As I wrapped up my undergraduate degree, I decided to stick around for a masters. Why? I met someone, and she wouldn’t be graduating for a couple more years. Get a masters, graduate at the same time, happily ever after. The plan changed, but the happily ever after part didn’t – we just celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary with our three kids.
A few weeks into grad school, I found myself having a conversation with my advisor, Professor Walter O’Brien. He’d already spent about 40 years as a professor at Virginia Tech and was still working for one reason: because he loved it. Here’s a paraphrased version of our conversation from about 13 years ago:
Me: You’re clearly well-known and a leading expert in the field. Why aren’t you out designing next-generation rockets and jet engines?
Dr. O’Brien smiles, and without saying a word opens a drawer in his desk. He pulls out a yellow-pad with a list of about 150 names in it.
Dr. O’Brien: I could be out working on engines, with a chance at making one really great contribution at a time. But there is too much work to be done. These 150 people are all out there doing that work, and every one of them got their start in my lab. I’ve multiplied myself.
That image stuck with me: multiply yourself. In that moment, I knew that I’d become a professor. I walked out of his office and down the hall to complete the paperwork for enrolling in the PhD program.
The Way We’ve Always Done It
5 years later, we’d made some real progress. We got married, I finished my masters, and was deep into the data collection process for my doctorate. A gap in research funding put me in position to teach a course for the first time as a way to cover expenses. While my experience was positive, I quickly learned that there is a lot more to effective teaching than “knowing your stuff” and “giving clear lectures.”
I attended a few seminars through the teaching center and registered for the “Preparing the Future Professoriate” graduate certificate. Here’s what I learned, in a nutshell:
- Most faculty teach how they were taught. After all, it worked for them. Why not emulate what you saw demonstrated by those who taught you?
- The science of teaching and learning is every bit as rigorous as any other discipline. Yet many college faculty have little to no formal training in pedagogy – neither how to leverage best practices nor how to contribute to the body of knowledge.
- Combining (1) and (2): most faculty teach poorly, and work very hard doing it.
I became more deeply involved in the teaching center’s program, learned everything I could, and have found myself in the position of “disruptor” ever since.
What Gets Measured
Fast forward a few more years and I find myself living the dream: I’m in a teaching-focused position as Associate Professor in Residence in the College of Engineering. My mission: enhance students’ experience in the early “decision-point” courses – the courses that tend to be places where students decide whether or not to remain in the program based on how well they do. It’s going very well (if student evaluations, retention rates, and performance in follow-on courses are any indication).
I wasn’t expecting to be seen as a mentor by my colleagues. Yet I am frequently asked “You get great student evals, your students are succeeding, and you’re great at work-life balance. Do you even get stressed? How did you do that?”
While I’d like to think there’s something special about what I do, it really all comes down to a few things:
- Do what the best do: instead of teaching how I was taught, I look to pedagogy experts for proven methods of supporting my students on their journeys.
- Recognize that empathy and rigor are not competing notions: We can be responsive to students’ experiences, circumstances, and struggles while continuing to hold them to a high standard.
- There aren’t “STEM People” and “Humanities People”: Everyone has a whole brain, and both halves need nourishment regardless of the chosen field of study.
- Everything is a draft: perfection isn’t possible, but continuous improvement is. Rather than trying to get everything perfect, I focus on doing the best I can and then revising 20% of each course from semester to semester.
If that’s too much to take in, here’s an even more succinct perspective:
What gets measured gets improved. Let me wrap up this post by unpacking.
Mentorship 101
When people ask me what mentoring means to me, I form an image of a mirror in my mind. Teachers may be in the business of delivering new information, but mentors do something else: they help us see where we are. They help us measure our current status objectively, enabling us to chart a path to where we want to be. A great mentoring conversation usually looks like:
- What did you do?
- Why did you do it that way?
- What do you intend to do next?
Simply measuring our current state (and why we are there) tells us what we need to do next. That’s what it means to say “what gets measured gets improved.” You’ll rarely hear me using words such as “should.” “Well, what you should do next…” is not a statement made by someone with mentoring in mind. Instead, what we need from our mentors is help seeing ourselves for what we are. No lens, no filter, the real deal. Confronted with our true selves, the path to becoming who we aspire to be naturally presents itself.
People don’t need to be told what to do. They need help seeing how the way they are currently doing things is aligned (or misaligned) with their values. Once we’re confronted with the truth, everything else follows naturally.
*I am flattered to have been recognized recently for the ways that I mentor my colleagues. I had no idea that folks see me this way. This post is my response to having received this recognition. It’s also ignited a new passion which builds upon that life-changing phrase spoken by Dr. O’Brien all those years ago: If teaching is a chance to “multiply myself,” maybe teaching the teachers is a way to “exponentiate myself.”
This world has many problems. Effective education is the foundation for solving them.
