers misunderstanding product manager, developing common language, engineers asking to extend sprint, etc, user being demanding on timelines, value vs # features, etc) - the class left super excited and after that day I tried to incorporate a lot more fun and interactive games (In a 25 lecture course over half had interactive games. It took me a few years of learning / experimentation to understand this and to throw away the pressure to 'lecture'. My feedback is positive and despite >50% of lectures being highly interactive students want more interactive lectures. Exam scores / grasp of material strongly correlated with interactive sessions) 2. 'Lecturing' means you need to know your field but also read up on education as a field in itself. How do people learn? How do you structure a lecture? How many points can people handle per hour? How do you control a class / classroom management? (this last one is a lot of fun and easier with a few techniques but that is for another day) A lecture may then look like a variant of: - capture attention with clickbait - why this issue really matters and how it is hard, how it really applies in industry etc - open out on the theory - apply it to a problem / example - interactive class exercise - post mortem of the class exercise (what did we learn) - take a 5 minutes break with a joke / discuss the time I failed / saw this fail (this is the value of an industry adjunct ...) - some more theory - wrap up / re-summarize (sometimes the class exercise was #2 to make the point then we did the theory) Set expectations in the first lecture. My class is over-subscribed so I set expectations and if they don't want to meet them then let someone on the waitlist take the class. Care about your students. Learn their names. Make content relevant to them. "If you want to do X you need to know this etc", "This is the thing first year software engineers sometimes struggle with", "this is a super common interview questions" Be open with your class about your failures. Ask your class if you have convinced them yet! Make it a challenge. If one of them says 'no' then gladly accept the challenge! (if one person says no then >30% of the class probably feel the same) Some students were nervous about contributing for fear they may be 'wrong'. Always thank them for their input, acknowledge any merit their answer has / it would be correct if X. However, Y causes Z to be more important. 3. Oh my word does it take time. The first year I found it took me ~8 hours to produce each lecture from structuring course, research, crafting learning outcomes, devising lecture, creating materials, practice, tweak, deliver, etc. 4. Lecturing is like coding. You should look back on the lectures you delivered a year ago and cringe. That means you are developing. I still cringe hard =)