Take My Advice: If You Have Trouble With Tech

Sometimes technology betrays us! It’s happened to us all, usually at a point when we are actively trying to seem competent. If you ALWAYS have problems, however, there might be something on your end you could change. There are some common problems I’ve identified from my time supporting faculty and graduate students with technical issues; these issues not only also affect students (and thus could be usefully passed on to them for their own tech needs) but also characterize a decent portion of my own issues when I stop to reflect. Some of the biggest below:

You’re going too fast. Technology can often allow us to go faster! But going too fast with a technology can not only lead you to make mistakes (guilty), it is also sometimes simply too fast for the tool to keep up. For example, Canvas often needs a refresh to show an updated grade when grading quizzes– it simply won’t update its view for you immediately upon the updating of a quiz grade. And, it’s of no use to start reviewing New Analytics in Canvas immediately; it takes time for it to analyze student activity and grade data and present it to you. It can help if you think of technology not as an instant communicator, but as a collaborator who might take a little time to get back to you. 

You’re using the wrong browser/old hardware. Imagine the software you’re trying to use is a gold-plated, top of the line refrigerator. It’s very nice, it functions perfectly, and it has a lot of features that you’re looking forward to using. Now imagine you give that refrigerator to a Pekingese and tell it to carry it up the stairs, install it, and get it functioning.

A Pekingese who would try really hard, though. Image by No-longer-here via Pixabay.

Not only is that Pekingese not going to be able to lift that refrigerator, it’s also not going to have any idea of what you’re talking about. Using incompatible hardware or software to get your tool working is similar– generally, it’s either not strong enough to carry the task, it doesn’t have the capacity to understand what it would need to understand to carry out the task, or both. 

You’re using a nonstandard tool for the job. Imagine that refrigerator again. It has a door, right? It plugs in. You put food in it. All these qualities are very similar to a microwave, but if you try to use the refrigerator as a microwave, you’re going to be disappointed. Similarly, looking at what a tool was designed for and evaluating if that is in line with your ambitions for the tool can be helpful. That’s not to say you can’t use a tool at sideways purposes– I would argue half of my discussions of Twine are sideways to its intent. (Incidentally, the medium of Interactive Fiction also has a lengthy history of using tech in ways contrary to its intention for creative purposes, so I feel I’m part of a rich tradition.) However, you’ll experience less frustration if you do so intentionally, rather than realizing that you’re trying to give feedback with a software that’s really only meant for file sharing, or facilitate group collaboration with a tool that only allows one or two users at a time. 

I’m in an interesting predicament at the moment where I’m trying to use AI tools to complete some data analysis. I am reading about good prompting strategies and trying to use them. I’m trying to build a foundation and then build on top of it. I’m trying multiple different strategies to see if I can come to some different results, even if only to give me some insight into how to better get the results I want in future. Yet, at the moment, it’s been more time checking and evaluating and figuring out where it’s getting its ideas than actual time saved in the analysis from the way I normally do it. 

I don’t think I’ve been going too fast, although I admit sometimes I see the demos of how quickly AI can pop together information and read reports of how it’s dramatically cutting time spent on certain tasks and I’m like “shouldn’t it just be able to do this for me already??” My hardware and software don’t seem to be the limiting issue– it’s not that it’s too slow, it’s that the conclusions are incorrect or partially correct or inventing some information that is not quite there. And the tool by all reports seems to be the tool for the job (see above demos), although perhaps a lesson I may end up learning is that some parts of the job are beyond it. I think the issue is actually a number 4, which is that the tool is more complicated to use than I am treating it as, and I don’t know enough yet about using it effectively. Straightforward and simple UX is powerful, but it can come at the expense of tailored, expert usages– think about what can be achieved by a pro using HTML to create a website versus a novice using Blogger or WordPress, or by a musician versus the prerecorded tracks on a child’s toy keyboard. The problem I’m trying to solve, then, may simply be one that is more “improvisational jazz” than “Old MacDonald.”

 

The strategy that's been most helpful to me so far is one that can be difficult for a lot of us to use: ask someone else to make an attempt at it, and learn from what they do. When in doubt, have someone else try! Either they have success, which you can learn from, or they don't, in which case you can at least feel a bit better that you are not alone.

Any of these tech issues plaguing you, or others? Let me know in the comments!

Enough About Me: Source Analysis Template Walkthrough

As promised when I introduced the Source Analysis Template, I have also created a walkthrough to using it. If these steps seem like a lot, don’t worry! This is a pretty granular breakdown, and some of these steps are repeats from the download process in the first post.

