During my time at university, I’ve worked as a teaching assistant at the School of Business and Economics. This included leading workgroups, tutoring, and help with developing courses. Trough my role as TA, I encountererd the SAT (Students as teachers) programme. It is a training offered through the Student Qualification Education (StuKO) consortium and aims to help student teachers develop practical teaching skills through a mix of hands-on experience, peer feedback, and reflection.
As I’m nearing the completion of the programme it seemed like a good oppertunity to look back on my experiences and reflect on what I’ve learned, how I’ve grown, and where I still want to go as a developing educator.
Background
Before starting with the SAT training or as a teacher assistant at university, I was already used to standing in front of a group. I served as a mentor & tutor in highschool, gave educational trainings for the European Youth Parliament (NL), and taught more than 2000 hours of sports lessons during my movement sciences bachelor.
As I made the transition to a masters in IT, I followed large parts of the computer sciences programme while writing a thesis, and with my little spare time I decided to stop teaching. Later, when I started with the Information Sciences master, I found the programme to be a lot less time consuming, and started following a wide variety of extracurricular courses. One such courses was the “Nudge: Influencing Behaviour” course on behavioural economics taught by the excellent professor Lalin Anik. The course focussed on the implicit and explicit ways that behaviour can be steered.
During my time as sports instructor I realised that the succes of a sports lesson depended heavily on how it was structured. Sports sessions are meant to give people a feeling of accomplishment which often connects to giving people the feeling they worked hard. Motivations differ: some came for the health benefits while others came for the social interactions, but no one came to stand arround waiting for etended explanations.
Realising that explanations were merely organizational overhead, I started experimenting with ways to make my time in front of the class as effective as possible. Sports lessons were particularly suited for experimentation on organization as each exercise requires both equipment and explaination. Usually I taught three consecutive lessons, and improving the exercise selection to minimise the time spent on fetching materials & explanation led to direct feedback from the improved flow of each lesson. Some of my takeaways are:
- End the explanation with an actionable (eg. now fetch this). Never state what you want people to do during explaination. People will either interrupt you to do so directly, or forget about it.
- Define clearly when the next explanation will be. In warming ups, use AMRAP style workouts so everyone is ready at the same time to minimize time spent waiting on one another (and minimize chatter before explanation)
- Warming ups can be used to minimize time spent explaining. Incorporate the workout movements in the warming up. If a movement is hard such as the snatch, break it down in the warming by doing deadlifts, pulls and overhead squats. After the warming up explain how these movements combine into the snatch.
- Make the schedule flexible. My 10:00 group chatted the most and thus things took a bit longer. By leaving time at the end for stretching / finishers, you leave yourself with some margin for error and don’t have to stress if something unexpected happens or takes longer than expected.
Much of the coaching experience I gained was tacit: knowing what examples do or do not work, experience with intonation supporting the message, or other things hard to put into words. But while I was experimenting I was already trying to influence the behaviour of our mebers and steering it in certain directions. Following the nudge course by prof. Anik helped me become more aware of different possibilites and the academic background of nudging. Intrested by the topic I reached out the prof. Anik to discuss what the best place would be to gain experience in nudging, and we came to the conclusion that teaching opportunities would be great places to learn. She connected me with the VU School of Business and Economics, a faculty totally unrelated to my bachelor’s or master’s, but due to many extracurricular courses at this faculty, and my personal intrest in teaching, I was appointed as TA here.
Teaching at university
My first experience with teaching at university was with the first-year bachelor’s business administration students for the marketing course. It should be no suprise that this audience was a bit different from the midle-aged, intrinsically motivated, strict on-time gym members that I was used to. Starting as a TA I felt I had to prove myself to the students which were just a few years younger than me, thus I was a bit more structured, hierarchical and strict than necisarry. I suppose this is a phase many new teachers go through and as I gained experience I became more relaxed and relied less on “strictness”.
The marketing course was structured in such a way that most of the content was discussed in the lectures by the professor, and our roles as TA’s were to discuss a specific framework for about 15 minutes, after which we aided the students to apply the frameworks to different cases for about an hour. As the structure was mostly predetermined there was little need for us to focus on the structure, and most of our focus went onto the 1-on-1 interaction with the students.
