There are plenty of ways to spend more time on teaching. You can add another reading, create another resource, leave more comments on student work, redesign a lecture, answer email late into the evening, or add another office hour. Some of that work may help students. Some of it may simply add more to your workload.
For faculty already balancing teaching with research, service, mentoring, and other responsibilities, the time a course can take is almost unlimited. Effective teaching depends on being thoughtful about where your time is going and whether that work is actually helping students learn.
Start with what you want students to learn
When a course starts to feel like too much, go back to the learning goals. What do you most want students to understand or be able to do by the end of the course? Then look at the readings, assignments, activities, and other requirements you are using to support those goals.
Some will clearly belong. Others may still be there because they have always been part of the course or because they seemed useful when you added them. Over time, courses can become crowded in ways that are easy to miss. One extra reading or short assignment may not seem like much, but several small additions can mean more work for students and more preparation and grading for you.
Looking at the course through the lens of your learning goals can help you decide what is still worth keeping and what may no longer be doing enough to justify the time it takes.
Consider the grading load behind each assignment
Grading is one of the easiest places for teaching work to expand. A course with several written assignments may give students useful practice, but it also means more time spent reading, evaluating, and responding to that work.
If grading is taking up more time than you can reasonably sustain, look at what each assignment is meant to do. A major project may need detailed feedback, while a low-stakes assignment may not. Some activities can be reviewed in class, graded for completion, or supported with peer or self-assessment. Rubrics can also help make expectations clearer and give you a more consistent way to respond.
The amount of time you spend grading should make sense for the role that assignment plays in the course.
Be deliberate about feedback
Faculty can spend a lot of time writing comments on student work, and students do not always use all of that feedback. It can help to focus your comments on the areas that matter most and on the parts of the assignment students will have a chance to use again.
If students will revise the work, detailed feedback may be especially useful. If many students are struggling with the same issue, it may make more sense to address it with the whole class rather than writing the same comment repeatedly. You can also think about where individual feedback is most important and where a lighter approach will still give students what they need.
This can make feedback easier for students to use while keeping the workload more manageable for you.
Make it easier for students to find what they need
Some teaching work repeats itself every semester. Students may ask the same questions about an assignment, a deadline, or something already listed in the syllabus or course site. Those questions may only take a few minutes to answer, but across a class and an entire semester, they add up.
If the same questions keep coming up, something may need to be clearer. A short FAQ, a stronger assignment prompt, an example of successful work, or a few minutes spent explaining a common issue in class can reduce confusion and save time later. It can also help students become more confident about finding answers and solving problems on their own.
Set clear expectations around availability
Being available to students matters, but it can become hard to manage when there are no clear expectations around communication. Email is one example. Answering one message may only take a few minutes, but checking and responding throughout the day can make teaching feel like it is always running in the background.
Let students know when you usually respond to messages, which questions are better suited to office hours, and where they should look first for course information. You can take the same approach to office hours. More availability does not always lead to better support, especially if students are not using the time or if it makes the rest of your workload harder to manage.
Clear expectations can help students know what to expect and make your teaching schedule easier to maintain.
Effective teaching should be manageable across the semester
A teaching practice that feels manageable during the first few weeks may be much harder to sustain later in the term. That is worth keeping in mind when you design or revise a course.
Think about how long an assignment will take to grade when every student submits it at once, how much preparation an activity will require each week, and whether you can realistically give the same level of feedback across several assignments or sections. Those questions can help you spot places where the workload may become difficult later in the semester.
As you think about your own course, where are you spending the most time, and is that time supporting the learning you care most about?
