By most people's definitions, we're experts. Whether you're a PhD student or a more senior academic, you have more expertise than most people in your subject. However, us "experts" often still lack confidence when it comes to teaching. In this episode, we think about how we can put things in perspective and develop more confidence in your teaching.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to episode 29 of the PhD Life Coach, and this week we're actually going to be talking about a topic that was requested by a listener. So I got a lovely message on my website from somebody who said that they'd been really enjoying the podcast, finding things super useful, but that would I ever talk about something to do with teaching.
Now this podcast is for everyone, from PhD students to senior professors. And for a lot of us that means that our roles involve teaching. Even as PhD students, you might find yourself running seminars, delivering laboratories, those sorts of things, or even looking after some of the day-to-day activities in undergraduate projects.
And even though universities have really increased the amount of support there is to develop teaching skills over the last five or 10 years, certainly compared to when I started out in academia, it's still an area that a lot of people feel under prepared for and under confident about.
So today we're going to think about how can we feel more confident about our teaching and… I'm not going to teach you how to teach. This isn't actually going to be “here's a bunch of new skills that will make you feel more confident.” Because one of the things that we know from coaching work is that having objective skills, having an actual ability to do something doesn't always lead to confidence. Often when lecturers used to talk to me about being worried about their teaching, I'd watch them teach and be like, but you are great. You're really good at this. You're absolutely fine. There's no problems here.
The problem wasn't that they couldn't teach. The problem was what they were thinking about their ability to teach. So today we are really thinking about how we can generate that confidence and the good news is, that today, I'm talking about it in the context of teaching, but actually you can use this for anything.
Say you've got a conference presentation coming up, or you've got a job interview coming up, or you're going to be submitting to a journal and you're really worried about it and lacking confidence in your ability to get published. You can do exactly the same thing for all of these things.
So the first thing we need to think about is why it’s totally understandable that you lack confidence in this. This is not what you were necessarily selected to have done. You know, when we get accepted onto PhD programs, accepted into academic jobs, it's usually on the basis of our research and our research ability, and so not necessarily feeling comfortable in other arenas like teaching, it's totally understandable.
This is not something that's weird about you. It's not something that's broken. It's a totally legitimate response to the way the sector is set up at the moment. And that's really important to recognize because sometimes on top of that lack of confidence and worrying, we then lay a judgment that we shouldn't lack confidence, that we should be okay, that everybody else can do this, and that's simply not true.
There's a huge proportion of PhD students and academics who feel deeply uncomfortable about their ability to teach, and sometimes that can really carry on for a long time, even once they've got quite a lot of experience. So there's nothing wrong here, but equally, it doesn't have to be like this either.
The other thing that I want to say upfront is your lack of confidence as a teacher doesn't have to mean you're not going to do a good job as a teacher. We are going to think about ways that you can increase your confidence, but we're also going to think about ways that you can teach while being less confident and still being perfectly good about it.
You don't have to generate this huge overwhelming, “I'm amazing” confidence before you can do things. You can choose to do things and support yourself to do things while still feeling like you wish you had a little bit more confidence.
So the first thing to think about is where does confidence even come from? Because we all sort of assume that confidence comes from past experience. We typically automatically get a bit more confident when it's something that we've done lots of times before, and so we know that we're able to do it at least to some extent, and that, we think, spontaneously generates feelings of confidence, but in reality, the feelings of confidence come from the fact that we are telling ourselves, I can do this, I've done this before. I know I'm capable of this, and that's where the confidence comes from. It's just much more likely that you are saying those things to yourself when you have done it before.
Now the fact is for all of us, if I asked, how much teaching would you have to do before in order to feel confident, for some of you, it would be just one thing. You know, if you've done it once, fine, I can do it again. For others, it would be, oh, and I need five years experience. I need 10 years experience.
There's no objective amount of experience that will definitely make you feel confident, and that's because it's about the thoughts that we're thinking, not about the experience that we have. So what we can do is we can use that to our advantage and as usual, we can choose the thoughts that we focus on more. And so what we're going to do today is we're going to think about a few different ways that you can choose to focus on thoughts that will help you to feel more confident about teaching.
