I am a big believer that the edge of your comfort zone is often where fun, learning, and adventure all converge. But wow, when I decided to try my hand at teaching a college course 9 months ago, I had no idea that Covid-19 would turn my little adventure cruise into the Titanic.
When I began this adventure of living life outside the maze, I made a vow that I would never again just get a job just for the cash or the role. Instead I would work for things that I believe in and/or am genuinely excited about. I’ve long been a Design Thinking practitioner and the plan to teach came out of an exercise around Designing Your Life with design thinking. I thought it would be fun to look back now a year later and share what has come out of this very part time college professor sort of experiment. Is teaching a calling for me? Am I even good at it? What have I learned along the way?
You May Know More Than You Think
One of the first things I learned is that I know more than I thought I did. Imposter syndrome is real and I certainly didn’t feel like a professor when I started out. However, when students seemed stuck or confused about a concept, and the answers felt second nature to me, I was reminded of how far I’ve come. Sometimes what we take as common sense is not so common.
When I was early in my career, I thought that I knew everything. As I learned more, my confidence actually went down even as my ability went up. Kind like this:
After a career designing new things, I probably sit somewhere on the right side of these 2 curves. Teaching has been a great reminder of how far I’ve actually come on that knowledge curve and maybe it even filled my confidence tank a bit.
Durable Knowledge
Closely related to this is the durability of knowledge. When I realized that this stuff is not common sense to a beginner, it pushed me to try to put myself back in the shoes of the student. Einstein supposedly said, “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.” I had to re-examine what I know and why. This clarified my thinking and made my knowledge more durable. I could hear a student’s question, follow her thought process and then use it as an opportunity to clarify for all those with a similar misunderstanding rather than worrying that it would confuse others to go down that path.
Rising To Expectations
This is tricky to explain but proved to be very valuable to teaching effectively for me. When I started teaching this course, I inherited a bunch of teaching notes some of which repeatedly explained the same things or were even belittling in some cases. For example, “remember to clean the workshop. Remember your parents are not here to pick up after you.” I found that the more I explained the same things or required repeated check-ins before continuing, the more the students relied on me for the answers. However, the more I showed faith in the students and treated them like professionals on a design team, the more they aspired to prove me right. This is a tricky balance, because I think it requires understanding what is the adjacent possible for students but it really proved effective to push each to strive and then offer help in the form of office hours to fill in support for those that needed more assistance.
Passion vs. Pedagogy
Coming into this course, I pictured Ben Stein teaching economics in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I can do better than that I thought (Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?). However, gone are lecturing, blackboards, and chalk. Instead, I stepped into a highly interactive exchange that involved 45 students each with 2 monitors, alternating between my presentation and exercises. I could sketch over my fancy camera based projector with annotations and I walked the room checking in on small groups. Wow college is certainly not “Old School” and it’s a far cry from “Animal House.” It was more like standing in front of a bunch of students, giving a speech while designing something, and playing a video game all simultaneously. Teaching has given me an even deeper respect for those that maintain a passion for teaching sustained over an entire career in academia.
I was able to observe some great professors as mentors. I also observed some very highly educated PhDs debate the finer points of curriculum in staff meetings but fall a little flat in front of students. These professors are certainly better teachers than I and understand more about the science of teaching and learning. Still at the end of the course, evaluations from my section came back higher than the department average. This made me curious. While I am not as experienced, I also am very passionate about this material and I really focused on preparation and clear delivery of the curriculum. To me this raises a question about the roles of passion / presentation together with pedagogy in being effective. I don’t claim to have any answers after just a couple of semesters, but it certainly made me think.
Everyone is Going Through Something
Part of teaching is that when a student is going through something you are usually informed either by the student or the administration. This helps best address individual needs and give best chance of success but it also means a window into the truth that everyone is going through something literally all of the time. I have learned about a number of common learning disabilities that people deal with every day. One student was noticeably crushed and required bereavement leave when his dog died. Another was trying to juggle classes while going through gender re-assignment and simply requested use of a new preferred name and set of pronouns. When one student committed suicide in the dorms we all felt the tragedy campus wide and several students had difficulty focusing on the lesson of the day. Between this and the campus incident reports that share every theft, assault, and other miscellaneous crimes, it raises a sense of awareness of all of the things that people are going through each day. To me this has become a reminder that we are all in this together and some days that person is you.
Covid-19 Like an Iceberg….Dead Ahead!
When Covid-19 hit like an iceberg that we couldn’t steer away from in time, no one actually thought it would bring down the whole ship. Until it did. Within a one week time frame I went from mild concern to never meeting with my students in person again. Some panicked and flailed while others stayed calm.
With students now spread across many states and a few different countries, we all had to become Zoom geniuses and figure out how to run a group design project and final shark tank like pitch event online. Students were sharing small apartments with family and some went as far as setting up a tent like barrier to better focus on class. Others were asked by their parents to help with farm chores literally in the middle of class since the student was home from college.
