This term I gave a lecture similar to the one last year, on gentrification of urban slums in China with the case study of Beijing’s hutongs. It was a 300-level geography class with about 60-70 students.

This is a different class that the one I gave the guest lecture in on this topic last year, but it’s a similar audience and level. The topic fit in well with the course for the instructor, so I mostly left everything as it was, having updated some statistics and reviewed the content. It was a really good opportunity for me to have a second run of the lecture, and I had a high standard for me as the first time it went quite well, so I wanted to do even better this time.

Again, it was an 80-min class where I spent about 2/3 lecturing and the rest on the discussion activity and the summary. I was very pleased with how engaged the class was, it wasn’t hard to get the people to discuss and share their ideas with the rest of the class, and while I was walking around and checking in with different groups, I was very impressed with some of the interesting ideas and examples they came up with.

The instructor for the class who’s observed me was very happy with my guest lecture too. In the post-class conversation with him, I thought he raised an interesting point about how he views the teaching of a lecture in a systematic way. He said as an instructor, you have to manage three different aspects: the content, the time and student engagement. I thought that was an interesting way of looking at it, and indeed it could be helpful to analyze your performance as an instructor from those perspectives. It also can help identify areas for improvement and personal growth. For example, in my very first guest lecture, I wasn’t great on time, which is why the summary of the discussion activity was rushed. In the third lecture on Vancouver housing, I haven’t fully tailored the content to the audience’s level. I find it helpful to identify those aspects as points for improvement for future lectures.

This time, the instructor thought I did well on all three of them saying that it can take some people years of practice to get there. I think it has definitely helped that it was the second time I was giving the lecture (with few modifications) and I am glad that it turned out well for the students who were very engaged with lots of questions and quite a few of them coming up to me after class to discuss a few more things they were thinking about. I think this was probably one of the best teaching experiences I’ve had, a well-structured lectured that is engaging for students and stimulating their interest in the subject beyond just one lecture.