One of my big fears when I started teaching as a PhD student was my students asking questions I didn’t know the answer to – I was worried about my level of subject knowledge and thought that students would be eager to catch me out and expose me as a fraud who wasn’t good enough to be instructing them.

In the third video with advice from PhD students, Abeer Elbahrawy, Alex Gilder, Lee Jones, Alex Powell, Marianna Rolbina and Deanna Taylor provide some solutions for dealing with this situation if it arises – although I can assure you that the vast majority of the students who you will teach will not be deliberately attempting to find the gaps in your knowledge!

The video suggests:

• being honest when you don’t know something – it’s normal and fine to not know everything
• looking into the answer after class
• showing the student how they can find the solution – modelling your process for this will be really helpful for them and is often a more useful thing for them to learn than the answer itself
• referring students to a colleague who might specialise in the area