So the first thing we're going to think about is keeping it in perspective. I mean, this is going to sound a little cynical, but I've been academia for a really long time. So I was 20 years at the University of Birmingham, I externally examined a variety of other universities, I observed teaching in a variety of places. I went to billions of conferences and watched people present. And so the first thing I want to say, in terms of keeping this in perspective is there's a whole lot of quite mediocre teaching out there.
I don't mean that with any disrespect to anybody. It's fine. There's nothing wrong with it. The students were learning, it's all good. But it wasn't outstanding. It wasn't overwhelmingly inspirational. It wasn't beautifully fluid and you know, well-structured and pedagogically perfect and all of these things that we tell ourselves it has to be. There's a whole lot of quiet, ordinary teaching, and you know what? It does the job.
So remembering that, remembering what we're aspiring to, can be really important, and that's not to say you shouldn't have high standards. I super care about teaching. I spent most of my career either developing my own teaching abilities or trying to support others to develop theirs. Trying to make sure that teaching quality was high on the agenda at universities. I believe in good quality teaching. I just don't believe in a kind of perfectionist approach to teaching that means you terrify yourself if you're not doing anything other than the absolute perfect session.
Most of the time, good enough is good enough and you do it good enough, enough times, and you start to get a little bit better, and you start to automatically feel a little bit more confident. So next time you're thinking, this is not going to be amazing, this is not going to be the most perfect session either. Remind yourself that nor are most of the other sessions that they're, the students are experiencing that week.
The other bit that goes alongside that is if you are worrying about how good your teaching is, whether you're going to be good enough, you are already better than the worst teachers at the university because the worst teachers at your universities are the ones that aren't even thinking about whether it's good enough or not. They're not bothering, they're just getting it done. So if you are thinking that you want this to be effective, you want your students to have a good experience, you want them to learn, you already are above the baseline because you care about the student experience.
The other way I want to put this in perspective is by sharing a few of my experiences. Without wanting to blame my own trumpet too much. I'm an award-winning lecturer. I've had awards in the university. I've had awards from my own university.
I've had national awards. I'm a national teaching fellow. I'm a principal fellow of the Higher Education Academy. I used to go to other universities to support people to be better teachers. I'm a good teacher. Okay. It's what I do.
However, over my career, I have still had a whole variety of things go wrong in my sessions. Things not be the best they could be. To give you some examples, I have forgotten to turn up for a session. I've gone to the wrong room for a session. I've not been able to log into the computer and had to do the whole thing from my memory, which was an interesting one. I've…. this one's probably too much detail, but you know what, I'm going to share it anyway.
I've been partway through a first year lecture wearing skinny jeans. Wondered what's that? Lump on my calf and realized that it was yesterday's knickers. I wore these trousers yesterday. That's not an easy way to continue concentrating when you're trying to talk to freshers. I've broken the heel on my shoe part way through a lecture and managed to cover it up, so the students didn't see what was happening. I've accidentally drawn a penis when I was trying to draw the head of a femur in an anatomy lecture and got laughed at by a bunch of 18 year olds. I've flicked onto the next slide, looked at the graph I was about to present and realized I have no idea what they did in that study and had to admit as much to the students because I hadn't had time to check that lecture before I went into class.
I've also been in situations where I'm talking, I'm presenting a lecture that I've done so many times before, that I suddenly realize, I have no idea what I've actually just said and where in the sentence I was. I have done a whole lot of ridiculous things, and I think if you talk to anybody who has taught, they might not have quite such a ridiculous array of things, but they will have their stories of their mediocre sessions, of their sessions that went badly, of their sessions, where you come out of it going, “okay, I definitely need to rewrite that lecture next year.” It happens. There's nothing wrong with you if it happens to you.
The thing that has always saved me, is that the students knew I cared. The students knew I liked them and the students knew I was interested in my subject even when it was things I wasn't that interested in. They still thought I was interested in my subject.
And you know what? Those things are generally enough. If you show up as a human being who is actually vaguely invested in the student experience and vaguely invested in the thing that you're talking about, and you let them see that, and when you make a mistake, you're honest about it.
When I forgot what the graph said, I just said, “yeah. I'm really sorry. I have no recollection of this study whatsoever, so I'm going to tell you about it next week. The reference’s at the bottom, how about you guys will read it and we'll talk about it in more detail next week, but now we're going to move on to the next slide.” And they laughed and they understood, and I still got really good teaching reviews.
