5 tips for becoming an amazing educator

This expands on my instagram post of the same name (have a look for a quick reference guide!)

Okay so this is largely going to be me pulling from some of what I’ve noticed in working with many educators of the years; what I’ve noticed in the behaviour of those who become great but also some crucial elements that are needed to allow us to become great in a sustainable way.

Right so let’s get into it!

1. Prioritise relationships…

… with your students, with support services… Relationship building is one of two things I tell educators all the time that we need to prioritise!

In order to learn, we (learners) need to feel safe; need to feel we have the space to try things and fail at them, to say something embarrassing in a group. A colleague of mine who I greatly respect once told me “fear is the greatest barrier to learning” and I couldn’t agree more. As teachers, we need to cultivate a space for our students where they see that they won’t be judged and where they know we are on their side.

Some ways we can do this? Positive reinforcement! When you see your students coming up with cool ideas, compliment them on them! Recognise the value in the questions they pose! When you see a student stepping outside of their comfort zone to try something, praise them for doing that! It can actually be really hard to speak up especially for the first time. Let’s imagine the opposite of this: a student asks a question and they hear back “That was covered in our lecture three weeks ago, are you seriously still confused about that?” — Do we think that student is ever going to ask a question of that teacher again? What about all the students who say that; will they? A tentative testing-of-the-waters to see ‘what kind of teacher do I have’ has sadly compromised potential trust and rapport.

Learning about our students, who they are, why they’re in our class and what they hope to get from it, what their goals and interests are, and all of that jazz. We show our students we are curious about them and interested in them as a human, not just an ID in our learning management system.

Also big note: this is not something you do quickly in 30 seconds once and forget about. It takes intentional effort. And the workloads need to be setup in your area to allow for this time. It’s something that can disappear with scale but also if you have a big subject and have a team of teachers, it’s a skill you can cultivate in your teaching team and there are creative ways to get an element of this there too (*note to self: this shall be delegated to some future post to save us a very long tangent*)

There are plenty of other things to do in the relationship space but let’s talk why we’d do this. When you build those relationships with students and show them we see them as humans first and are prioritising helping and guiding them towards their own goals, we build enormous levels of trust. This means those students are more open to reaching out to us if they have problems rather than feeling they need to figure out by themselves. They are more open to speaking up in class. They are more open to hearing sometimes critical feedback about their work and learning from that rather than becoming defensive. They will care about showing us what they can do over perhaps taking an easy way out of an assessment or task (hint: discourages cheating). In short: they are more open to engaging with all of what we might do as a teacher, because we see them as a human first and foremost.

Now hold up Aster, what about those other relationships? support services? Oh right! So the support services comes in because when we empathise with our students and show them we see them as a full human, we also will become a form of safe person to them. So often for young people (especially in environments where stigma exists around mental health, disability, being insecurely housed, etc.) they may not feel they can share what’s going on for them with folks in their close social network (because they don’t want to risk affecting their relationship with someone to revealing certain struggles they face [it’s problematic that this is something one considers, I know!]) and meanwhile it’s also not something they can discuss with a stranger. It requires both trust and distance. A teacher can become a trusted human who one sees regularly but also there’s less danger in sharing with them as they aren’t in a direct social network. So teachers can often become a first contact point. Of course most teachers are not trained counsellors nor should they need to be one but many organisations will have existing support services that students can be directed to so it’s good to be aware of what’s on offer and certainly knowing a few key people in some of these services means you can touch base and seek advice on who to connect a student with to best support their needs right now. So forming these connections as well will help teachers support their students in non-academic matters (which will best support students to excel academically as well!).

2. Observe and be reflective

The other thing I’m always telling educators is (to quote Aster of the past) “the best educators, are reflective educators”. That is to say we need to be listening and attentive to the information and data available to us about what we’re doing with our students. We need to know what they need and how our approaches are working for them. I myself started standing by a whiteboard with a very passive class design where just writing up the answers to class questions because I thought that’s how it worked because that was what it was like when I was learning those subjects. My teaching practice now is radically different. I operate very much in a ‘learning together from one another’ space (social constructivism) now but I got there by gathering student feedback, taking notes of what happened in class and how I saw students respond, noticing what they seemed to enjoy and engage with, what made them think. As I became more experienced I looked trends in assessment results, gathered experiences from other teachers. These days I even observe the practices of other teachers and facilitators with a mind to learning from their practices and what works there in terms of how I can continue to refine my own practices.

I put together a module a while back around evaluating teaching and learning and I may at some point distill the ideas from that explicitly into a post here but for now I might just share a simple set of ideas for how you can get started on this practice (or enhance your current way of working).

