Stop lecturing, start coaching
Hands up if you’ve ever lectured on a module that wasn’t your area of expertise? Hands up if the phrase, ‘you’ve just got to stay one week ahead of the students’ is one you’re familiar with?
I don’t even know what my ‘area of expertise’ is anymore, or if I ever truly had one. It happens a lot I think…you drift into a teaching post after completing a PhD, and before you know it, you’re googling the name of a module you’ve agreed to teach. I’ve always gone along with this on the basis that, I love learning new things (so it’s no great punishment to have to study something new in order to teach it to undergraduates in a vaguely convincing way). Other narratives I have used to justify this form of self-indulgence are ‘having a PhD makes me an expert learner. It’s my job to learn and to inspire others to do likewise’ and ‘it’s professional development. I need to learn this to stay current.’
It’s not that I think these narrative are wrong, but I have started to question whether the one-lecturer-to-many-module model is one that needs updating, at least in teaching-focused universities where there is more need to prepare students for employment than for post-graduate study. I know I am not the first person to consider this, and I’m only just starting to imagine other possibilities.*
Before I elucidate any further, a bit of back story…
Two emerging interests have given rise to these reflections:
Firstly, I’ve discovered something even more satisfying than speed-teaching yourself a new topic the night before you’re due to give a lecture on it. It’s getting people who actually live and breathe that topic — as in, people who do it for a living — to tell you exactly what to teach. Hell, they might even offer to take the lecture for you, if they happen to be from a successful and forward-thinking company who value outreach. This realisation was something of a game changer to me. It has completely transformed how I approach module planning, from something I used to do in relative isolation and without much real-world experience to draw on, into something collaborative and grounded (at least, that’s the idea).
Secondly, I’ve started hanging around with agile coaches and it’s starting to rub off on me. I find this pragmatic and person-centred approach to leadership sorely lacking in many realms of academia, yet I think academia could really benefit from it (as a complement to other progressive forms of leadership, applied wisely and artfully.) I’m fortunate that I have opportunities to explore and to experiment with some of these ideas and approaches in my current role, but I fear there will always be a glass ceiling in academia, until something big enough comes along to uproot those tired and rigid institutional structures.
These two interests then converged, resulting in the latest ‘what if’ scenario to have begun churning around inside my head.
What if…lecturers didn’t exist?
Apart from being a horrible and antiquated word, ‘lecturer’, doesn’t adequately describe what I think I want to be to my students. I don’t want lecture students on topics I have decided are important; I want to help them to discover what’s important to them, and create the conditions that will enable that learning to take place.
What if…modules didn’t exist, and instead students were able to navigate their own learning tapestries?
We know that career pathways are seldom linear, yet we plan curricula as if they were narrow beams lighting the way toward predestined end points. What if there were many different routes and destinations, and we gave students torches to light their own way?
What if…instead of lecturers, there were coaches, mentors and trainers?
The coach would be there to help a student identify their personal goals and plan their learning journey. They would support the student to develop self-awareness and executive function skills through continuous feedback and other activities designed to enable. The mentor would offer support and guidance from an experienced vantage point. And the trainers? We’d need expert trainers to deliver the real-world experience.
It’s a flight of fancy I’m taking here, but it’s one that reveals to me where my real value is (or could be) as a ‘lecturer’, and it’s not giving lectures — it’s almost the exact opposite. I want to stop lecturing, and start coaching.
*Others have progressed much further in this e.g. Ovum (2018) Reimagining the University in a Student-Centric World