A few weeks ago, I published a post about the benefits of teaching as a PhD student. On this blog, I always want to try to give a balanced view of PhD life so this post is about the potential drawbacks of teaching as a PhD student. Even if you love teaching for the most part, there may be aspects of it that you find challenging. You may also not particularly enjoy teaching during your PhD and that’s okay! As long as you remain professional and fulfil all your teaching commitments, you don’t have to love every second of it, or even any of it.
This post explores some of the common challenges of teaching during your PhD and provides some strategies for overcoming them.
One. Teaching takes time
This drawback is perhaps the most obvious one. Most Humanities PhD students are registered as full-time students and are expected to dedicate a large portion of their time each week to working on their dissertation, thesis, or other academic projects. If you are teaching, you will have less time for your own academic work by default.
Depending on your institution and any funding package that you are receiving, you may be obligated to teach for up to 20 hours or more during all or part of your PhD, or you may have no teaching obligations at all and have decided to take on teaching responsibilities as an optional extra.
If you have to teach or find yourself teaching for any other reason, it does not have to be at the expense of your dissertation or thesis, or any other projects and commitments that you may have. It can be frustrating to not be able to put 100% effort into your research or into your teaching, but by rigorously blocking time on your calendar or in your diary for teaching and related activities such as meetings, preparing classes, and grading, you should be able to protect the rest of your time for research and other activities.
Note: If you are in a teaching situation in which the demands are too high for the contracted hours or the amount you are being paid, it is usually best to report the situation officially to the relevant unit on your campus and to work towards a formal resolution.
If you do not have to teach as part of your programme or funding package, you should weigh up any potential teaching opportunities you are offered and the skills and experience that you may gain from them with your planned timeline for completing your dissertation or thesis and any other commitments that you have. If teaching is important to you and you will still be able to pursue your research and other projects alongside it, go ahead! But if teaching won’t help you reach any personal or professional goals, it may be better to eschew it altogether in favour of focusing on your academic work and other pursuits.
Two. You may not get a lot of training
Some universities offer excellent campus-wide programmes and sessions for PhD students who are teaching, including orientations, ongoing professional development, certificate programmes, and one-off sessions about topics including assessment, technology, and inclusive teaching. Support for PhD students who teach can also be offered on the department or unit level, with many Humanities departments in the US running mandatory semester-long seminars for students during or in advance of their first semester of teaching, their own orientations, and ongoing support sessions.
However, depending on the institution and the department, you may find yourself in a situation where there is little or no formal training on offer. This situation can also arise if you are asked at the last minute to step in to cover a class or course for someone who is suddenly unable to teach, or if you are teaching a course outside your home department; there may not be enough time to complete any relevant training or preparatory activities in such cases, or there may be no training geared towards your situation.
If you have not received any or enough training, you may feel overwhelmed and unsure of what to do. To overcome this situation, you can try to make informal connections with others who have taught the course or similar courses before to see if they have any tips and advice.
It can also pay to spend a bit of time looking at the situation calmly and working out what you need to do by working backwards. For example, if you know that you will need to lead twelve seminar sessions, what kind of materials will you need for each one and when will you have the time to prepare them? What are the main responsibilities associated with the class you are teaching and when will you do them, for example, grading, planning, and office hours? Working things out for yourself is not necessarily an ideal situation, but using your initiative in this way can help you to develop your project management skills and gain a better understanding of the teaching process than you might have had had you had more guidance.
Your institution may not offer online support or resources. If that is the case, several universities have teaching centres that make some of their resources available online for free to users from any institution. Here are some examples of resources that are publicly available online from various organisations that may be helpful if you lack support and guidance in one or more areas of your teaching practice:
Resources from the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning at Yale
Reference Materials from the University Center for Teaching and Learning at University of Pittsburgh
Teaching Strategies from the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan
Programmes and qualifications offered by AdvanceHE in the UK
Three. You may feel a lot of pressure to perform well
When you start teaching or even if you have been teaching for a while, you may feel pressure to be an excellent teacher. How you define excellence will depend on your own experiences or expectations: you might want to present yourself in a certain way to students, ensure that your students have the best possible learning experience, cover as much material as possible as effectively as possible, help your students to increase their grades, create the most inclusive learning space possible…the list goes on.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with caring about your work and wanting to do a good job. You should absolutely do your best to help your students learn and to improve your skills as an instructor.
However, you cannot be perfect all the time, or indeed, most of the time. Sometimes, your classes will not flow as well as might have hoped, you might get your time management wrong or forget to share important information, you might not cover as much material as you had hoped, or you might make mistakes in interpersonal communication with students.