It's not about being perfect, it's about showing up and caring and just doing what you can do. Qualities I used to show up with were enthusiasm, honesty. Things like that. Maybe you'll show up with different ones. Maybe you are not a naturally sort of bubbly person, but maybe you show up and you're thoughtful, and you're kind and you're calm and you make them feel better about themselves. Maybe you are reassuring, maybe you are interesting.
Maybe you have a way of telling a story that just draws them in. You have qualities that your students will resonate with, and you don't have to have the perfect session planned, and you don't have to have the perfect PowerPoint slides and the perfect graphics and the perfect everything else for that to happen.
You have qualities they need. Maybe spend a little minute figuring out what qualities do you bring, what qualities could your students value that you can bring to those sessions, no matter what preparation you've done, and no matter how confident you are feeling.
So I really want you to keep this all in perspective. When you hear the thoughts, “this has to be amazing. They're expecting a lot. They're paying a lot of tuition fees for this.”… you don't have to think about it like that. Show up, show you care. It's all that needs to happen.
Now one place we know we can draw confidence from is past experience, but people are often really limited in what they interpret as past experience. Have I ever done a lecture before? No, I haven't. Therefore, I haven't got experience. What do you have experience in? When have you spoken to anyone? When have you presented anything? When have you explained anything to anyone?
For me, one of the massive experiences that helped me was I spent most of my teenage years teaching like kids camps, like sports clubs, those sorts of things. So I used to do coaching, I used to go on like holiday camps and be one of those annoyingly enthusiastic people in a bright coloured T-shirt that would entertain your kids for the summer holidays.
And actually loads of that translated through into my teaching. I also used to marshall on massive corporate multi-sport adventure races and that sort of organizing people really helped my teaching as well, especially in the more of the sort of small group seminar workshop type basis. None of those are teaching experience, but they helped me hugely in my teaching.
What experience do you have that isn't teaching that might set you up to teach well, how can you draw confidence from that?
The next tip though, is how can you draw confidence without having experience? Because usually that's the only place we think it comes from. But actually where you can draw confidence is confidence in yourself. You can have confidence that you can learn to do things. You can have confidence that you can make it work even if something goes wrong.
And most importantly, and if you listen to nothing else in this entire podcast, listen to this. You can have confidence that you are going to be nice to yourself however this goes, because let’s think it through, if something goes wrong, what are the consequences of that? If you forget what a slide means, or you realize that you've got an error on your slides, or you try and explain something and it comes out wrong, what are the real consequences of that?
In most situations, there are no consequences other than what we say to ourselves. The bit that makes that painful is when you lie awake at night going, oh my God, I was such an idiot. They were all staring at me. They must have thought I was so stupid. I can't believe I didn't prepare that more. I can't believe I didn't spot that mistake. I'm so lazy. I'm so stupid.
That's where the lack of confidence comes from, is knowing that you are going to beat yourself up if you get this wrong. How about we just decide now. Let's make a pact together. Now let's make a pact that the next time we teach, if something's not perfect, we can be super kind to ourselves about it.
We're not going to tell ourselves what we should have done. We're not going to tell ourselves how we should have started preparing earlier, or we should have paid more attention or whatever. We're just going to accept it. We're going to figure out how to learn from it, perhaps. You can listen to last week's podcast about how to learn from your mistakes, if you want to hear more about that.
But the main thing here is deciding here and now that we are not going to beat ourselves up if we're not perfect, because then every eventuality you can think of comes much less of a problem. Are you worrying that no one will listen? Okay, so what do we say to ourselves if they don't? Are you worrying that you're going to forget what to say? Are you worrying you don't know enough, you're worrying. Someone asks you a question you don't know the answer to?
Okay, why is that a problem? The only reason it's a problem is because you are going to make it mean you're not good enough. Yes, only a problem because you are going to make it mean that they're not learning anything and this was a terrible thing and that you are an imposter and all of these things that we tell ourselves.
