Marion Germain and Emma Hughes told us about their journey from having a more research focused position (at the postdoc or PhD level respectively) towards a more teaching focused one.

The classic (unrealistic!) journey from PhD student to professor. However, even in this unrealistic story, this has always involved more and more teaching (the teaching load drastically increases with time). Taking a more teaching focused role earlier is probably made easier at Sheffield (or similar universities) because of the lesser distinction between teaching and research. Ultimately, teaching at university is always embedded in research and probably only distinguishable at an administrative level: university teachers are not teaching basic grammar and arithmetics at the university level but, in the case of Marion and Emma, more natural history or animal behaviour. Both topics they have actually done a PhD on!

How to get there?

For both Marion and Emma (and most positions for most people these days!) it was more a series of opportunities and choices rather than careful planning. For both, they were first offered a one year teaching position while waiting for other postdocs or applying for grants but because of the specific circumstances at the time at the university, there was a possibility to make these positions permanent which was a nice opportunity for both because of personal circumstances, academic ones, teaching projects, being sick of some aspects of research, etc. So although there was no plan to effectively get to that position, they discussed some key skills that definitely helped them getting there: for example they worked as teaching assistants during previous position (useful to see if you like working with students) or more generally, as researchers they were already great a problem solving (which is a very good secret transferable skill!).

How does it work in practice?

In practice, as teaching focused staff, you are in charge of a module (i.e. course, subject, etc.). How you teach within the module iis then mainly up to you. Higher parts of the university (e.g. faculty level) can constrain your work through some guidelines (what are the objectives? How is the learning assessed? Etc.). But these guidelines are often useful to help you decide on what and how you like to teach specifically. Alternatively, you can propose new modules although this come with more work like getting it validated a higher levels (faculty) both in terms of content but also in terms of admin (e.g. how is it recorded and advertised for the students in the system) or even in terms of physical constraints (e.g. time tables, rooms available, etc…).

Positives:

Both Marion and Emma highlighted quite a few positive bits. One of the main ones, in comparison to more research focused positions, is that the work is done more in terms of short term goals rather than the classic long term ones. For example, in research you might be focusing on a project that will take around 5 years and will have to allocate time and resources strategically over the long term (marathon strategy). On the other hand, teaching can be more like a sprint: you focus more on smaller time constrained tasks that can be challenging to complete but once they’re done, they’re done. For example, once you are done with a module, you don’t have to get back to it (cf once you’ve submitted the paper and get the reviews back after a while!). One other great aspect of the teaching focus is that you get to see the personal development of some individual students. Rather than focusing on vague long term scientific achievements (e.g. advancing a field), you feel like actually contributing to and seeing the growth of actual humans which can be sometimes really rewarding. For example you can see and feel responsible for a student thriving and getting passionate about a topic (although sometimes it can be quite the opposite which is painful and can be a negative aspect!). Because of this more direct connection to more humans compared to research, the diversity of students you meet and work with brings a very nice and interesting part even when sometimes it can be hard on you (e.g. when you have to question yourself). And finally, decentering from the students, the teaching work is done a lot in collaboration with brilliant and very nice colleagues, which is definitely a major positive point facilitating the list of negative points about to come.

Negatives:

And of course, these positives come with their negative counterparts that make the job sometimes frustrating, annoying, stressful or depressing. For example, as mentioned above, the positive aspects can easily become negative when students are struggling (or are just being immature!). Because of the more human centred nature of the work, it comes with much more real responsibilities on the teaching staff. The workload is really high with a lot expected from the teaching staff (this goes back to short term goals and problem solving mentioned above. On an organisational level, for the teaching itself, it can also be sometimes difficult because of the lack of clarity of what needs to be done and when. Marion and Emma both told us anecdotes that will not be shared here (mainly because of the swearing) revolving around surprisingly learning what they had to teach, when and where at the very last minute. Also, that very nice proximity with colleagues mentioned above also comes with a more negative consequence when not all the colleagues are great or nice. You’ll then have to still work in close proximity with them while keeping a high level of professionalism. This is rarely the case in research focused jobs where you can probably more easily refuse to work with certain people as you progress in your career. And of course, there’s always that admin workload that no one wants to do (although that’s probably true for research focused jobs as well and just dangerously increases with seniority).