Are you not entertained?

Teaching awards have changed my career.

Being named the Australian University Teacher of the Year in 2020 has allowed me to amplify the resonance of the work I am doing in teaching and learning at a much broader scale.

The best part of it all is the chance to connect with other teachers and last week I was invited to RMIT’s Learning and Teaching Festival to do exactly that - collaboratively address the big issues in teaching and learning. Staff engagement, professional development, and training for teachers is a recurring theme across many of these discussions and I am often asked:

“What tips do you have for new teachers just starting out?”

The thing about education is, everyone has an opinion on it - good, bad or indifferent. New teachers are hardly lacking in the “unsolicited advice” department, their cup runneth over so to speak. In an attempt to avoid the overly generic advice new teachers are consistently bombarded with, I try to tell new teachers about three points of emphasis. Here’s the first:

You don’t have to be “Entertaining”

All of the most famous teachers captured on TV or film - Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, Maria from Sound of Music, or any teacher from The Simpsons, have the ability to captivate any room they’re in through jokes, songs, or simple deadpan delivery. These teachers can capture the imagination of their students through sheer force of will, and have set a high bar for students’ expectations of what a “good teacher” should be.

The trap that new teachers often fall into is to spend too much time and nervous energy developing an “edu-taining” hook for the lesson, a “performance persona”, your very own Sasha Fierce. It can sometimes feel like your value as an educator is tied to your ability to entertain your students, and therein lies a bottomless pit of insecurity. Sure it helps to be charismatic and entertaining as a speaker and communicator, but that shouldn’t be your first priority in professional development.

To keep things in perspective, stand-up comedians - who (unlike teachers) are paid solely based upon how entertaining they are to the right crowds - take years to develop 15 minutes worth of material. The average lecture runs for 50 minutes, some workshops and lab classes run for 3 hours - you can do the maths. Designing classes around entertainment value alone for that period of time will have you running on fumes very quickly.

Devil’s in the Details

Experienced teachers know the difference between an entertaining lesson with little substance, and an interesting lesson designed to meet specific learning objectives. We’ve talked about the idea of Substance over Style before, but learning objectives, learning activities, and assessment tasks (not to mention curriculum requirements) should be your first port of call. If you’re teaching in Higher Education and have the good fortune of being in an institution with learning designers, go grab a coffee with them! Talk through your lesson plans and get some constructive feedback from people who have seen all sorts of teachers, classes, and approaches.

If you have all of that figured out already, and are still terrified of “losing the room”, my approach is to lean into the details - deep dive into the subject matter you’re presenting to the students, and explore its historical significance, connections with famous people or events, and how perceptions or knowledge around these concepts have changed over time.

Rather than focusing on how you can personally be entertaining to the students in the room, re-direct your energy towards showing your students why the subject matter is inherently interesting. Why it’s worth their time to know about this, even if this class is the first and last time they hear about this topic. It’s really not about you, it’s about student learning and engagement. If you can deflect attention away from yourself and spark organic student interest in the learning materials, you won’t have to worry about how many jokes you have left up your sleeve that day.

At the end of the day you don’t have to be entertaining, you just need to spark student interest.

Jack.