When I asked colleagues from other universities about what resources they’d recommend for PhD students who teach, the most popular one was Phil Race’s booklet called In at the Deep End, which is available to download from his website as a PDF.

This was written for any one new to teaching in HE, rather than PhD students specifically, but includes lots of practical ideas. It’s broken into several sections – ‘large-group teaching’ addresses lecturing, which I know some of you will be doing. It covers structure, how to guide students to make notes, how to encourage questions, and some guidance of PowerPoint, some of which was beneficial to me – I hadn’t realised that you can go to a specific slide during your presentation by pressing the relevant slide number (very useful if someone asks you about a diagram or quote on a previous slide, and you’ve printed your slides out so know which is which).

In small group teaching, Phil explores the ways in which both students and tutors can ‘spoil’ small-group work, and how to deal with issues such as student preparation, non-attendance, or not making it clear what the students are supposed to learn. There’s a section on common problems (and how to deal with them), and a check list for both large and small group teaching.

Finally, the booklet addresses assessment, marking and feedback. This may not be relevant to all of you at the moment, but it’s worth a read as even if you’re not doing formal marking, such as assessing essays or exam scripts, during your teaching classes you’ll be giving feedback to students to enable them to see how well they’re doing (such as when you go around and see how different groups are getting on during an activity, or when you respond to the answers students provide to your questions). It’s particularly important to note Phil’s points about feedback needing to empower students and be developmental. This involves thinking about how negative feedback can be given in a way that students don’t feel demoralised and know explicitly what they need to do to improve. Language is really important here – one technique can be to use the word ‘yet’, which suggests that there’s a clear opportunity for a student to do something in future. Also, it’s best to avoid giving a piece of positive feedback, and then saying ‘but’ or ‘however’ before you say something negative – this often leads to students not really hearing the praise as it’s been negated by the problem.