I am a program planner

I have been exploring big questions this year, about what I like to do, what I really care about, and what unique value I bring to work and life. It’s a challenge after such a long career to explain my value clearly and concisely. But in my work with graduate students and scholars this is what I am always asking them to think about. If a PhD student should be able to tell a 5-minute version of their dissertation research and why it matters, then I should be able to communicate my core contributions in a clear and compelling way! I will unpack some of them here over the next few weeks.

I love creating and sustaining educational programs. I know how to build and run complex programs, and how to keep them organized and evolving as new priorities emerge. I know how to set goals, plan, and adjust accordingly. One example is the teaching conference I used to lead for graduate students each fall. The conference was intended to prepare new teachers for their first teaching roles AND include useful content for teachers across disciplines getting ready to start a new semester, whether they had taught before or not.

So what should the goals of the conference be, given this relatively general mission? You can see just from considering this briefly how complicated it was! What do both new and experienced teachers really need to think about, especially given disciplinary differences? How can you incentivize attendance? How will you know if the conference is a success? Learning is not a quick or simple process: it takes modeling, time, practice, and feedback. People learn best in community, and helping teachers build a network, have a space to discuss their questions and ideas, and understand that they could join ongoing programs that provided that space felt as important to me as the strategies we hoped they would adopt. As such, my goals were to help students learn key teaching strategies and develop their confidence, to provide a space for them to connect with each other, and to help them see that we were providing useful resources they could access over time. I really wanted them to come back to see us as they had questions or wanted to learn more.

I designed the conference with an online component for new teachers to complete before they were welcome at interactive in-person sessions on core teaching strategies. We adjusted some details each year (how Covid changed everything is a story for another time!) and shifted topics as new teaching issues emerged, but we combined communicating key information with time for participants to get to know each other and to share their questions and experiences. The welcoming environment, the community we created, and the useful resources we shared were steady themes in the feedback we collected each year. We were also glad to see that many who attended the conference joined other programs and came back to see us.

If you’d like to learn more, the Getting Started as a Teacher guide on this site is based on some of the core training I designed for new graduate student teachers. Are you thinking about how to plan a program intentionally or figuring out how to set measurable goals in a complex environment? Please reach out!