This post details some of the benefits that you may derive from teaching during your PhD. For some students, teaching is a highlight of their time as a PhD student for myriad reasons. Even if you think that teaching isn't for you or you might prefer to focus on other things, this post highlights some of the advantages of teaching. As ever, I aim to give a balanced picture so I plan to produce a post about potential challenges of teaching as a PhD student in the near future.
Let’s start by looking at how teaching opportunities can work in Humanities PhD programmes. In the US, most Humanities programmes require students to teach for at least two years, if not more, as part of their basic funding package. Students may assist a professor or lecturer with a large lecture course by running discussion sections, grading, and providing other forms of input, or students may teach a class as an instructor of record, namely as the sole or main instructor of the class. This situation is particularly common in language departments and for first-year writing courses typically offered by English Departments or their equivalents. Some students also have the opportunity to design and teach their own course as they progress through their programme.
Most Humanities departments offer some form of training, orientation, and/or seminar course for students before or during their first semester of teaching and in many cases, attendance is mandatory. Several universities also having teaching centres that offer sessions that graduate students can attend and professional development certificate programmes, such as the University of Michigan, Duke, and UT Dallas.
In some instances, students may also apply to work as graduate instructors in departments other than their own, if they are qualified to do so and at an institution that offers these arrangements. You may also be able to take advantage of programmes that aid you in designing a course as part of a cohort with a particular focus such as service learning or writing; you may even have the opportunity to teach this course in a subsequent semester, Examples of this type of programme include the Sweetland Fellows Seminar and the Community Engaged Course Design Workshop at the University of Michigan.
In the UK, teaching is not usually an integral part of a PhD programme in the Humanities; it is very rare to receive a place in a programme or an offer of funding that includes guaranteed teaching. Students usually apply for teaching opportunities once they are in their programme as and when they arise; many positions are not available each year or semester and need can fluctuate according to demand and supply. For example, many PhD students gain teaching experience by covering the teaching load of a permanent staff member during their sabbatical. Opportunities can include teaching language and writing classes, running first year seminars, delivering tutorials, running revision sessions, and assisting lecturers and professors with larger classes and courses.
Because teaching is not included in standard funding packages, students are usually paid on an hourly or termly basis on top of any funding that they are already receiving. Some institutions offer training and professional development programmes to students new to teaching and those looking to develop their skills further, including the University of Reading and UCL.
This post focuses on the benefits of teaching within universities during your PhD. At the end, I touch briefly on other kinds of teaching opportunities that you may be able to take advantage of during this time.
One. Transferable Skills
Teaching during your PhD can give you a number of what are commonly called transferable skills, namely skills and competences that you acquire as a student or in another part of your life that you can apply to different professional settings in your future career pathway(s). Here are some key skills that you are likely to develop while teaching:
Communication: Learning how to explain concepts to undergraduates may not come easily to you if you easily mastered the topics in question yourself, or if you have been thinking about them for so long that you have forgotten how you learnt them in the first place. You may have to learn how to do this through trial and error, although there are also resources and training sessions that can help you. The same goes for structuring and leading discussions, delivering information clearly and concisely, and even for how to communicate with students via email or your Learning Management System (such as Canvas and Blackboard). Improving your ability to communicate will help you become a better teacher, and will also benefit you when it comes to explaining your own work and applying for new opportunities.
Time Management: In most, although not all, cases, you will have a contract or written agreement that specifies how many hours per week you should be spending on teaching, preparation for teaching, and other related activities. For example, when I was teaching language classes at Michigan, my contract was for 20 hours a week. I was in the classroom for four hours, held office hours for two hours, and had a meeting with my coordinator and other instructors for one hour per week. That left 13 hours to create the materials for my classes, plan my lessons, answer emails from students, and grade my students’ work. I found that 13 hours were sufficient to complete all necessary tasks if I managed my time well. For example, I would block off slots on my calendar for grading quizzes, preparing slides for the next day, and responding to emails, leaving a few buffers where possible if a task took longer than I anticipated. Balancing the multiple demands required of you when you are teaching can help you to develop time management systems that allow you to also work on your dissertation or thesis and that you can use in future projects and jobs.
Public Speaking: If you are teaching live class sessions online or in-person, leading discussion sections and seminars, or even giving lectures, you will spend some of your teaching time speaking in front of multiple students at a time. Some people love public speaking, others dread it, and there are many people in between the two extremes. Luckily, when it comes to teaching, classes are scheduled at a set time, so unless you want to lose your job, you have to turn up and do it, no matter how nervous you might feel. Find a style that works for you. Some people like to use humour when they teach, whereas others prefer to maintain a serious tone throughout. You might like to make your classes as interactive as possible with group activities, which can also take some of the pressure off you as the instructor, or you might be comfortable with being in the limelight for the entire class session. Experiment with various delivery styles if you feel comfortable; for example, you could try to make a seminar or lecture more like a dialogue. If you are really struggling with nerves and things don’t improve once the semester begins, consider speaking to a mentor or coach and working on techniques to build your confidence. However you decide to present yourself in class, teaching is certainly an ideal opportunity to improve your speak and presentation skills.
