Dear Graduate Student Professors

I am currently sitting in genetics class reflecting on the quality of graduate education in science. Let's just say that the class is taught with a 'challenging' style. I'm going to list a few key requirements of good graduate school teaching that are often disregarded.

1. Enunciate. This is not that hard, people.
2. Get to know your students' names. Grad classes tend to be small, and any one of us could be a future colleague. At least make an effort.
   
3. Look at your slides before class and understand the flow of your presentation. By this I mean understand the logical progression of the ideas. Make sure that everything you need to understand a slide is presented before your arrive at that slide.
4. If you're explaining an experimental result or protocol, take your time. These tend to make a lot of sense after you understand them, but are impenetrable the first time you look at them. That's usually because there are a lot of tools that go into the experiment with which students may be unfamiliar. How can you understand a genome wide association study if you don't know what a SNP is?
   
5. When you plan to ask questions, make sure that the answer is actually available given the information you've presented. If students can't guess the answer then it's a bad question or you've failed to lay out the setup to the question. If a student answers your question incorrectly explain clearly but without condescension why the answer is wrong.
6. Do not get stuck on one slide. Your students, as interested as they may be, will start to tune out.
7. Balance and manage questions in class. This is an art. Don't get bogged down, but don't race through material and leave everyone in the dust. Actively ask your students about your pacing, perhaps on an individual basis to avoid peer pressure.
8. Vary your cadence. Show the importance of a particular part of your presentation with vocal emphasis. 
9. Don't be afraid of the blackboard. It's a great way to draw out and clarify a point.
10. Try to make sure that if you're teaching without a textbook that students who get lost have a written resource to which they can refer that has complete information (this doesn't have to be powerpoint slides, but that's one good place).
    

Some of the above are so damn simple that I can't understand why anyone wouldn't be able to manage them.  Others are not all easy to live up to, but your students will massively appreciate your efforts if you try.

PS: To add a few more...

• Never ever ever condescend to your students. It's immature and unprofessional.
• Avoid the adversarial model of professor vs. student.
• Did I mention enunciate?