What do you choose?

The Educationalist. By Alexandra Mihai

Welcome to a new issue of “The Educationalist”! This week I choose to address a topic that has been featuring in many recent discussions with colleagues from near and far. While not directly linked to teaching and learning- the usual focus of this newsletter- it does have huge implications on our work as academics. I am not quite sure how to call it, so for now let’s stick to “self-management”. It’s basically about the choices we make (or feel are made for us), about how we spend our time (and constantly run out of it) and how we strive to achieve a balance that feels more and more elusive with each day. But as you can read from the title, I want to frame this positively. I want us to (re)claim ownership of our work, our time, our priorities. I am not a wellbeing scholar (though luckily some of my colleagues are and have helped me with ideas and resources) and my goal is not to write a self-help guide. If anything, I would like you to read this and have a moment of reflection, zooming out of a busy work day/week/month and regaining sight of the bigger picture. Why are you doing this? What do you love about your work? And how can you keep doing that in a sustainable way? Thanks for reading and look forward to your comments and ideas.

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Self-management for academics: why and what

As the initial buzz of the new Academic Year is slowly subsiding, we start looking at our agendas and all too often a sense of gloom replaces the initial enthusiasm. Despite looking forward to meeting the new students and working on new projects, it feels like soon enough we will be buried in so many tasks we’ll hardly have time to leisurely meet a colleague over coffee (this happened to me, as we realised our next joint availability was in December!) or fully enjoy a weekend without teaching preparation or catching up on writing.

And still, ironically, when I looked for resources on self-management in academia, I mainly came across resources for students. This is a skill our students most definitely have to train but I strongly believe we- people who work in academia, with different roles- need to seriously think about this as well. It is something we thoroughly (and often happily) ignore until it is too late.

Let’s start with a quick definition, so we’re all on the same page. When I say “self-management” I mean regulating our thoughts, emotions, and behaviours to achieve personal and academic goals. When we unpack this, we can see it touches up things like:

• Time management: Do we spend our time effectively? Do we get to do the aspects of our work that we like? Do we still have spare time?

• Goal setting: What do we want to achieve? What is expected from us? How do we bridge the two?

• Organisation: How do we plan and organise our tasks to make our workload manageable? What choices do we make in terms of tools, habits, etc?

• Emotional regulation: How do we manage stressful situations? How can we stay on top of our frustrations and still love our job?

With a variety of roles and tasks that we have to joggle on a daily basis, it’s obvious why we all need to work on these skills. But with jobs that are rarely “9 to 5”, the lines quickly become blurred. The pressure of finishing a grant application, revising an article, designing a new course or grading hundreds of assignments can easily make any spare time simply vanish. With our batteries low, we make poor decisions, falling deeper into this vicious spiral. And it’s not only the external demands. We are very often our harshest critic. We’re never “enough”. We need to grow, to continuously develop. It’s in our DNA.

Between the external pressures and this nagging inner voice, we hardly find any headspace to critically look at what we are actually doing. And more importantly, why.

Am I a good teacher?

Of all the facets of an academic job, I will dive a bit deeper here into teaching*, mainly because I am involved in it from different angles, teaching students myself but also working with faculty on their teaching. So I will use these two perspectives to show the dilemmas we’re in:

• As teachers:

  We are invested in students’ success and we want to support them the best we can. We prepare our courses well, making sure we stay on top of our topic but also trying out different teaching activities to engage and motivate students. All this takes an important amount of time.

  With large teaching loads and high student numbers, we have to make difficult decisions: do we keep our high standards, often resulting in inhumane workloads both for us and for our students? Or do we cut corners? And if so- where and how?

  What is good enough? This question has a negative connotation for our excellence-oriented selves, but I feel it’s a crucial one to ask. To answer it, we may need to find our own system to measure the quality of education.

  We are treading a very fine line and everyday we need to make important choices in terms of balancing our presence and involvement (teaching) with student agency and engagement (learning).

• As faculty developers:

  We are invested in teachers’ success and want to support them the best we can. So we talk to them about important pedagogical principles (e.g. course design, active learning, assessment) and we also encourage them to find ways to understand and connect with their students.

  Then reality kicks in: large teaching loads, lecture halls packed with students. How on earth can one even start to use those principles in real life? At the end of a workshop on inclusive teaching, one participant shared with me that, while he fully supports the use of inclusive teaching approaches, he simply cannot put them into practice when teaching 6 simultaneous courses, with over 100 students each. He is not even able to learn all the names. It was a cry for help. And it made me aware of the huge limitations our ideas and suggestions have in real life. People are struggling to be good teachers, and often feel like failing if they cannot do everything “by the book”.

  Are we not, unconsciously, adding extra pressure? And if so, how can we recalibrate our approach?

  We need to make our own choices and it comes back to the same question: “what is good enough?". It’s not about lowering standards, it’s about being aware and flexible enough to adjust them to different contexts, without losing confidence.