1. pick any goal that you have for your teaching / student learning/experiences
2. think about what an improvement there would look like
3. think about what information would tell you that was happening in terms of either student perspectives, colleague observations, self-reflections, or trends within assessment/formative task results
4. try a thing you think will work (your initiative) and plan to collect the data you need
5. review the data and see what it tells you
6. refine your goal, initiative, or data collection practice and repeat the cycle until you feel you are getting diminishing returns or another goal takes priority

3. Work in iterations

And this is really a continuation of the above. It’s almost impossible to get things right the first time. In fact when I work with educators I almost always suggest we use the first iteration of a subject/practice/initiative as a means of discovery and learning for us as the educators with a mind towards iteration 2 or 3 being the one where we really start to see positive results.

The first time we run something there are going to be setbacks, logistical issues, miscalculations, and those other fun confounding variables which can sometimes lead us to think that an actually good idea was wrongheaded somehow. We need to stick with something past the novelty factor, past the teething phase and into the point of it becoming the new normal where we’ve ironed out all the kinks. This doesn’t mean everything we try will be a good idea but as long as we have a reasonable basis for thinking it will work (see my next point!), piloting and experimenting new ideas is actually an important step in providing a great experience for our students but also ourselves!

This is also important from a sustainability sense. Large changes require a lot of work to get right and many educators work in spaces which are not always friendly in terms of workload and capacity. That means we need to work smarter not harder. We need to find out what parts we can extract from our bigger whole to learn enough about the practice to get a “crappy first draft” out in a way that won’t have negative effects on our students and with room dynamically fix anything essential as we go. Sometimes I suggest piloting a practice (such as picking one class or week to try something and see what happens; if it goes very badly it has only affected one small part of the whole but if it goes well we can feel more confident rolling it out further later). Sometimes I talk about making a minimum useful product, the barebones version which will be useful but doesn’t have all the bells and whistles and we tell our students openly that we’re doing this and why. In a later iteration we start to add in those bits and pieces, we work towards a more chef’s kiss refined version but taking that intentional choice to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good is really helpful. Plus when we’re open with students that this is a new practice, this is our basis for trying it (we think it will help them), that we’re super open to feedback and learning from you to improve things and just to be patient with us as we go… in these cases honestly I tend to see students are very understanding. Sometimes they’re even really excited to be a part of something new!

4. Collaborate and learn from colleagues

This goes with being reflective and working in iterations. It’s really important that we aren’t trying to operate in isolation. So often folks end up reinventing the wheel when in fact your colleague from two doors down tried that two years ago and can tell you exactly what pitfalls to be aware of and they even found some great resources to get you started! Whatever stage you’re at, it’s always a good time to consult with a peer, colleague, or ‘trusted human with relevant expertise’. Running your ideas past this person, brainstorming out approaches, unpacking challenges and problems. These will all result in better outcomes and save you time and stress!

If you can engage with the academic literature you can also often find out about useful approaches for a given problem, interesting design practices, what sorts of things don’t work, how students have responded to things, etc. Just like working in science we “stand on the shoulders of giants” and there is a lot to be said of the wisdom of the crowd. We just need to be careful we aren’t getting stuck in an echo chamber just with people we agree with as we may have biases we aren’t aware of and it’s helpful to expose ourselves to radically different ways of teaching and engaging so we can take a nuanced view and decide “what of this person’s practice, do I see as relevant to my own, and in what way?”

And of course, just to spruik my own field [humble brag emoji where are you!]. Learning design as a field exists precisely for this purpose; to be the Vygotsky-an “more knowledgeable other” and simultaneously the mentor and the cheerleader. Our role can often mean we are experienced with a wide range of different teaching practices, can often be quite across the relevant literature and likely have a wealth of knowledge they can share with you to help you meet your goals as a teacher. Of course I do have to highlight that my field is incredibly broad so I may just be speaking from the sense of what I have seen in the university sector! Please take with an appropriate amount of salt (not a whole shaker, especially not one of the really tall ones you see in restaurants. That might be too much sodium!)

5. Be kind to yourself!

Final point! So much of us can end up putting a lot of pressure on ourselves to be amazing all the time. All of these practices take work, time, energy. It can become all consuming if we aren’t careful. We can fixate on negative feedback and doubt ourselves, get caught in imposter syndrome. Remember, the mindset we adopt and the process we participate in, is more important than getting some perfect outcome. Yes there can be pressure on us from above or around to perform a certain way. Stressing in the now doesn’t necessarily help us, especially if our work starts to find its way out into our out-of-work time.

We need time to rest, recover, recuperate, reconnect with joy, recharge our batteries.

We cannot help others if we do not help ourselves first.

Do that paint-by-numbers. Play with your pet dog. Listen to the birdsong. Play that cosy game. Curl up with a book you love. Watch that ‘embarrassing’ reality TV show. You decide what self-care looks like for you. Do that thing, and come monday, you’ll be ready to get back into the ongoing becoming.

Relationships. Self-reflection. Working in iterations. Collaborating. Practicing self care. These are the 5 tips I have to help anyone advance in their doing of teaching.