I became a teacher by accident. I had been planning to go into the media industry, like my amazing fiancée. She found the secret password and is now a social media and web editor, and I’m so, so proud of her. As it happened, my path took a different turn and now I’m learning to teach.

When I was a student, after giving presentations, there was one compliment I almost always got: that I can explain things in a very accessible way. Great, good to hear that, thank you! It was the first skill I developed that would help me as a teacher. But I must admit – it was this same skill that held me back in the first few courses I taught. This perceived talent for keeping the material understandable for everyone, was turning against me. I was explaining everything too simply. Students lost interest, they felt it was obvious what I was telling them. I failed to challenge them, to get them to think for themselves. My teaching style turned out to invite students to just lay back and relax and to not do any work themselves.

Just at the right moment, my boss asked me to acquire a teaching certificate. The course you have to complete to earn that certificate, proved crucial for me to become a lot better at my job. Our fantastic coach / lecturer, Kitty van Dijck, set us to work right away. She made it seem like she did very little, and we did all the work. Of course, that’s not what actually happened – she had prepared her workshops so expertly, that we felt we were discovering new insights into the material ourselves. But then she kept inviting us to take the next step, and the next, and we slowly realised that Kitty knew perfectly well what we would ‘discover for ourselves’. She had been planning for us to do that! It was great to see a master at work like that.

Having obtained my teaching certificate, I’m now trying to follow Kitty’s brilliant example with every course I teach. The trick is to talk as little as possible, really, and to let the students do all the ‘discovering’. This means I’m putting far more time into preparing the lectures, so that they can become workshops rather than lectures. I’m no longer the only one climbing up a mountain and then shouting down from the mountaintop what the experience is like.  The students are climbing the mountain for themselves – I’m there as a Sherpa, climbing along, knowing the route, nudging or advising them only when they need that.

Sometimes, that strategy doesn’t work. When I’m asked to give a guest lecture, I don’t just parachute in and set everybody assignments. In those circumstances, I slip back into lecturing mode. But even in those cases, I do like to open up the conversation. I’ll ask students (or other kinds of audiences) about their thoughts and experiences with the topic of my talk. It’s always better to invite people to think along.

After over two years in front of the class, I’m still not sure if this is the life for me. Some aspects of teaching, I’m good at. Other aspects – not my forte at all. That would be the case in any other profession I might end up trying out, of course. If anything can keep me interested in teaching, it’s the students who realise I’m a human being who you can have a laugh with. If anything is driving me away from teaching, it’s those other students, the ones who feel they’re entitled to absolutely everything (including a high grade) just because they’re enrolled at the academy.  That sort of behaviour makes me seriously consider an office job where you don’t have to see quite as much of your ‘customers’. But for now, teaching is still mostly fun, and I’ll keep learning to teach in better ways.