Teaching outside your expertise is not as unusual as you might think, according to Therese Huston, author of Teaching What You Don’t Know.  Most college faculty routinely teach courses outside their field of expertise or even outside their discipline.

How can you do that and minimize the stress involved?
Since confidence is key,  Professor  Huston offers these suggestions to boost your confidence level:

1. Take control of the choices that you do have.  Start the course from the core of your experience.
2.  Frame what you know and what you don’t know and then talk about it with someone, an ally or supportive colleague.
3. View your role as more than a “knowledge dispenser”.  Set goals like “get students to ask good questions” or “train students to think like a ___”

To help you get a handle on what to teach Huston suggests starting by brainstorming a list of the “Big Questions.”  Then find a question that intrigues you.

Finally, as a way to organize and prioritize, slot everything you want to teach into Must Know, Should Know and Nice to Know.

Believe it or not there are some advantages to teaching a course in which you are a “content novice” (Huston’s term.)

•    You will have more realistic estimates of how much time an assignment takes than an expert does.

•    You will offer more concrete examples than an expert normally would

•    You will have the fervor of the newly converted.

CELT has a copy of the book to loan.  Stop by our office on the first floor of Rhodes to borrow it.