Setting Up

1. Download the Twine desktop app from Twinery.org and the HTML file for the template. 
2. Once you reach the Story Listing in Twine, click “Import from File” on the Side Menu. Click “Choose File,” then select the template file. 
3. The template will appear as a story in the Story Listing view. 
4. This is a good point to do the following two actions: 
• Duplicate the file so that you have the template for safekeeping, and a work file for your new activity. That way, you can go back to the template if needed, or duplicate it for other uses in future.
• Click the Settings (gear) icon next to the duplicate and select “Rename Story.” Give your activity a descriptive title, as this will appear in the activity once it is complete.
5. Click on the template to open it.

Welcome

1. Double click on the “Welcome” passage to open it. 
2. Replace the all caps text in between the two sets of tildes, as well as the tildes themselves, with text relevant to your activity. (example: ~~ THIS ENTIRE THING ~~ would become Your Text)

Leaving the tildes will result in your text looking like "Title" and "Title of Text" in this 

image in the finished product-- which, if you like it, great! If not, take out the tildes.

3. You should also, of course, feel free to edit or omit other text that may not apply to your use of the activity-- for example, if you don't want your students to turn in the answers at all, or if you want them to complete the activity in one sitting, some of the instructions may not apply. 
4. If you’d like to link to a copy of the source or excerpt, edit the link text given in the Welcome passage in the paragraph beginning “If you’d like, you can pull up a copy of…” Put the URL link itself in the first set of quotation marks, and the text you’d like to link (usually the title of the source) in place of ~~LINK TEXT WITH TITLE OF SOURCE~~. 
• For example, this:
  <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/ancient/hamframe.asp" target="_blank">Code of Hammurabi</a>
• Becomes this:
  Code of Hammurabi
5. This version of the story asks for the student’s name in the Welcome passage , so that their answers at the end will have a name associated with them. If you don’t need this feature, you can delete the question and the code for the input box ({text input: 'studentName'})
6. Close the passage by clicking the x at the top right. You’re done with this one! 

Source

Okay, this is the fiddliest bit, but I promise it’s not so bad. There’s even a nice visual walkthrough to help you out. Ready?

1. Replace “~~TITLE OF TEXT~~” with the title of your source or excerpt. 
2. Replace “~~ADD YOUR TEXT HERE. PUT TEXT YOU'D LIKE TO LINK INSIDE ONE OF THE FOLLOWING:” with the full text of your source or excerpt. 
3. Identify the words within the source that you would like to link to another passage. Copy ‘em.
4. Go down to the link list. Replace “~~LINK TEXT 1~~” with the copied text. 
5. Highlight the entire line. Cut. 
6. Highlight the words you copied earlier in the passage. Paste. You’re done with the first one!
• Here's what that process looks like. Every little yellow flash in this clip is a CTRL+C (Copy) or a CTRL+V (Paste). 

7. Repeat this process with each selection of text you want to link. Delete any links you do not use.

Items

There’s lots of code-looking stuff here, but never fear! Each of these lines that begin with "{text input for:" simply creates an input box where students can write their answers, one input box per line. 

1. Add any questions or comments you’d like to the Item 1 box corresponding with the text you linked to this passage. 

2. If you’d like a text input option for students to respond to your questions:

• Cut and paste the first line of code from the list beneath the relevant question.
• Repeat for all questions in that Item. Delete any you do not use (or else you’ll have a list of extra input boxes in your passage).
• Each input option can each only be used once in your story. So, if you used ‘inputA’ and ‘inputB’ in the Item 1 passage, you’ll need to remove these two from the next slide and use 'inputC,' 'inputD,' etcetera. 
3. If you don't want a text input option, simply delete all text before {back link, label: 'Save and go back to excerpt'}.

Submission Instructions

Okay, home stretch! There’s so little you need to do here, it almost doesn’t seem fair. 

1. Choose one or both sets of instructions for submitting answers. Delete any irrelevant instructions. 
• If you did not use any text inputs in your activity, you can delete this passage entirely or replace everything before the {back link} with any concluding text you like. 
2. Replace “~~YOUR PREFERRED SUBMISSION INFO~~” in the instructions you choose with the email, LMS assignment submission link, or other details needed for students to submit any work they’ve created. 

That’s it! You’ve got a Source Analysis Activity of your own. If you have questions or get stuck at any of these steps, feel free to reach out in comments, or schedule a quick chat with me via my Calendly. 