Curriculum Design: The fourth section of this post addresses this particular skill in more detail, but it nevertheless deserves a mention here. Making decisions about what material to include in a course and how to structure it, as well as reflecting on and modifying learning goals, building schedules, and organising course content, can help you to develop your project management skills, encourage you to think about the impact and purpose of your teaching on a macro level, and give you some excellent examples of projects to talk about in interviews and applications.
Content Creation: Depending on what you are teaching, you may have to make resources and learning materials to use with students in the classroom and for students to use in their own time. From presentations and interactive quizzes to activities that help students to apply newly learnt material and even complete online modules, creating student-centered content on a regular basis may involve learning how to use new software packages and thinking about how to present information and concepts that may seem obvious to you in accessible and interesting formats for students.
Data Management: Organising and processing student data, from attendance to participation, grades for classwork and assessments, as well as responding to student feedback that you might collect throughout the semester or receive in formal evaluations at the end of a course by adapting your teaching methods and materials, are all things that you may find yourself doing as part of your teaching duties. It will probably only be a minor part of your work as an instructor, but it could equip you to take on roles using some of these skills in the future or to do projects focused on areas such as assessment or evaluation.
Of course, this list is not exhaustive! A good tip for getting the most out of your teaching experience is to spend some time at the end of each term or semester reflecting on the tasks you have done as part of your teaching role and noting any skills that you used in relation to each task as well as key things that you learnt. This list can help you present your experience legibly to future employers when it comes to preparing job applications.
Two. Testing Your Own Knowledge and Understanding
Your own knowledge and understanding of your field may be constantly tested once you step into the classroom. Students often ask questions that go beyond what you had planned to teach. Their questions might lead you to think about the topic you are teaching in new ways, or to go right back to basic definitions and foundations while helping students to understand something. Of course, it is always good to check that you remember the basics, but this approach can also help you to think about your research and writing in new ways, for example thinking about why a student asked a question and what led them to it could help you to make connections that are useful for your own work.
Don’t worry about being competent enough to teach. Of course you are! There are multiple ways of looking at topics and it is impossible for you to know everything about even texts or concepts that you have spent years working on. It’s not a problem if you have to occasionally look things up when students ask questions or if you have to come back to students after spending some time thinking about something that they have asked you about. You can learn a lot from exploring topics with students; many PhD students end up thanking the students that they taught in their acknowledgements and even incorporating ideas that they honed while teaching into their dissertation or thesis.
Three. Colleagues and Collaborators
During the thesis or dissertation stage, you may find yourself in a situation where the only person that you are interacting with regularly in a professional capacity is your advisor or supervisor, unless you are also working, volunteering, or doing other academic and professional projects. Teaching can therefore give you a new set of people to connect with professionally.
If you are assisting a professor or lecturer with a large course, you may have regular meetings where you will check in with them and any other PhD students who are also assisting with the class. If you are teaching a course by yourself, you may have a supervisor or mentor. If you are teaching a class that is one of several sections of the same class that is being offered, for example a language course or a writing course, it is common to have regular meetings with your colleagues and a coordinator. These regular interactions provide you with the opportunity to swap experiences with colleagues and to work together on developing course components such as rubrics, assessments, policies, and other activities.
Your department or university may also run professional development sessions, orientations, and certificate programmes, all of which provide further opportunities to connect with others, talk about teaching, and gain new ideas for your own teaching practice.
Sometimes there may also be scope for you to collaborate with others on projects related to teaching. You might be able to participate in cohort-based training programmes or workshops that give you the opportunity to work on a project with or alongside the same group of people for an extended period of time. You may be able to get involved in departmental committees that develop teaching policies pertaining to assessment, grading, course offerings, curriculum, design, and other aspects of teaching. Occassionally, you might be able to propose your own teaching project or initiative and carry it out; some universities have grants available for graduate students to do this kind of work and occasionally, permanent academic staff members look for graduate students to assist them with new teaching initiatives and projects. This type of work can help you to improve your own teaching practice by giving you new ways of seeing your work as a teacher, additional skills, and materials to incorporate in your classes. If you apply for jobs with a focus on project management, programme management, or really any job that asks for leadership skills or initiative, these kinds of projects can be a great CV booster.
