Establishing a Teaching Persona in 2021

I hope you’ve enjoyed the Establishing a Teaching Persona (ETP) course this year. With the digital pivot, I’ve run things a bit differently this year as all sessions have been online. I didn’t think that the previous structure of one full day of teaching, and then a half-day of micro-teaching practice would work well online, so instead, in response to your priorities on the survey I sent out, I changed it to four 90 minute sessions focusing on different key areas but retaining the emphasis on identity and compassion.

The slides for each of the sessions can be found here, in case you want to refer back to them:  identity, planning and presenting, engaging students in active and creative learning and reflecting on teaching.

I’m not sure everything has translated effectively to online – in the face-to-face version, we used a Lego building activity to explore teaching identities and I’m not completely satisfied with the replacement activity of choosing pictures. What I did really enjoy was co-teaching the sessions with my colleagues Jane, Pam, Richard and Ruth – I think there’s huge benefits to teaching collaboratively (such as getting different perspectives and input) , so if you have the opportunity to teach with others I would definitely recommend doing it, and don’t be afraid to ask others for help if you think a session would work better with more than one teacher (especially online).

If any of you have any thoughts about what worked or didn’t work, please let me know in the comments. I’m leaving City at the end of the month to join the University of Winchester as Head of Learning and Teaching, but the academic team in LEaD will be continuing ETP.

I’m also doing a conference presentation about the move to online at 11:25am on Wednesday 30th June as part of the Learning at City Conference – please do come along if you want to hear more about the reasons behind the changes, and if you’d like to let me know how it worked from your perspective!

 

Reflecting on ETP1 – identity

Yesterday was the first online version of the Establishing a Teaching Persona course – thank you to everyone who attended as we had some really productive discussions around teaching identities, and your aspirations are very inspiring – to provide insight and take the students beyond their knowledge, but being there to support their journeys; working together to create interesting and engaging learning opportunities and giving your students the fuel to fly; freeing student thinking and allowing their thoughts to grow with guidance; considering students’ individual needs and enabling them to reap the benefits of education.

We’ll be looking at ways you can implement these ambitions in the rest of ETP (please book on using Research Manager if you haven’t already as places are filling up fast!). I mentioned during the class yesterday that one of the most powerful ways that I’ve found to develop my teaching is through reflection. When I reflect on yesterday’s task, I could see some definite easy improvements in making sure the tech functioned as I wanted it to! I found your contributions to be really valuable, so I’ll be ensuring that we have plenty of space to discuss your thoughts and ideas in the remaining three sessions.

The final ETP is all about reflection, so we’ll be exploring how it might be useful for you then. In the meantime, you might find a guide that I wrote about reflective writing on teaching useful (Reflective writing guide for MAAP) – this is for participants for our MA in Academic Practice but goes through some of the models you might wish to use, and even if you’re not needing to do formal reflective writing at the moment, you might find it beneficial to do some reflective writing about your teaching in an informal journal or blog.

Establishing a Teaching Persona 2021 – development for PhD researchers who teach

Hello!

Despite starting with good intentions last term, I haven’t updated this blog as often as I planned – like many of you who are juggling your research with many other responsibilities, some things have fallen by the wayside a little. I hope to keep you updated more frequently this term, with advice and resources which are useful to PhD researchers at City who are teaching or interested in teaching.

What you might find useful this term is the return of the Establishing a Teaching Persona (ETP) programme. ETP aims to build your confidence and knowledge about teaching and addresses the difficulties of negotiating between your identity as a PhD researcher and a new, teacher identity. You might already be teaching or have teaching planned – perhaps you’re wondering whether your students will respect you in the classroom; possibly you’re worried about how to run a tutorial or seminar, online learning, how to deal with awkward questions or students who don’t seem interested. Or maybe you’re just not sure about what teaching involves and want to find out whether it might be something you’re interested in for the future.