  Adding more explicit emphasis on self-management skills can help too.

*You can do this exercise with the other parts of your job, like research or grant seeking. What you will get will be a clearer picture of the tensions inherent to your job, between your own values and principles and the reality you need to work with. This is a great starting point to prepare for making some tough choices.

What do you choose?

Figuring out where the tension lies is the first step: it reminds us what we stand for as academics (educators, researchers…) and it provides a useful but painful reality check, making us aware of the constraints we are operating under. Even though it sounds like common sense, all these things are buried in our subconscious, which makes them easier to ignore than to address. What we end up doing is getting better at dealing, over and over, with the consequences of this clash: stress, frustration, sleepless nights, even burnout.

Let’s slow down for a second. Let’s remind ourselves that how we spend our time and how we organise our workload is our choice, though it may not feel like it. Here are some of my thoughts and experiences on regaining control of our academic life:

• Managing our environment: this is about managing time, workload, health, tools- everything that plays a role in our work. Start with small changes and try to create new habits.

  • Time management: try to be intentional about how you spend your time; you can find some ideas here;

  • Workload management: while decreasing our workload is in most cases an illusion, maintaining a clear overview at all times can help us feel more “in control”. More importantly, it helps us prioritise, so that we can direct our energy to whatever matters at a given point in time. An overview also provides us with an opportunity to actively diversify our tasks, which helps with staying motivated, especially in tough times. When designing a course, think about your teacher presence- where and when is it most needed? And what could also be achieved through independent or/and peer learning?

  • Focus on health (physical and mental): this is a no-brainer, and still, one of the areas where we often fail. And that is usually because we fail to address the previous two points. Let’s constantly remind ourselves that if we are not well, physically or/ and mentally, we are not able to reach any of our professional goals. Having mental clarity helps us set goals, design sustainable strategies to achieve them and manage our time and workload effectively. Don’t forget to take a break, meet friends, plan holidays, spend quality time with family.

  • Wise use of tools: nowadays we have so many tools at our disposal, supposedly designed to save us time and make our work more efficient. But are we using them (well)? And if we save time, what do we direct this precious time towards? How do we make it count? Having an overview of our tasks and workload also enables us to decide when and where we can use some help and which tasks require more brain power and creativity. Don’t just use tools because they are fashionable, only use them if and where they make sense for you.

• Using reflection is a powerful way to pace ourselves and try to better understand what drives us and what drains our energy. It is a great way to consistently reconnect with our values and (re)gain motivation. Try to step back every now and then (ideally at regular intervals) and think about where you are in that moment, what you are doing, what challenges you are facing. When overwhelmed, try to see where you can draw the line (yes, that’s a tough one!): what is enough*?

  *Enough to meet you standards but also give you time to breathe.

  Remember: perfect is the enemy of good.

  You can find some ideas for reflection here and more on teaching diaries here.

• Learning to say “no”: a very difficult thing for most of us. And yet, such an important thing to learn and keep practicing. Setting our boundaries is crucial for our well-being and work-life balance. A friend once gave me a usful tip for practicing this: on a post-it write these 4 questions: Why me? Why now? Why this way? Why at all? Every time you get a request, pass it first through the filter of these questions and only say “yes” if it fully makes sense for you at that particular moment.

• Getting a buddy is actually the most important piece of advice I have right now, so if there is one thing you remember from this long article, let it be this one. Relationships matter, so nurture the ones that help you refill your energy. A buddy can join you in your reflection, can bounce ideas with you and is a constant sources of accountability and reassurance.

Just to be clear: I am not against a growth mindset or personal and professional development (hell, that’s the part of my job I love the most!). But I strongly believe growth also means knowing how and where to set our boundaries and managing our (finite) resources effectively.

Ultimately it is a matter of making choices. And we need to make them intentionally, every day, with all the cards on the table.

So, what do you choose?

Resources

A Pedagogy of Kindness: Compassion Toward the Self- webinar recording and resources on self care and kindness by Catherine Denial (you can find many more interesting resources on her website);

Proactive Coping Strategies: Building Resilience and Thriving- a repository of proactive coping strategies;

Four Ways To Fight The ‘Super Teacher’ Myth- narrated presentation in which Jessamyn Neuhaus provides four practical considerations to help you fight the “super teacher” myth;

3- Minute Boundary Builder- boundary-setting exercise, very useful when you feel the pressure to say “yes”;

What We Value and What We Do. This Daily Game of Tic-tac-toe- ideas on how to reflect and act on our values in our day-to-day work and life;

Living into our values- list of values and an insightful exercise by Brené Brown;

Self-Care Awareness: Navigating Triggers in the Classroom- video offering insights on how to identify and manage triggers that can affect your work-life balance and well-being.

Picture by Elisa Trivino on Pexels