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How Do I Outline a Class I Would Like to Teach out of a Book?

If you are teaching a course for the first time, you may find it helpful to base your class on a book that thoroughly covers the topic. However, you should make sure to include information from other sources as well; otherwise, your students could just read the book instead of taking your class. When planning a course, you must consider how much time you have to teach it, what to cover and what to exclude as well as what your students should take away from the class.

Instructions

- 1
  Read the book on which you plan to base your course.
- 2
  Determine your course goals. What do you want your students to remember from your course in five years?
- 3
  Decide how many units you want to have in the course. Each chapter could be a unit, but you may also choose to skip or combine some chapters. You may also choose to present information in a different order than it is presented in the book; consider this option as well.
- 4
  Divide the number of units by the number of days in the course. This will give you the average number of lessons you can spend on each unit, although some units may be longer and some shorter. You may also choose to leave some extra days at the end of the course for student questions, review, and unexpected events that take up some of your teaching time.
- 5
  Plan lessons for each unit. Decide which lessons will be longer than average and which shorter. Be sure that your total number of lessons fits the time you have planned for the course.
- 6
  Select supplemental materials. Although the bulk of your course will come from the book, you will probably want to use additional information to build on each unit.

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