Find the courage to teach collaboratively

Why would a business professor ask an English lecturer to observe his classes?

I teach Developing the Leader in You, a course that focuses on using leadership frameworks and concepts to improve leadership skills. It is taught in a fun and interactive way.

I met my colleague Melissa through a community of practice that focuses on well-being in the classroom. She teaches English at our university’s Center for Language Education and takes a particular interest in student and teacher well-being. I asked her to observe and give feedback on how well-being was being implemented or affecting the teaching and learning in my own classes, and she ended up attending seven times to offer her view.

• What makes a classroom a community?
• Collaborate or compete?
• Be the warrior students want to see at the front of their class

Why ask her to do this? I was influenced by the author and educator Parker Palmer, who wrote The Courage to Teach. This is why teaching takes courage, according to him:

First, teaching requires vulnerability. As teachers, we share our knowledge, beliefs, experiences and, often, our emotions. This exposes us to criticism and sometimes even failure. I have felt especially vulnerable in recent times and often ask myself questions such as: Should I dumb it down? Do I pander to the compulsive and omnipresent nature of GenAI? Do we limit use of devices or allow free rein and give responsibility to students?

Entering into this collaboration, I harnessed the courage to make myself vulnerable – not just to my students but also to Melissa. The author Brené Brown has written extensively on vulnerability. She also says it takes courage, titling one of her books, Daring Greatly. Interestingly, I often refer to her work when I’m teaching about leadership.

Second, teachers need to be authentic and true to themselves. In the classroom, students can quickly see through inauthenticity. Teachers also need to be honest about their strengths and weaknesses. This can be challenging in a context in which performance and success are emphasised and evaluated, but this is linked to another reason why Palmer calls teachers courageous; they need to be committed to lifelong learning.

It takes courage to embrace the idea of continuous growth – seeking feedback, reflecting on one’s practice and making the necessary changes. This is especially true now that AI is ubiquitous. The entire student learning experience is being questioned, both from a student and an instructor perspective.

Despite this environment, I found the courage to commit to growth. The ideas in Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen’s Thanks for the Feedback also helped me – they stress that feedback is essential for development, both personally and professionally.

I was not asking for, nor expecting, only praise from Melissa. I wanted to understand and use the feedback she provided, overcoming any emotional reactions to it. Many times as an instructor one gets consumed with the subject and pays suboptimal attention to how students react and respond; Melissa’s unfiltered and direct feedback has enabled me to course-correct – by stopping during lessons and asking for student feedback more often than before. Further, I have instituted a screen-free period of 30 minutes at the beginning of the sessions, primarily because of Melissa’s analysis of student attention and engagement. This screen-free period has become standard procedure for all my courses.

In his book, Palmer also suggests that teaching can be a lonely profession. We spend a lot of time alone in the classroom with our students, absent regular collaboration with or support from our colleagues.

Palmer advocates for building supportive communities among educators. He believes that sharing experiences, challenges and successes with colleagues can help combat feelings of loneliness and foster a sense of belonging. Perhaps a bit of loneliness also prompted me to ask Melissa to observe my classes.

So what did Melissa get out of this collaboration?

First, she built on her previous work on engagement and well-being. She has developed a tool for “diagnosing” engagement in its different forms in her own classroom. When she collaborated with me, she researched other tools and adapted the BERI protocol for use in my class.

Importantly, sharing and discussing her observations with me led to her questioning ideas that she previously subscribed to – that there is always a reciprocal relationship between well-being and engagement. In my class, seemingly well students simply chose not to engage at times. This finding has prompted Melissa to continue her research on this relationship.

But belonging and identity are other topics that Melissa is interested in. There is much research on how belonging impacts well-being across various domains, including mental and physical health and workplace satisfaction. Melissa felt that she belonged in my classroom, and our follow-up conversations became something that we both looked forward to.

Melissa is also a believer in identity development across life stages – put simply, the idea that our identity continues to evolve. People who engage in ongoing identity exploration and development report higher levels of well-being, compared with those who become stagnant in their self-concept, according to research. Having been at the university for 27 years, Melissa’s self-concept might well have begun to stagnate. This collaboration provided an opportunity to explore additional ways that she could connect with others and contribute to the community.

Having spent many years in industry, among the things I bring to lecturing is the Japanese concept of kaizen, meaning continuous and never-ending improvement. Every day I look for little ways that I can do better in creating a great learning experience for students. What better way than collaborating with a fellow colleague such as Melissa?

We encourage others to collaborate, to grow as educators. Why not reach out to a colleague today? We dare you!

Mark Young is an adjunct teaching professor in the department of management, and Melissa Jane Megan is senior lecturer at the Center for Language Education, both at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

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