If we just don't tell ourselves those things, then it doesn't matter. If they ask you a question, you don't know the answer to it. Okay. One thing you can do, just as an aside, is plan for some of these eventualities. Someone asks you a question and you don't know the answer - you say, “that's a really interesting question. I'm going to write that down and let's ponder on it next week. I love that I'm not in a position to answer it right now, so let's have a think about it. You have a think too. See what answer you'd have and um, we'll talk about it next week. Alright. When I've had a bit more time to ponder it. Cool. Thank you.”
Or “actually I can't remember the detail of that study. You know, I, I know all the main things, but it's been a while. You know, do you find that when you read papers, you don't remember all the details? It's totally normal happens to all of us. So, no, I don't remember that exact detail. I can look it up for you though. Or actually, if somebody's on their laptop, do you want to have a quick peek now and let us know what type of participants it was? You can let the group know in a second.”
Okay. Because if it doesn't mean anything about you as an academic or an intellectual or a teacher, if you don't know the answer, then suddenly there's a whole ton of solutions. And actually what we're doing is we're modelling for the students that it's okay not to know. That it's not a big deal if you don't know, because you can figure it out.
One of the things that allows us to take that sort of approach is to keep our worries in this room. I don't mean my room specifically where I'm recording this, but whatever room you are currently in. So what we often do is we take something that happens in the teaching room and we make it mean a whole bunch of things about us and our future.
We make it mean whether we're ever going to be a good teacher, whether anyone will ever give us a lecturing job, whether the students are going to pass their degrees, whether they're ever going to do well in their exams. All of these things we make it mean all of this stuff. And in life, just generally, if you just worry about that specific thing in the room and not all these things that we make it mean, then suddenly it's so much easier.
Because actually if we are just in this room, all we've got to do is figure out how we get that student that bit of information that I didn't know the answer to in the moment. We haven't got a solve for why I now think I'll never get a job as a lecturer or whatever. We can just stay in the room, worry about that specific thing, then we can resolve all of these issues.
Another thing that I see regularly is, particularly junior staff who lack confidence in teaching, spending a disproportionate amount of time preparing. And that's because we let ourselves believe this myth, that more time preparing will lead to more confidence.
To some extent, there's a little bit of a linear relationship at some ends of that, particularly at the beginning end. If you spend no time preparing, it's going to be hard to feel confidence unless you're somebody who's really, really comfortable winging it. But there definitely reaches a point of limited returns. There definitely reaches a point where more time preparing is not going to make you more confident because the problem here is not that you are not prepared enough.
The problem here is that you're telling yourself thoughts that are not making you feel confident. They're thoughts that are making you feel anxious or shame or guilt, or whatever it is. Okay, so what I want you to do is I want you to have really sensible discussions with yourself about how long you have to give this piece of teaching.
That's not how long do I have to work in order to feel confident because we are not going to feel confident by the duration of time we've worked. How much time is a reasonable and proportionate amount of time to spend preparing for this piece of teaching? How much time do you have? How much time do you wish you had? Find somewhere around those. In between those.
Can be worth discussing with your mentors. It can vary quite a lot depending on whether it's something where you've had materials from somebody else, whether you're starting from scratch, whether it's within your topic area, whether it's not within your topic area. So do discuss with a mentor how long you should be spending on it, but try and break this belief that more time gives you more confidence.
My final piece of advice is we have to stay out of the students’ models. Now, when I talk about models, some of you who come regularly to my coaching sessions, either my free monthly group coaching, or maybe you're a member of my membership or have been to some of my training sessions, you'll know I use something called the self-coaching model, and this is where we look at:
The Circumstances - the true facts of the situation
The thoughts we have about those circumstances, which are up to us to determine
The feelings that those thoughts generate,
the actions that we do when we're feeling that way
and the results that we have.
We are in control of this model. We're not in control of our circumstances necessarily, but we are in control of what we think, what we feel, what we do, and therefore what results we get. One of the reasons people lack confidence in teaching is because they get all up in other people's models. They start thinking that their students' models are things like, their thought is “this person doesn't know what they're talking about” and feel disrespectful or judgmental. Or you’re worried, they're thinking, “oh, this is really boring,” and they feel fed up.
You see what I mean? We're getting into the heads of our students and starting to think what thoughts are they having? What feelings are they having? Now, it's always important to consider the perspectives of your students. But I hate to break it to you, but you don't get to control what thoughts and feelings they have.