Four. Course Design and Delivery
Some departments offer PhD students the opportunity to design and teach their own syllabus. If this option is available, students usually take advantage of it during later stages of their programme and once they have had the opportunity to teach courses in a more supported setting, such as teaching a section of a language course or leading a discussion section.
In some cases, students can propose their own course title and topic, and go on to choose their own content and learning materials. In other cases, you might be in charge of designing the course, but you may be tasked with doing so in order to fulfil a specific teaching need, such as an introductory course to a certain time period or a class that focuses on a certain skill such as writing, community service, or team-based learning.
Regardless of how much creative freedom you have over the final product, designing and delivering your own course is great preparation for a wide range of jobs and careers. As a complete project, building and running your own course may seem daunting, but if you break it down into the following elements, it becomes more manageable and you will see that you have done many of these things before; it is just a case of learning about how all these steps and elements come together:
Working out what the learning goals and outcomes are for your course and structuring it to help students reach them; keep in mind that your department may have guidelines for the level or type of content or skill that students should be working on in a given class
Selecting primary materials and sources
Building accompanying materials and activities to help students work with these materials
Creating a syllabus, including learning goals, a calendar or timeline, and course policies
Deciding how much material you will cover each week and how this will be delivered and split between in-class activities and work that students do in their own time
Selecting assessment formats and preparing rubrics or other methods for assigning marks and grades to students
Preparing content for in-class sessions and interactive spaces such as the LMS that your university uses
Scheduling office hours and informing students of these times
Being responsible for all these aspects of a class is challenging and you can never get every single thing right. This list is not prescriptive or a step-by-step guide; sometimes, you need to go with the flow and make changes during the semester. You do not have to write out a script for every single class session in advance if that does not work for you, or even create all of your content before the semester starts if that is not practical or you prefer a different way of working. In the future, I will make a series of posts about designing a class as a PhD student; this section was intended to provide a brief overview as one of the benefits of teaching because it can be a real highlight of a PhD programme for some students who have this opportunity.
Depending on department and institutional practices, you may have a lot of support in this endeavour, or you may have very little. Support could look like mentorship, check-ins with a more experienced instructor, or access to online resources to support you during your course design and delivery journey. You might have to submit your syllabus in advance to a supervisory figure for approval, or you may have no oversight at all.
Five. Time Pressure and Focusing on Research
You might worry that teaching will eat into the time you have to work on your dissertation or other academic projects such as coursework, conference papers, or grant applications. It’s true that teaching takes time, but sometimes, having a commitment of up to 20 hours per week (many US graduate programmes operate according to this model; teaching commitments in the UK are often, although not always, based on fewer hours per week) can actually help you to focus on your research more sharply and to be more productive in the time that you have outside of teaching. Setting strict boundaries can help, for example by spending two days per week on teaching and preparatory activities and your remaining time on research, or by spending the mornings on teaching and afternoons on your dissertation or thesis.
If your particularly enjoy teaching, it can also help motivate you to finish your dissertation or thesis within the timeframe that is available to you, because then you will be able to apply for positions and opportunities that allow you to spend more of your work time on activities such as teaching. Teaching may also give you new ways to see your research and writing, stimulating your progress and spurring you on.
Six. Energy and Fun
Spending a few hours each week engaging with undergraduates in the classroom and during office hours can be a good break from working alone in your room or the library. Their questions and interest in the topic can help to remind you of why you wanted to do a PhD in the first place. You may feel energised after a particularly good class discussion or feel a sense of satisfaction if you help a student to improve their work or understand something that they had previously struggled with. In some situations, you can incorporate fun activities into your classes that can help to boost energy levels in the room and everyone to see the learning material in new ways. And exercising your own creativity while teaching can be fun and energising in itself.
Closing Remarks
As you can see, the benefits of teaching during your PhD can be numerous. I limited this post to the types of teaching that Humanities PhD students typically undertake within academic departments at their universities. PhD students can also get involved in other forms of teaching, including tutoring secondary school and undergraduate students; teaching classes to adults in other educational settings than universities; volunteering as a tutor or language instructor for refugees or elderly people or other populations in need of support; providing workshops and classes in secondary schools; and creating courses and learning materials for various organisations and companies. All these experiences can help you to explore career pathways and to develop your skills as a teacher further. Always check with your department and any visa or other restrictions that may apply to you before undertaking new opportunities while working on your PhD.
Feel free to add any comments or questions below, or to use this form to send anonymous feedback, questions, and suggestions for future content. Share this post with anyone who may find it helpful!
If you appreciate this post and have the means, click below to buy me a coffee to help support my work!
Kommentarer