Try to treat these experiences as things that you can learn from. Find strategies for managing nerves and perfectionism around teaching, if you struggle with these things, that work for you. Teaching should be enjoyable and it’s important to learn to manage your emotions so that it doesn’t take up an unreasonable proportion of your work time and downtime.
Four. You may not have enough support
You might find yourself feeling isolated socially and emotionally while you are teaching. Depending on the organisation and culture of your department, you might be the only person teaching a particular course, or you might be teaching alongside several others but be in a space where the culture is not predisposed towards collaboration and supporting each other.
Consequently, you may not feel like you have people around you who understand the demands of teaching or whom you can ask for advice. This situation can lead to increased feelings of isolation and stress, especially if you feel as though you have no one to turn to if difficult situations arise while you are teaching.
There are ways that you can try to mitigate this situation. If you feel comfortable, you can schedule one-to-one conversations with others who teach in your department or similar departments to share experiences. You can also try to organise social events in your department based around teaching, for example lunch meetings where people share activities that they have developed for their students or a shared space where people can meet to grade or planned lessons together.
Accessing professional support can also help in such situations, either via organised sessions, courses, or conferences focused on teaching at your university or beyond, or by making an appointment at a teaching centre, if you have access to one, to discuss your concerns. You can also look for community online, for example on social media and other fora, where you can connect with others who are teaching for mutual support and to share experiences and resources.
Five. It can be unpredictable
You never know quite what to expect every time you start to teach a new course or meet a new group of students. Even individual seminar discussions or one-to-one conversations with students can take unexpected turns and follow random tangents.
You spend one semester with an incredibly lively group of students and then find yourself with a group in which the majority are disengaged the following semester. Students may adore texts that you merely tolerate, or you might be asked questions that you cannot answer immediately. Don’t forget that there are all kinds of unexpected events that you may have to deal with and adapt to including construction, power cuts, natural disasters, and more.
It is impossible to prepare for every eventuality when you teach. For some people, this situation can be difficult to manage; you might spend a lot of time worrying about what could happen and what you would be able to do if multiple things were to go wrong or even if some aspects of your class were simply sub-optimal. These feelings can be difficult to manage.
A way of managing these concerns is to focus on both things that went well and concrete strategies for improving your teaching practice in the future. Directing energy towards these two areas can be much less exhausting and more productive than worrying about things that could happen.
Six. Your progression may not be logical
In an ideal world, you might imagine starting by teaching a course designed for first-year students and progressing through courses that cover increasingly challenging or complex material throughout your time teaching as a PhD student. In my case, that is exactly what happened: I taught all four courses that form part of the Elementary Language Programme in French at the University of Michigan in chronological order and then progressed to teaching an introductory literature course that I had designed myself.
However, a logical progression is not always possible due to departmental or student needs. If you find yourself teaching courses in a different order than the sequence in which students usually take them or courses that are not directly related to things that you have taught previously or anticipate teaching in the future, you might find it difficult to orientate yourself in terms of what students might know coming into your class and what you could do to help them be prepared for what they might be doing next.
These gaps in knowledge can make planning lessons and producing materials more challenging than if you had previously taught certain classes. You can overcome these challenges by examining syllabi and learning material from classes that are a prerequisite for the one you are currently teaching and by asking instructors who have taught those classes about their experiences.
Seven. Teaching opportunities may not last forever
If you are undertaking your PhD in the United States, you will probably have a funding package that guarantees you a certain number of semesters or years of teaching. In some cases, it is possible to extend your time in the programme via applying for additional teaching positions, but this situation cannot be guaranteed and is often made on a case-by-case basis. Even if you really enjoy teaching as a graduate student, it is, by the very nature of the arrangement, a time-limited option. And with the academic job market being tight, particularly in the Humanities, it can be difficult to find stable teaching positions, let alone tenure track jobs, in universities and colleges following your degree.
In the UK system, teaching is rarely guaranteed upfront as part of a funding package; it may only be available on an application-only basis at various intervals during the year or as and when the need arises. The amount of available teaching can vary hugely so it can be very difficult to count on consistent teaching as an income stream or to build experience during your PhD.
If you love teaching, it can be difficult when the opportunities to do so cease or become more limited. To help manage this situation, you can look for opportunities outside your department and/or university to maintain your skills and income if you run out of teaching opportunities within your home department.
Closing Remarks
Make sure that you take some time to enjoy the moment while you are teaching because you may never know how long it will last! And remember that you don't have to love teaching just because it seems like all your PhD peers love it, or for any other reason. As this post has highlighted, PhD students who teach can encounter myriad difficulties and challenges; an important skill to develop during this time is overcoming such challenges and seeking out resources and support to help you to do so.
Did you experience any drawbacks or challenges while you were teaching? Comment down below if you have ideas that I didn't cover here.
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