Market Inefficiencies
Every professional is being pulled in a million different directions, and we have to constantly re-prioritise what is worth our time on any given day. At universities and colleges, research versus teaching is the ongoing conundrum.
Spending more time on one takes away from the other, and it can feel like a zero-sum game with you stuck in the middle.
Surely there are skillsets shared across the teaching and research domains for early career academics to find new synergies in their professional development? Today’s focus is on communication - the market inefficiency in professional learning that benefits both your teaching and research.
Getting your reps
How nervous do you get before giving a talk? One of the biggest differences between communicating in research versus teaching is the assumption we start off with. In research you can assume that those around you at the very least care about the project or topic, and know about the foundational parameters in your field. There are acronyms and inside jokes you can lean on, and there’s a basic safety net of understanding. Teaching is one of the best communication training programs you can experience through your research, but teachers have to assume that students know nothing about the topic, and care even less about it. I spend a lot of time obsessing over how to pitch the topic in a way that is relevant to students’ everyday lives, and this approach has bled over into my conference presentations and research seminars as well. Teaching other people about new concepts or skills, really forces you to think about what your students know or don’t know, or don’t care about, and that is the key to good communication – tailoring what you say and how you say it to the right target audience.
Finding your audience
In research there are many different target audiences you have to reach, with the general public arguably being the trickiest of all. Much of this boils down to how jargon-rich our scientific work is, but what counts as jargon and how much jargon is acceptable? Rakedzon et al., 2017 have built an “automatic jargon identifier”, and you can take advantage of these efforts through their free online “Science and Public De-Jargonizer”.
Even if you think you’ve chosen the right words, how do you find the right forum to engage enough people outside of your field on a regular basis? Teaching, especially first year teaching, is the closest thing to the general public we have regular access to. First year students often haven’t decided on their major and can be interested in everything or nothing at all. It's a great chance for you to learn how to communicate the importance of your discipline to a disengaged or even unenthusiastic crowd which is a good approximation of the general public at any point in time.
Breadth over depth?
In research we train to become specialists with a singular focus, but these specialisations can work against us to limit connections with people outside of our field. In teaching we’re always trying to outline the big questions or problems in the field to setup the context for the curriculum, before then going into describe the depth of detail for each individual topic. Knowing how to pitch your talks at the right level, and strategically zooming out to focus on the big picture, before zooming back in to talk about the details is a skill all effective communicators need in their arsenal. A story-telling or narrative approach can be very engaging if done well, and the more you practice how to do this in teaching, the easier it’ll translate into your research talks.
The Right Tools for the job
Whether it’s in-person or online events, the vast majority of talks rely on audiovisual cues. Your presentation slides are how most people form their first impression of your communication abilities, and you should be up front about what you want audiences to take away from your talk. In teaching we outline learning objectives at the start of each class, and this can be adapted to “research questions” or aims/hypotheses at the start of your seminar. In terms of the actual visual design of your slides, again this is something that teachers have explored in depth on what works best. Mayer’s Multimedia Learning Theory states that people learn better through multi-sensory presentation of audio and visual stimuli. You want your audience to be listening to you while looking at graphics on screen, to facilitate dual channel processing of information to augment their understanding.
Use photos and diagrams wherever possible to support or replace text,
Embedding audio or video clips can present the same concept through different perspectives.
A simple uncluttered visual design works best, and each slide should have clear headings against a backdrop using neutral colour palette.
Highlight and re-emphasise core concepts to signal their importance.
Explain how each new research finding is connected to the next
Repeat your findings in the context of the aim or question it helped answer
Re-emphasise significance through your conclusions
Mind the gap(s)
In research we’re painfully aware of what we don’t know – almost anything you can think of is a known unknown. So bear with me when I say that being able to highlight gaps in your existing knowledge is a valuable skill in both teaching and research. The reality is we almost have never of the luxury of only teaching topics that we are experts in. Teachers are always looking for new angles to connect concepts to students’ everyday lives, and the mad scramble to brush up on details before stepping in front of a room full of students never stops. Instead of looking up random lists of facts, it is more productive to formulate a strategy to fill specific gaps in our understanding. 5W+H is a common framework used in information gathering for journalists, or police investigations, and it’s just as useful in our context:
What was the central problem being investigated?
When was the information first discovered?
Who made the discovery?
Where did the breakthrough happen?
Why had no-one else figured this out to date?
How were the methods they used different to others in the field?
None of the answers to these questions should be simply yes/no, and should instead stimulate curiousity and even more questions. Slowly but surely we can build a story around the lesson plan, and promote an inquiry-driven mindset for students to learn about the material. This mindset is what you’re already doing as a researcher in figuring out how to answer different parts of your research question, and being able to explicitly apply it towards your teaching can reinforce this way of thinking.
Both teachers and researchers have committed to life-long learning in their own ways, but these paths intersect more than we realize. Next time, another market inefficiency in academic professional learning: teaching lab skills.
Jack.
