Summer is a fantastic time to reflect on your teaching practice. What’s been working well? What would you like to improve upon? What would you like to change?
For inspiration, I recommend Professor Adam Grant’s Ted Talk: “What Frogs in Hot Water Can Teach Us About Thinking Again.” Grant shares examples from his own life to illustrate how tunnel vision and fixed habits can leave us stuck on narrow paths. Drawing on his research and experience as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, he shares counterintuitive insights on how to broaden your focus and remain open to opportunities for rethinking.
Grant speaks of the need for teachers to have “confident humility,” positing that “rethinking does not have to change your mind, it just means taking the time to reflect and staying open to new possibilities.” Reflecting on his experience as a professor, he believes that “good teachers introduce new thoughts, but great teachers introduce new ways of thinking.”
Grant shares that he used to feel the need to control every element of what happened in his courses, but “it wasn’t until I ceded control that I realized how much my students had to teach one another and me.” This realization helped transform him from a good teacher into a great teacher. He concludes: “Ever since then, I’ve put an annual reminder in my calendar to rethink what and how I teach.”
Grant’s annual “teaching check-ups” have led him to reimagine and improve his courses in ways that he finds both energizing and impactful. As Grant suggests, integrating both active learning and reflective practices are key ways to both learn from your students and keep growing as a professor.
I also recommend approaching teaching like you would approach scientific research, using the scientific method of inquiry, as University of Wisconsin Professor Jo Handelsman and her colleagues Sarah Miller and Christine Pfund outline in their book, Scientific Teaching.
This process starts by recognizing that if you keep doing things the same way, you’ll probably get similar results. So if you want something to change, start by asking yourself, “what could I do differently in my course design or delivery?” Develop a hypothesis about how a given change would impact your classroom environment to better support student success. Then design an intervention, test it out, and reflect upon how it went, iteratively reimagining your teaching practice.
As Thomas Edison said, “When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this: you haven’t.”
The Teaching and Learning Collaborative’s instructional design team is here to support you in doing a “teaching check-up,” as Adam Grant does every year, or by helping you design and implement a pedagogical intervention, as Jo Handelsman and her colleagues suggest. Reach out to us at teach@wit.edu, and enjoy Grant’s Ted Talk below — I hope it inspires you to grow as both a teacher and a learner.
Joshua Luckens is an instructional designer with the Teaching & Learning Collaborative at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, Massachusetts. Follow TLC on LinkedIn!