I worked hard to keep everyone positive and engaged. At the same time my favorite part of teaching (interacting with students), was greatly diminished while my least favorite parts of teaching (grading and curriculum work) increased substantially. However, eventually we adjusted to the new normal and pulled off a pretty solid set of final design projects. I was super proud of everyone and really enjoyed the adventure even if it was more than I bargained for.
Sabbatical Already?
Like everything else, Covid-19 has hit Universities hard. What will be in person versus online? How many students are coming back in the fall? These uncertainties have put my professor experiment on hold. You see, adjunct professors are not exactly top of the totem pole when funding is limited and it is currently uncertain if the class will happen in the same way next term. Hence I am going to sit this one out until the dust clears… however, I will very likely return to teaching again. This experience has been amazing but not without challenging feedback as well.
You Can’t Make an Omelet Without Breaking Some Eggs
At the end of the semester, one of the other professors made a joke about cracking a bottle of wine before reading the student evaluations and all of the other faculty kind of chuckled. I didn’t really get it until I read mine.
Toward the end of this class I got a few emails from students that kind of made this whole experience worthwhile. It was a hard transition to learn the class on the fly while teaching it and then pivot and take it all online but hearing that students were moved was a really great feeling. One claimed that it was his favorite class and another called the class a bright spot in her day amidst back to back online classes. However, I also had one student totally lambast the class in his evaluation and claim that when the class was over he felt like Dante climbing over satan’s back on the way out of hell. Yikes that’s harsh but A+ on that description, I thought. I read every word and reflected on weather the criticisms made sense.
At the end of the day I concluded that you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. I certainly took much of the feedback across all of the evaluations to heart. However, there will always be a bell curve with people on the ends. The lesson for me was that feedback is best considered holistically and measured. We all do well to take in feedback and then process which suggestions to heed.
Learnings and Life Prototypes
It may be that the person who learns the most in the classroom is actually the teacher. In this regard, my teaching experiment has been a huge success. Covid-19 meant loads of learning and experience re-working everything in an even more compressed way than usual. I realized how much I actually have learned over a career and I have been able to solidify my own knowledge of these concepts by teaching them to others. I saw in a very real way how expectations and treatment of people can really encourage each to rise to the occasion while also getting some insight into the many challenges that we are all going through in life at any given time. Covid-19 hit like an iceberg but we made it through with the life boat of a remote classroom.
Coming from startups, a 3 year time frame is a long horizon to plan. However, Universities think in terms of the next hundred years. What does the future of education look like and what is the role of the University in shaping our society? These are academic questions as universities evolve. It has been super interesting for me to compare the academic setting to business and I certainly feel like a better coach and leader having gone through this teaching experiment. The roles of passion, presentation, and pedagogy to teaching also come to mind. I know enough to know that I have loads more to learn to become a great teacher and I also know that I will continue to teach…Even if Covid-19 and conflicting priorities may mean a pause for now.
Teaching is a part of all of our lives even if we are not formal teachers. I hope you’ve enjoyed this update on my teaching lifestyle prototype and find these learnings useful in your own life.
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3 comments
I chair the board of trustees at a small public college. I have seen first hand the financial hit our school has taken and it would surprise me if we don’t see quite a few colleges go out of business. Enrollments were already predicted to drop severely in the future and many schools do not have much in the way of reserve funds. In addition I see schools probably cutting costs the way they have in the past, by cutting pay for teachers who have already been falling behind inflation for many years now. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Hey Steveark thanks for the comment. Someone once told me that the test of what to focus on post financial independence is to ask yourself if you would still do it for no pay. As a lowly adjunct, this is super easy to imagine since my pay was very close to a few sandwiches that I stole from the break room (I jest of course…wow this sandwich is delicious). In all seriousness, part of why I chose to step aside in teaching this fall is that some full time professors rely on those extra classes for supplemental income to make ends meet. It of course doesn’t make sense for someone in my position to be taking that spot if others need it and cuts are shrinking the pie. I will however, be volunteering a bit and ready with my horn rimmed glasses and ruler if a substitute is needed. At the university level I know revenue is way down and many universities including mine are facing large refunds to students from facility closures and the move to online. This is compounded by huge losses in revenue. Even universities with sizable reserves are hurting. I know recruitment costs were high even before Covid-19 and many public universities are competing against for profit universities which makes things challenging as well. If I had to look for a silver lining it may be that moving to remote learning may disrupt the current classroom only model and change the way we teach reducing the costs of a quality program. Scaleable formats and adoption of technology seem promising. However, I would be speaking out of turn to claim that I knew enough about the administration side yet to start solving problems. Best of luck weathering this storm Steveark.
[…] In a prior article about what I learned from teaching, I made a lighthearted diagram to show that early in my career I actually had way more confidence than later in my career when I had even more expertise. Subsequently I learned of something called the Dunning Krueger Effect based on some research out of Cornell. […]