3 Lessons on Teaching I’ve Learned from My Students

Last year, I shared 5 communications lessons I’ve learned as an adjunct professor, which was so well received I thought that I’d add a few new lesson for 2015. Plus my students are so great, I’m constantly learning from them!

Revise, revise, revise

Marketing and communications are fields that are changing faster than ever, but digital media is also changing the world around us faster and faster. In today’s world, you have to be willing to go back and revise your work, to update it and make sure that it matches people’s expectations in this ever-faster-and-more-complicated world.

I go back following my class and make a lot of notes on how I will change the class for the next time I teach it, because if you leave content alone nowadays, it can easily get stale.

Clear expectations make people happy

I get feedback all the time from students that they really appreciate the fact that I give them a specific rubric and clear directions on their assignments. I use a highly structured rubric because (a) it makes my job of subjectively evaluating individuals and coming up with fair scores easier and (b) because when I was a graduate student, I craved specific feedback that I could learn from and use to iterate my work–but I rarely received it from professors.

Whenever possible, I try to make expectations clear–and in the end, I get little to no push-back from students, because they know what the game looks like when they’re going in.

Don’t assume people have the resources they need to get the work done

It seems obvious that we all come to the table with different life experiences, skills, and resources, but when it comes to teaching (and I teach in many different venues), I think that sometimes instructors take for granted the wide range of knowledge that people come with. I’m constantly trying to encourage students to speak up if they don’t know a term or need something explained again–but I’ve also become more aware that not everyone wants to ask a question in front of the whole group.

So now I try to have opportunities before, during, and after class when people can come up and ask me questions–and then I incorporate them into my review materials for the next class so that everyone can benefit. If one person has a question, it’s highly likely that someone else has it too.

Last week, my first group of graduate students finished their program–congratulations, guys! I couldn’t be prouder!