And the fact is you could go and do the exact same teaching session and some of them will have good thoughts and some of them will have bad thoughts. Nothing amazed me more than getting my first batch of feedback forms after I was teaching like straight out. It probably even during my PhD actually and I got my first batch of teaching feedback forms And. It would amaze me that like some of them would be like, oh, Vikki talks far too fast, there's too much information to take in, da, da da. And then others would be like, it was so slow and boring. There was so much, you know, too much to take. There was, you know, it was all stuff we already knew. Didn't have to take any notes. I'm like, This was the same lectures, exactly the same person, exactly the same teachers, and you guys are having completely different responses.
I had everything from, you are the best teacher I've ever had. This is an inspirational, you're incredible, through to, you're a bit much, aren't you? And everything in between, so we don't get to control the thoughts and feelings of our students. What we do get to do is turn up and do a session that we think is good enough considering the amount of time and effort we are allowed to put into it. We were able to put into it.
We get to decide that, and then they get to have their own experience and to have their own thoughts and opinions. It's a hard one to land. We all love getting positive feedback. It's nice when the students tell us that we're their favorite lecturer or it was a really interesting session, or whatever.
These things are lovely. But we don't get to control when they come. Same as everybody else in your life. You get to turn up the way you want to turn up and be the best version of you, whether it's as a teacher, a researcher, as a partner, a friend, a parent, whoever. You get to show up as the version of you that you want to be, and then we have to accept that other people will just have their thoughts and feelings about that.
Because the irony is the more we try and get up in their thoughts, the worst job we usually do. So usually, have you ever been in that situation where you're like looking around a teaching room going, “oh my God, they think I'm an idiot, they're bored, that person's not even listening, that person's asleep.” And just start worrying about what they're thinking.
Do you do a better job in that situation? When you are trying to interpret every thought of every person in the room? Do you do a better job when you make it mean something about you? No. You start doubting yourself and then you start sort of stuttering and you start forgetting what you are going to say and you don't do the best job.
Because when we try and get in other people's models and really figure out what's going on in their heads and change what's in their heads, because we're making it mean something negative, that's when we actually end up doing a less good job. You are much better off getting out of their models, delivering a session that you can deliver and getting it done.
Obviously this doesn't mean we don't try and assess where the student's understanding is at, but there's a massive difference between having a look around and going, okay, are people generally taking notes? Do they look confused? And using that as an information gathering as to whether you can move on to the next topic or whether you're going to spend a little bit more time here.
That one's fine. But now compare that to, “they look bored. I must be boring. They look confused. I must be explaining this badly.” That's different. That's where we're making it mean something about us. So try your best. Get out of other people's heads. Stay in your own.
Now, at the beginning I said that one of the really important things is knowing that after the session, you're not going to beat yourself up however it went. You're not going to beat yourself up. You're going to tell yourself you did the best job you could on the day, and you're going to be supportive and kind to yourself.
Now, some people say, “ah, but doesn't that mean I'll never get better? If I always tell myself I've done a good job, I'll never get better”. It doesn't mean that you don't reflect on the session, but there's a massive difference between, “oh my God, I can't believe you did that. You're terrible. Why did you do that?”
And “ah, that was interesting actually. I think I included too many slides and I had to rush a bit at the end there, didn't I? I'll make a note of that and remember next time.” Those things are so different. You're not beating yourself up about the decisions you made. You're looking at them compassionately and going, “oh, that's really interesting.
I wonder why I thought I could have fitted all that in, because actually, yeah, on reflection, I don't think that was ever going to work. Okay, next time I need to remember. I have a tendency to be ambitious about how much I can fit in and let's maybe try and chop it.”
So what we can do is we can reflect with compassion, we can still learn. And again, I talked about this a little bit last week when we were talking about learning from your past mistakes. We can still reflect, but we can reflect from a place of compassion and respect and understanding with the intention of improving our performance next time, rather than attributing blame and beating ourselves up for last time.
I really hope that that was useful. And just to remind you, this was a topic entirely done on the basis of a request from a listener. So if there are things you think I should be talking about that you worry about that I haven't covered yet, get on my website, drop me a message, or find me on Twitter @DrvikkiBurns and let me know and I might do your episode too. Thank you so much. Particular thanks to the person who requested this topic, and I will see you all next week.