You're not the first

"Have someone be your guide who's already made the mistakes you don't have to make," says Mike Zeilik, an emeritus professor of astronomy at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. No one is the first to teach any type of class, no matter how much it feels that way. Zeilik's own mentor was an engineer who invited him to tag along to a meeting on physics education.

M. ZEILIK

Stars of tomorrow: many lab heads are moving away from straight lectures to teaching systems, such as putting students into 'learning teams'.

That experience and his later work on improving astronomy education opened his eyes to another important source of help for new investigators. "Most professional societies have a committee on teaching or education. Find out who those people are and get in touch to find out what resources are available," he suggests. There are myriad tools for typical introductory courses in almost every field, he says, and these can sometimes be found at the committees' websites.

More and more science departments are turning away from the standard straight lecture format. Zeilik and other experts recommend keeping up with the best-tested practices for active cooperative learning — this could make your teaching job easier and more effective in the long-run.

For her introductory biology course, Thornber relied heavily on the prepared materials and slides that came with the textbook. She also took advantage of the extra administrative support her department provides for large courses. But even in the algae course — her specialist subject — Thornber realized she needed help from more experienced colleagues.

Start small if you have the chance, says Japanese native Masayuki Numata, who set up his molecular cell biology lab at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver three years ago. As English isn't his first language, Numata opted to ease into his teaching responsibilities with a very small course tutoring medical students. His major duty was to stimulate discussion among students dissecting mock patient case studies.

"In the future, I'll have to teach bigger classes, but now I can handle it with less stress," says Numata. "Now I know how to encourage students to learn and have established my teaching style."

In at the deep end

Not everyone has the luxury of a such a transition. Although some institutions give new researchers a teaching hiatus of one or two years, others expect you to jump right in. No matter where you land, says Jerry Hedrick, director of the Professors of the Future programme at the University of California, Davis, "there will be teaching-intensive times and research-intensive times". Plan accordingly by looking at your two-year and five-year goals and — just like a grant deadline — give yourself a cut-off point for teaching preparation, he advises.

Darcy Kelley, a neurobiologist at Columbia University in New York, agrees. "Time management is of the essence for junior faculty members," she says. "Use the law of diminishing returns and decide what's necessary and what's obsessing." One trick she uses is to teach all of her courses in one semester, to ensure that her autumn semester is free to focus solely on moving research projects forward. Also, she notes that teaching afternoon classes forces her to spend only the morning hours that day to prepare.

Both new and experienced teachers emphasize the importance of time management, and warn beginners not to waste effort on 'reinventing the wheel'.

Thornber follows wisdom she found in Robert Boice's Advice for New Faculty Members (Allyn and Bacon, Needham Heights, Massachusetts, 2000). She begins preparing for lectures early by hammering out a quick outline. "When I sit down to write a lecture I already have some notes and don't have a mad crunch right at the end."

Mentally separating your commitments can help lessen stress, too. "It doesn't help if you are teaching and thinking, 'I should be writing a paper now'" says Susanne Mandrup, a molecular biologist at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense. "I often think I have too many other things to do, but once I'm in the classroom, it's fun. It's better to be positive about it and take the students seriously," she advises.

"Be prepared" is the ultimate time-management advice from Eric Mazur, an applied physicist and education researcher at Harvard University. "Doing a good job teaching is not necessarily more time-consuming than doing a bad job of teaching," he notes. Standing in front of 500 first-years is not that different from standing in front of 500 colleagues at a meeting, he says — and is much less intimidating.

Think of it as an art form

In fact, once you have the organizational and time-management aspects cracked, it's time to think about teaching as experiment or art form. "Do not hold back in innovating in your own teaching," advises Zeilik. "Experiment, you are an experimentalist." The trick, he says, is that as in any experiment, you have to assess the outcome and revise the innovation accordingly.

Others who advocate co-teaching with more experienced faculty members point out that science is never done alone, so why should teaching be done solo?

"Part of doing research is knowing how to convey your results, the methods, and excitement of science to other people," says Mazur. Lecturers are not only preparing the next generation of scientists, he says, but polishing their own communication skills and strengthening public support of scientific research.

Indeed, established researchers say that approaching your teaching in the same manner you approach your research will make it more valuable to you and your students. Instruction, far from being just a necessary distraction from the bench, they say, should be viewed as another part of the job that can be integrated with your research goals.