The series of four short courses are specifically aimed at people with limited or no teaching experience, and so covers many practical basics, but PhD researchers at any stage are welcome if you think that the content would be useful to you.

I began running this in 2018, and this year it takes place online. The session run for 90 minutes with a mixture of advice, reflection, discussion and activities. You can attend the whole series, or whichever ones seem most pertinent to you.

  • ETP 1 Teaching identities: Wed 17 Feb 10-11:30am
    This session looks at how you establish your teaching identity – what kind of teacher would you like to be? How can you establish boundaries with your students but still be approachable? How can you consider student diversity in your teaching?
  • ETP 2 Planning teaching and presenting: Tues 2 March 10-11:30am
    This session looks at how you can prepare and plan your teaching, whether you’re running a seminar, lecture or lab yourself or supporting another member of staff. What kind of presentation skills are needed for teaching and how can you develop these in the context of your own teaching persona?
  • ETP 3 Engaging students and enabling them to participate in creative learning: Thurs 18 March 10-11:30am
    This session looks at how you can engage students to learn actively during a session, and the benefits of taking a creative approach to learning. What does engagement mean? How might you encourage active learning in different kinds of teaching?
  • ETP 4 Reflection and developing your teaching: Wed 31 March 10-11:30am
    This session looks at the benefits of reflection to continue to develop the kind of teaching identity that you wish to create. Why is it important to reflect on your teaching? What areas of development might you want to focus on?

These are open to anyone registered as a PhD researcher at City, and can be booked via Research Manager. Please let me know (jessica.hancock @ city.ac.uk without the spaces) if you have any questions, or you can add a comment to this blog.

I look forward to seeing some of you there!

 

City PhD videos: relationships with students and teaching personas

A key aspect to consider when you start teaching is your teaching identity. What kind of teacher do you want to be, and what kind of persona will you adopt? Will you be similar to those who have taught you, or other teachers in your department, or different? What’s the connection between your personality, and other identities you have (such as a PhD student, researcher, professional, friend, carer), and your teaching identity? This idea of who you are as a teacher, or your persona, is also closely linked to the kinds of relationships you have or want to have with the students you teach – for example, will you treat them as peers, or create a hierarchy?

There’s no one right answer to these questions, or one correct persona to adopt – I firmly believe that education benefits from diversity in teaching identities. Nevertheless, I also think this is an important aspect to consider, and is something that we examine in detail during the Establishing a Teaching Persona course at City.

These issues are discussed in the fourth video with advice from PhD students about teaching. Here, Abeer Elbahrawy, Alex Gilder, Lee Jones, Alex Powell, Marianna Rolbina and Deanna Taylor elaborate on the process of establishing their own teaching personas, and the kinds of relationships they construct with the students whom they teach. They talk about being:

  • relatable – through having been in their students’ position very recently
  • friendly (but professional) and supportive
  • an advisor
  • informal – but also maintaining boundaries
  • authoritative through a professional presentation
  • firm but fair – balancing praise and criticism

There’s also an exploration of the rewarding nature of teaching students, and the pride that is gained by seeing students learn.

Establishing a Teaching Persona first iteration and using whiteboards

The new course, ‘Establishing a Teaching Persona’ ran for the first time today and yesterday. I was really impressed by how enthusiatically people participated, and by the thoughtful feedback that my group gave each other this morning for the micro-teach activity.

One of the issues that came up during the micro-teach was whether to use Powerpoint slides whilst teaching, or whether to write key points and explanations on the white board: in my group, we had people who did both. We explored the benefits of the whiteboard: how the flexibility of being able to write or draw anything enabled connections to be made easily between different points, and how engaging it could be to see the key issues emerge as you watched and listened. The issue of handwriting size and legibility came up – I have difficult reading back notes I’ve made sometimes, so I definitely struggle with writing clearly at speed. We also talked about how many students will benefit from having materials in advance, so that they can go over it before a session and understand how the information is structured – it’s easy to do this with a prepared Powerpoint, but might be harder if the lesson is centred around the whiteboard.

