First Steps
At times we all feel stuck between a rock and a hard place, but this is especially common early in academia. You’ve just finished your PhD, and hopefully you felt supported through that process by your supervisor, colleagues, friends and family, but now as an ECR or MCR, you need to prove that you can be independent.
Your supervisor can be very well-intentioned, but they need to survive as well. Neither of you can afford to be unproductive, but there’s so much more in academia outside of research that you need to learn - service, community engagement, teaching, leadership - where do you find the time? How can we work smarter, not just harder?
Academia isn’t all about research, but early on it has to be your entire focus…? Publications and conference presentations are the main way that ECRs can build their credibility and it’s an all-consuming task to stay in the game. Often it comes at the cost of developing other important skills, which are still necessary for you to find jobs in academia.
Being a more effective teacher and communicator does impact on your ability to be a more effective researcher, but where do you find the time to learn how to teach? Let’s walk through 5 tips on how to be more strategic in your approach to professional learning as a University teacher:
Find Teaching Opportunities
A very common misconception that I try to dispel for ECRs is that teaching at universities means lecturing. Almost no ECRs, or even very senior postdocs, are given the chance to give lectures in front of hundreds of students at a university or college. This doesn’t mean that you have no opportunity to teach though. At my institution, teaching is defined as a range of responsibilities which includes:
Developing curriculum and assessment tasks
Selecting novel teaching approaches
Apply new learning technologies
Coordination of teaching
Get to know chairs of teaching and learning committees in your school, faculty, or institute, and understand where the time and resourcing pressure’s coming from and offer to help out any way you can.
Diversify your Teaching Portfolio
In science, PhD students often tutor lab prac classes over many years, and that is very valuable - that is how I cut my teeth, but it can very easily become the entirety of your teaching experience. It’s not just about how many times you’ve taught the same class in the same mode, but about the different types of teaching you’ve been involved with.
Have you run tutorials before? Problem-based learning workshops? Have you designed a laboratory session from scratch before? Have you marked student assessment and designed a way to provide meaningful and constructive feedback? Have you taught online versus in-person classes, or designed learning resources for online delivery?
You won’t be able to do everything at once, but setting goals to broaden the scope of your experiences in teaching one-by-one is the smart approach.
Develop your Teaching Philosophy
To stay motivated in all of this, you need to know why you want to be a teacher. Sure it can be a box-ticking exercise for a job application, but if that’s your mentality you will run out of steam sooner rather than later. You need to have a teaching philosophy - why you teach the way you do - and it needs to be more than “that’s how I was taught, and I turned out OK”. Teaching philosophies are personal, grounded in educational literature, and reflect the current teaching landscape.
It’s actually really hard to do this and distil everything you believe about teaching in a couple of sentences. There is no universally approved teaching approach, and if you don’t believe it as a teacher then it won’t work for you. You should try reading more broadly about educational theories, and try writing your own teaching philosophy. It will change over time and that’s OK, but your teaching philosophy has to be what drives and motivates you to keep teaching, especially in the current landscape.
Develop an Online Teaching Toolkit
Do you know how to set up an online class? Configure your webcam or microphone properly? Setup learning management systems to upload slides or assessment tasks? Do you know what tools you should be using to check for plagiarism or set online exams? Can you make animations, graphics, podcasts, or videos to create an original online learning environment for your students?
10 years ago there would have been no pressure for you to learn this, but of course pandemic-teaching forced everyone in the sector to learn on the fly. You don’t have to be good at all of it, but if there’s one thing you can do really well in the online space this will give you a huge advantage in the current climate. If you don’t have to ask for help from audiovisual or IT teams to setup your course, not only do you save yourself a lot of time, but you will also become a resource for your peers and colleagues. The only constant is change, and all the changes in our sector are moving towards online communication. You need to be adaptable and valuable in this context, so think about picking an online skill to further develop.
Establish a Mentoring Network
Remaining flexible and adaptable in your professional learning is not easy to do by yourself, and you need mentors to help see the forest for the trees. I will say that you should aim to find more than one mentor, as your immediate supervisor may rightly demand that you focus entirely research. It makes you and them more competitive in the short term, but may not align with your developmental trajectory in 5 or 10 years’ time. You do need to be proactive in seeking other mentors, but make it casual and natural to begin with, just a conversation starter over coffee or a drink. Think about the value you bring to the table for any potential mentor, they should get something out of it just as much as you and you should also consider mentors outside of your immediate discipline? Cast a wide net, and just by reaching out you’re proactively broadening your professional networks.
I go into these 5 tips in more depth in the video below - here’s to life long learning!
Jack.
