The call came a few days before the class was scheduled to start. The woman who had been assigned to teach the course needed to remain in Hong Kong longer than she had originally anticipated. They needed someone to take over their sales and sales management class with hardly any notice. I am who they called.

One of the things that had been drummed into my head when I was teaching computer application courses early in my career was that you never tell anyone this is your first time teaching a course. If people knew that, they would wonder why they had paid a couple hundred dollars to attend a class taught by someone who was only a few pages ahead of them in the manual.

The first night of the sales class, I was prepared to act as if I had been doing this for years. My first move was an obvious give away at my lack of experience. “Please take out your textbooks and take a look at page 11.”

The cat was out of the bag from the very beginning. The norm throughout my university was that hardly anyone brought their books to class on the first day. First, they would need to determine whether or not the professor was actually going to use the textbook in the course. Otherwise, it didn't make sense to spend the money.

While I didn't think it wise to admit that it was my first time teaching the course, an even worse offense would have been to lie about such a thing. They knew that I was new to teaching in a higher education context, but they were still prepared to put their trust in me to guide them during the semester. That was almost 15 years ago and I'm still in touch with a few of the students from that very first adventure in college teaching.

I had my share of mistakes in the course, but also was able to make an impact. There were techniques I could bring over from my corporate training background that were effective with this new group of learners, yet there were also those approaches best left behind.

Failure Gets a New Look

Last week, we learned of a study that looked at why a group of anthropologists had decided not to adopt particular teaching strategies, despite the evidence that they were likely to prove effective. The Fear of Looking Stupid turned out to be stronger than the hope for change.

John Warner reflected on the evolution of his teaching over the years and emphasized The Necessity of Looking Stupid. Instead of completely revamping everything about the way we have structured a course, he recommends adopting smaller changes and continually asking the students for feedback. “Let the point of the exercise be the attempt, not the outcome,” John urges.

I would be remiss if a discussion of small modifications in our teaching came up and I didn't once again recommend James Lang's Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons From the Science of Learning. If the fear of failure is holding you back from considering experimenting with something new, Jim guides you through what approaches are worth trying and how to get started.

I just finished reading The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World, with interviews between the Dali Lama and Desmond Tutu. They both speak of fear as having a natural existence within their struggles for justice.

Manuela said, “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. I felt fear more times than I can remember, but I hid it behind a mask of boldness. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” Archbishop Tutu said something very similar: “Courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to act despite it.”

In order for us to overcome the fears that are holding us back from taking risks in our teaching, we first need to identify what is there. Name the feeling – and then dig deeper in to why it is present.

Worthwhile Failures

In an upcoming episode of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, I share reflections on what I learned from my most recent set of course evaluations. You will hear the pain in my voice, as I describe ways in which I let my students down.

I hope you will also hear the absolute joy. I don't believe we are able to find such rich joy in our teaching, without the sorrows that come from not realizing our aspirations.

Discovering more joy does not, I’m sorry to say,” Archbishop Tutu added, “save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak. In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily, too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreak without being broken.”

Encouragement

The antidote for fear or sorrow is joy. I burst with gratitude as I consider those who “teach out loud,” stressing The Importance of Being Bad at Something.

While a quest for perfection in teaching will never be attained, we celebrate the milestones we hit along the way toward more spectacular successes and failures.

And so I would say to everyone: You are made for perfection, but you are not yet perfect. You are a masterpiece in the making.” – Archbishop Tutu

There's been a lot I've had to unlearn, since transitioning from the corporate world to academic environments.

I worked in the franchising industry for the first decade of my professional career. It was a computer training company and we had locations in 40 countries around the world. As I took on various roles, I became increasingly responsible for researching and documenting the successes and failures that various franchise locations experienced, in an effort to propagate the learning.

McDonald's has documented for their franchisees the precise amount of time to cook the french fries. We ran a far more complex business and inputs hardly ever equaled predictable outputs. However, our eccentric founder relentlessly attempted to quantify every aspect of the company that could possibly be documented, and tried to pass the lessons on with little room for variation.

When I transitioned into an entirely new context, it quickly became apparent that certain phrases that were captivating in the franchising business were considered revolting in higher education.

Best Practices

The phrase that has been most regularly disparaged in academic circles is “best practices.” Sean Michael Morris writes:

The worst best practice is to adhere to, or go searching for, best practices.”

Sean goes on to document what he has found to be most effective in his teaching, but is careful to caution us about thinking that his lessons will work for us in the same ways. He continues to offer wonderful guidance for our work, such as: being ourselves, creating trust, grading less / differently, and leaving room for silence.

Another recent caution against best practices came from John Warner, on Inside Higher Ed. He reflects on his discovery that his quizzes were not accomplishing his goal of getting students to do the reading prior to class. However, he also recognizes that in other instances, aspects of what he had tried might have worked. He concludes with:

This is why I have little faith in so-called universal “best practices.” There is never a one-size-fits-all technique or assessment. What works well in one context might not in another. Asking students about their experiences with reading quizzes reinforced that for me, teaching must be rooted in a collaborative process.

While there may not be best practices, I have come to believe there is a “best process,” and that process involves always being open to questioning what I’m doing.”

Inspiration

Instead of looking for best practices, I now seek seeds of inspiration. The majority of the ideas that I hear about when conducting interviews for the podcast are far too overwhelming to consider feasible at my institution. However, I try to break them down into their smallest components and see if I can't experiment with some aspect of the source of inspiration in my own teaching.

• I can't ever imagine being as incredible at making video and audio content as Mike Wesch, but I can certainly observe his creative outputs carefully and decide to draw inspiration from just one way in which he crafts stories.
• Gardner Campbell's eloquence is far out of my reach, but I can try administering an APGAR for class meetings and see what can be learned from the experience.
• No one would recommend I try to emulate Ainissa Ramirez's use of blow torches to illustrate key points, but I can think as failures more as data collection to help them “lose their sting.”
• Using extensive role playing games, like Mark Carnes' Reacting to the Past may be out of reach for the time being, but I can experiment with a making a game using Twine, like Keegan Long-Wheeler recommended.
• While my institution may never pull off a public sphere event as magnificent as Chico's Great Debate, as shared about by Thia Wolf, I can still experiment with poster sessions and look for opportunities to collaborate with others in different disciplines in my teaching.

I'll admit that my franchising experience leads me to wish we could read a book, or take a workshop – reduce it all to a set of best practices, and suddenly the grueling work of developing as a teacher would be over. However, when I look for inspiration from phenomenal educators, they continually show me that the work of becoming a teacher is never over.

John Warner ended his piece on best practices as follows:

As soon as I think I have it all figured out, it will be time for me to stop.”