In the previous post in this series, I discussed how to approach leading discussion sections. This time around, I'm broadening the scope to the fundamentals of teaching competently. I'll have at least one more post on teaching after this. Afterwards, I'll probably turn to some other aspects of graduate school, such as long-term planning or job market preparation.
---
When you first start teaching, you might think you should aspire to do it well. By teaching well, I mean teaching in ways that captivate students, educate them effectively, assess their mastery fairly and comprehensively, provide ample support to students in need, and respect university guidelines and regulations. In the abstract, this all sounds great, and it’s an admirable ambition to want to teach well. However, for those new to teaching, it’s not realistic. Teaching well requires a level of skill and expertise that early career teachers will almost never be able to achieve. Even the few newcomers to teaching who have the ability to teach well should probably not try to teach well at that stage of their careers. This notion might strike you as counterintuitive, so let me elaborate a bit.
Teaching well is difficult and requires a substantial amount of time if you aren’t an experienced instructor. I recall anecdotes of graduate students telling me about how they devoted 30-40 hours per week to teaching a single course of 25-30 students. Those courses may have been amazing, but this behavior is not admirable or prudent. As a graduate student, you must balance teaching responsibilities with a variety of other goals: making progress toward your degree, submitting papers to conferences and journals, participating in department events, and so on. Devoting 30-40 hours per week to teaching a single course does not leave enough time to adequately prioritize these other commitments – at least not if one wants to maintain good mental health and avoid burnout. Moreover, once you finish graduate school, you will never be able to devote that amount of time to a single course. If you obtain a faculty position, you will probably teach at least 3 courses per term, and they might all be different subjects: you definitely won’t be able to devote 30-40 hours to each one. That means you should aim to develop teaching strategies that can later be extended to contexts where your teaching load is significantly higher.
Here’s the general point: trying to be an exemplary teacher when you’re just getting started with solo teaching is not an appropriate goal. Instead, you should aim to teach competently. As I use this phrase, teaching competently means to teach in a satisfactory or acceptable, but not outstanding, way. Teaching competently involves the same general goals as teaching well but sets the standard for success a bit lower. You don’t need to captivate students to teach competently: it suffices to maintain the motivation of those who are engaged and avoid turning off the remaining students. Teaching competently does not require that you be a master of test design and assessment – something that requires many courses’ worth of exam creation and refinement – it is enough to design your exams so that course content and exam material align and that students have clear expectations regarding exam content.
Continue reading "7 Years Later Excerpt #3: Teaching Competently" »
Recent Comments