I’m writing this in my final week working at City. I’ve loved my time here, and especially working with PhD researchers to develop their teaching. This blog will be continued by my colleagues in the academic team in LEaD (possibly more regularly!) so there’ll be more resources and discussion of teaching here in the future.

Nevertheless, I thought this might be a good opportunity to offer a final piece of advice around teaching, and it’s actually the same advice that I’ve been giving the whole time I’ve been teaching in HE – to read more fiction.

My own teaching journey began by teaching literature while I was a DPhil student myself, so the applicability of this advice is obvious for students whose course revolves around reading fiction. I then moved into teaching academic writing to a range of students, and it might also seem fairly logical that all kinds of reading will unconsciously develop your writing ability. But what has reading fiction got to do with teaching?

Well, there’s been lots of research around how reading fictional stories can develop empathy (see, for example Stansfield and Bunce, 2014; Tamir et al, 2016; Oatley, 2016). And I am a firm believer that empathy, and compassion are the most important attributes of effective teachers.

At its heart, teaching and learning is about connecting with people. Of course, there’s practical considerations about how to cover the material on the module, and what activities are beneficial to engage students. But all the structure around teaching and learning is about connecting with people – planning, using learning outcomes and constructive alignment are all about connecting with who your students are at the start of the course (what do they know? how do they learn?) and who they will be during the module (what new things will they be able to do? how will you support them doing these?). And connecting with people is all about empathy.

So, to develop empathy and compassion – for your students, and for yourself as a teacher (because it’s a hard job at times): read fiction.

Read fiction that makes you laugh. Read fiction that makes you cry. Read fiction that inspires you.

When I used to commute into City, I had a very long train journey and so lots of opportunities for reading fiction. Lately, I’ve struggled to find the time or headspace to get into anything demanding – if you’re feeling the same, I really recommend young-adult fiction which is often a bit shorter and easier to get into (I’ve recently enjoyed books by Jenny Downham and Holly Bourne).

It can take a bit of effort to get back into the reading habit, and it can feel like there’s other things that you could be doing that are more important, but reading fiction definitely makes a difference for me and positively influences my teaching – I hope it benefits you too.