For the teacher:

If you need to miss class, find a substitute to cover for you rather than simply cancelling class. Your Course Coordinator or Language Program Director should be able to help you find a sub. Only as a last resort (and with your supervisor’s approval) should you cancel class.

A substitute is doing you a favor, going out of their way to help you by adding extra work to their already busy schedule. You need to make their life as easy as possible. To do this, send them everything they need to know to make class run smoothly. Selfishly this is also to your advantage. After all, you want to return to class with your students fully ready for whatever you have planned that day.

To do this, send your sub a flexible lesson plan. Your sub isn’t going to invent a clever lesson for a class they don’t know. They need to know what they’re walking into: what should they know about the class, and what should they do while they teach it? Keeping FERPA in mind, it can be helpful to have a general sense of the class’s current strengths and weaknesses. (E.g. “half the class always arrives late” or “they still don’t understand how the gerundive works” or “call on Sally for the particularly difficult sentences.”)

That said, the sub isn’t you, and you aren’t training them to pretend they are. Tell them what you want them to do, but also let them teach the way they normally teach. For instance, it’s alright to say “I throw student questions back at the class before I answer” or “when introducing the Greek subjunctive, just tell them the theme vowel lengthens.” But don’t micromanage.

If you have something very particular scheduled that, say, builds off of previous class work, it’s better to rearrange your schedule than to ask your sub to figure out your course beyond that particular class. It’s fine to let your sub know how you like to do things (e.g. ),

Also give your sub a class roster. If students usually sit in the same place, give your sub a seating chart.

Lastly, be ever thankful to your sub for covering you that day.

For the substitute:

Request from the teacher you are subbing for a flexible lesson plan and a class roster or seating chart. If they don’t give you these, there’s no way you can sub. Remember that your job isn’t to teach an award winning lesson. If that happens, great. But your main job is to fill a temporary gap.

If you are a faculty member subbing for a grad student teacher, make sure the students appreciate their real teacher when they return!

When class is over, at your earliest convenience email the teacher to let them know how things went. How was attendance? What did/didn’t you get through? Basically anything the teacher should know (a) to make them feel like they were there, too, in class, and (b) to resume class the next day as seamlessly as possible.

—James F. Patterson