When I came back from the session, I mentioned these discussions to my colleagues, and Ali sent me some links to resources about using whiteboards which will be useful if you use them in your teaching. The first is from Yale, and has some recommendations for using whiteboards in teaching. The second is from the British Council, which is a little more focused on school teaching, but much of the advice about teaching with whiteboards is transferrable and interesting. Let me know if you have found any other good resources.

 

 

Micro-teach information for participants

For your micro-teach, you will need to prepare a short (5-7 minute) presentation about some material that you would like to explain to the other participants. This could be something from your PhD, or undergraduate or masters dissertation, or it could be something that you’ve taught or will teach. Make sure it’s something that you can cover within the time (you will be cut off after the time limit!). You might want to use a PowerPoint presentation – if so, please bring it saved to a USB stick.

Micro-teach feedback

You will give peer feedback to each other, and will also receive feedback from one of LEaD’s lecturers. For the peer feedback, you’ll be asked to note on a post-it at least one thing you liked about the micro-teach, and one point for improvement.

Feedback will cover:

  • Methods
  • Resources
  • Pace and delivery
  • Body language and communication with your audience
  • Creativity

Micro-teach advice: things to think about

  • What can you realistically cover in 5-7 minutes? Attempt only what you are sure you can get through in the time available
  • Your ‘class’ members are drawn from a range of backgrounds and subject areas – how will you ensure that content is equally accessible to all students?
  • What kinds of resources/ visual aids will you use to enable/support learning?
  • How important is it that you plan a creative and enjoyable experience for all of your students?
  • How will you know that your peers have learned something from your session?

Establishing a Teaching Persona course for City PhD students

Are you a City PhD student who is concerned about teaching or having to teach in future? Perhaps you’re wondering whether your students will respect you in the classroom; possibly you’re worried about how to run a tutorial or seminar, how to deal with awkward questions or students who don’t seem interested. Or maybe you’re just not sure about what teaching involves.

If so, LEaD’s 1.5 day Establishing a Teaching Persona (ETP) course is for you. This is taught in a September (Wed 12th and Thursday 13th Sept 2018) and January (Wednesday 23rd & Thursday 24th Jan 2019) iteration and so will be particularly useful if you will be teaching for the first time in that term, although you do not have to have any teaching arranged to participate.

The course aims to build your confidence and knowledge about teaching and addresses the difficulties of negotiating between your identity as a PhD student and a new, teacher identity. It will cover the following areas:

Day 1 (full day: 10am – 4pm)

  • Practical advice about teaching – managing student behaviour, asking questions that generate responses, managing discussions, structuring a session, engaging students, encouraging attendance, using a whiteboard and classroom technology
  • Discussion about teaching identities, and establishing authority and credibility
  • Exploration of the types of teaching you’re likely to do, such as tutorials, labs, clinical teaching, seminars

Day 2 (half day: 10am – 1pm)

  • Teach a short session to peers and the LEaD academic team
  • Receive feedback
  • Observe others’ sessions

This short course is specifically aimed at people with limited or no teaching experience, and so covers many practical basics, but PhD students at any stage are welcome if you think that the content would be useful to you.

To apply, please complete the online form.

If you will be teaching at City, please note that ETP is provided in addition to the Learning, Teaching and Assessment (LTA) module of the MA in Academic Practice. You are, therefore, still required to take LTA (unless LEaD has agreed an exemption due to an appropriate existing qualification). LTA is for PhD students who already have teaching arranged for the term which they take LTA as there is a requirement to submit a peer review due to the module’s accreditation with the HEA. ETP will cover some practical elements which are not addressed by LTA, and will also provide a focus on the particular experience of teaching whilst undertaking a PhD.

Please let me know if you’d like any more information about the course: jessica.hancock@city.ac.uk