Post 68: Add a Guest Speaker To Your class

Post 68: Add  A Guest Speaker To Your Class

When you add a Guest speaker or a Guest Lecturer to your class, you add excitement to your class.  The advantages of having a Guest Lecturer is that the Guest Lecturer brings real world insight into the core concepts.

I was a Guest Lecturer when I went back to my alma mater UCLA Applied Linguistics department and I spoke to the graduate students in that department about my career and about how I used my Applied linguistics degree. After all,  those same graduate students were getting the same Applied Linguistics degree that I got many years ago, so when I stood in front of them to talk about my career, those graduate students were all ears.

Giving a guest lecture or having a guest lecture in your class adds excitement to the class because it brings real world perspective to all the theories that students are learning in class and students get to see how those theories play out in the real world.

I talked about what aspects of my Applied Linguistics degree proved to be most useful in the jobs that I held, and I talked about which Applied Linguistics textbooks proved to be most useful in my career.

I taught students how to be more marketable with their degree, and I told students that in order to be more marketable with an Applied Linguistics degree, they need to minor in ESL or in English Composition in order to get writing jobs.

I talk gave them stories about jobs that I had where bosses would tell me that I needed more background in English composition rhetoric if I were to stay in the English department. I also gave tips on how to behave on the job, and I gave tips on useful classes they should take to be more marketable.

Students were fascinated by what I said and grateful that I gave them hints on which textbooks, classes, would prove to be most useful to them in this field. In my case, the Teaching ESL Grammar class I took, and the English Grammar workbook by Marianne Celce Murcia has proven to be the most useful workbook that I  have used in my career. The ESL Writing and reading classes also proved to be invaluable. The classes  on Second Language Acquisition I never used in my career and were not as useful or practical in my career. 

Students appreciated I took the time out of  my day to give them advice about their future and give them advice on how they can improve and not make the same mistakes I made. For instance, I regret not having majored in English Composition or having a BA in English.

After the guest lecture, I received many thank you notes from students who subsequently went on to minor in English composition or ESL just like I instructed them to do. Others said they would never have thought of majoring in English composition if I hadn't told them to do so and they were grateful that I improved their job prospects.

In my online classes, I  taught The Digital Literacy and Library Research class, I had as my guest speaker a librarian who spoke to the students about how the library worked. In addition, she instructed students on where the best research materials were located, and the best hours to contact a librarian for help. The students were very grateful to the Librarian for taking the time out of her day to talk to them in real time in the online classroom.

Before the Librarian did her guest lecture in my online classroom, students had no idea that they could use the librarian  as a resource if they were having trouble finding the correct research materials in the library for the research paper. They did not know that the librarian was on call all the time and that the librarian had office hours, telephone number, and email where she could be reached. She told them that I library and was always on shift 24 hours a day to help students with their research needs.

Having a guest speaker helps break the monotony of a pretty much text based online class and added excitement to the class by having a real life person speaking to the class in real time. And for students who could not make the real time meeting, I had the whole thing recorded on video so that students who were not there would be able to watch the library and speak whenever they wanted to. It is always a good idea to have a guest speaker in your class to bring a fresh perspective on the class.