This is also one of the strengths of the SAT programme. We are no full professors, and letting us lecture for hours wouldn’t be effective. However, as students ourselves we are more connected to the students we teach, making it easier to build up rapport with the students. I didn’t have answers to all the questions the students asked me, but I could offer them some relevant examples, anecdotes, or think along with possible solutions. It was in those 1-on-1’s where SATs can deliver the most value.
The focus of the SAT programme on giving feedback and questioning techniques was relevant here. I tend to be quite direct in my feedback and like to “cut the crap” which is not always appreciated by the receiver, which I found hard to understand in return. It was nice to spend some time reflecting on the different feedback styles and sharing experiences on how feedback was received in one of the SAT trainings. Coming back to it again while writing the reflection report, I realise that this might also be a trait learned in the sports world. New members should be handled with some care as they need to build up some confidence in moving, but more seasoned athletes generally prefer their feedback more direct as they do not associate it with their self-worth. Would this be the same for students? I could see how a first-year student needs a more delicate approach than a finalizing PhD student. What also comes to mind is how more experienced athletes ask feedback on specific metrics like their timing, while newer members ask more general questions such as “am I doing well”. A takeaway could be that when feedback concerns a measurable it should be concise and to the point, and when it concerns something more subjective, especially when connected to self-worth (am I doing well?), one should be more cautious.
The structure of the lessons I taught was determined in advance by the professor. That made things a lot easier as it lowered the threshold to start teaching since I didn’t have to worry about the organizational side of things. Especially when you’re just starting out, that kind of support is really helpful. At the same time, we were given full freedom to shape the lessons however we wanted, which I think is essential when you are developing as a teacher. Being able to experiment with the lesson plan/organization allows you to think about what you are going to say, in what order, and why that order makes sense. A somewhat related example was that I wanted to start the introductory lesson with breaking the ice with an activity where students had to introduce each other in front of the group, which turned out to be a bit too much at that stage in the group-forming. They were not quite ready to present in front of the group yet. This happened in the lesson just before we covered icebreakers in the SAT training, where we delved a bit deeper into the fundamentals of group forming. I also remember the icebreaker we first did on the first training where we formed groups and had to find as many differences or similarities between our group, which is definitely one I’ll take with me and use next time. (especially as it does not force students to present in front of the group directly). But it is in these experiments and mistakes that you develop yourself as a teacher, and It was valuable for me to have made the mistake only a few days before discussing icebreakers in the training. If not for my mistake, the reasons why icebreakers work and the pro’s and cons would have gone entirely over my head. I suppose you just need to make certain mistakes to learn from them, and the SAT provides a great environment to learn from mistakes: First of all, you are teaching while you undergo the training, enabling connecting experiences to theory. Secondly, the stakes are not that high. Clearly I wanted to do my best and I can see that starting to teach could feel like a huge burden, but in the worst case of a mess up a handful of students would have a couple of mediocre work-groups. Nothing too bad. Finally, there were a lot of channels for support and feedback. If I had some more informal questions, I could reach out to my fellow TA’s and SATs. For questions concerning the procedures or content there was a professor with whom we had good contact and walked us through the lesson plans. Finally, the SAT training allowed us to reflect on our teachings. A pretty solid support.
Future teaching
Hopefully I can continue teaching at the VU. I’m rounding up my masters and likely graduate well before the end of the academic year, but I’d like to stay connected to the VU or SBE to teach next year. I’m even considering extending my graduation to be able to teach (and the DUO + NS benifits :).
Recently a couple of friends of mine started a gym recently wich I visit regularly. It’s always interesting to see how they approach the coaching challenges. Their team is rather small thus they don’t have a lot of substitute teachers, so I’m asked to help out once in a while. I don’t want to go back to teaching full time but I certainly enjoy it occasionally.
Finally, I hope to develop a professional area of expertise, and I look forward to be able to share it with others, although I’m unsure in what format.
