In the lively Teaching Matters conversation last week about “Why We Teach,” a colleague raised this question: How do we help our anxiety-laden students make connections between our classroom learning goals and the other things they are trying to accomplish in college?
One of those student goals is building a career path, but as academic faculty, we don’t always feel prepared to talk to students about how the thinking they do in our courses might connect to possible professions beyond academia. We aren’t the experts. How are we supposed to talk about something beyond our expertise?
As professors and classroom instructors we are, though, experts in leading class discussions. We are experts in crafting questions that inspire our students to think. We are experts in helping our students to grapple with uncertainty and ambiguity and find a way through to understanding and decision-making. We are experts in engaging our students in brainstorming and thought exercises and helping them to articulate their ideas concretely.
And while many of us may not have extended corporate or other work experience, stories, or connections to share with our students, what we can offer them as professors and advisors are these very elements of our teaching expertise. Before they can make connections between their classroom learning and applications beyond the classroom, they need to be able to identify the skills and ways of thinking that they are building in our classes.
Helping our students get comfortable with seeing connections among their classes is a giant step towards making connections beyond their academic work. This is the place where we might feel most hesitant, and where the conversation feels the most speculative. But at that point in the discussion, our students can be the experts. In any classroom, students bring a range of work, internship, research, athletic, and other experience. We can help them articulate the skills they are developing in our courses; they can tell us how they also use those skills in other parts of their lives.
The flyer above sets out 3 questions that you can try out anytime—in a 5-minute conversation after the class has submitted an assignment, or in a longer discussion at the end of the semester. There is no single right way to make this happen. You can work it into your own courses and teaching styles as useful and appropriate. But each time that you stop and walk through these questions with a class, you are helping students understand their own learning experience and put it into words that they can use on resumés, on job and fellowship applications, in job interviews, and across the experiences of their daily lives.