P.S: Now that you’ve made this lovely thing, how do you put it out into the world? We’ll talk more about that in the next post. 

Plug and Play: Source Analysis Template

Ever since I created the Source Analysis I activity, I've been wondering if there was a way to reduce the friction of creating a close reading exercise like this even further than just providing an example. Twine is a fairly low investment technology to pick up, but to start from scratch can be intimidating, and there can be a high barrier to trying new things for teachers who simply don't have much time to argue with technology. 

To help with this goal, I've created a template for making a source analysis activity similar to Source Analysis I. I have tried to make it as self-explanatory as possible to use (at least, if you’ve read the previous posts and/or demoed the Source Analysis I Activity), so feel free to download it and jump right in yourself! However, if you’d like a more detailed walkthrough to using it, one is coming. 

Download Source Analysis Template! 

This template is good for activities like: 

• Close reading of a fiction or nonfiction text guided by questions
• Encouraging annotation of specific passages
• Creating notes about a source that will inform a paper or exam question

For the particularly imaginative, you could also use it for:

• Having students read and dissect the key requirements of a paper or project prompt
• Reflecting on the different formats of a text (what different things did students pick up reading the piece in its original format versus within Twine?)

To start working with the template:

1. Download the Twine desktop app from Twinery.org and the HTML file for the template.
2. Once you reach the Story Listing in Twine, click “Import from File” on the Side Menu. Click “Choose File,” then select the template file.
3. The template will appear as a story in the Story Listing view.
4. Optional: This is a good point to do the following two actions:
   • Click the gear icon and click “Duplicate Story.” This will make a copy of the file so that you have the template for safekeeping, and a work file for your new activity. That way, you can go back to the template if needed, or duplicate it for other uses in future.
   • Click the Settings (gear) icon next to the file you plan to work in and select “Rename Story.” Give your activity a descriptive title, as this will appear in the activity once it is complete.
5. Click on your work file to open it.

In creating the template, I worked out a couple of irritations of the original:

• If using a link to an external site, placing it into the template as provided will now automatically open it in a new tab, rather than either opening in the existing tab (thus navigating away from the activity) or requiring users to right click and select "Open in a new tab" manually (which is annoying to have to remember). This update is thanks to this question and answer in the Twinery forum!
• The original activity required players to make a slightly unnecessary choice between whether they were going to write down their answers separately or in the input boxes. Although this was useful for the purposes of demonstrating two different approaches, it really wasn’t necessary for a template– if not using the input boxes, the creator can delete them, or the players can ignore them.

You may have noticed it’s been a while since my last post, and that’s primarily because every time I sit down to publish this template post, I come up with a new way to make the template or the instructions better which requires an additional hour of Googling, fiddling, and fighting with Blogger. I then created a bunch of content which felt like too much for one post; I like to keep these somewhat bite-sized. So, I’ve created a lot and split it into smaller, time-released bits, like those pain reliever capsules with the little spheres inside. (Is that what those do? Not sure, but they look fancy, so I’m going with it.)

Now, finally, I’m releasing the template out into the world, with the promise of additional supportive content to come, including a walkthrough (with a helpful video demo or two) and some upgrades to this template that you may like to experiment with. I’m also offering some small-group or one-on-one meetings for anyone who wants support or ideas for using this template; feel free to schedule an open time on my Calendly. And, if you decide to use it to create your own resource, I’d love to see the final product or hear about how you used it!

Plug and Play: My Much-Anticipated Proclamation of Love for Rubrics

Grab your colorful writing implements! It's rubric time! Photo by @alyssasieb.

In the Spring of 2017, long before I ever thought about becoming a CITL grad affiliate or even particularly understood my own interest in teaching, I participated in the "Four Friends and a Book" reading group hosted by a CITL grad affiliate. We read parts of Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do and discussed how Bain's ideas related to our own practices and disciplines. I recently rediscovered the discussion questions and my answers that we each prepared in advance of these sessions, and realized with a start that this was the beginning of the story I promised to tell you so long ago, about how I became a rubric enthusiast.

In the Beginning: A Skeptic

A selected excerpt from my notes on the Pre-Meeting Assignment for Meeting 3, in response to a question about whether rubrics were the tools of excellent teachers or merely time-consuming busywork:

• I’m struck by “Students focus on grades. Sad, but true” (7)

• I think this could have potential usefulness for conveying some of those learning aspirations that Bain references repeatedly, though the rubric’s obsessive focus on the grade is why I have shied away from using them before. They always seem to be something that promises to make the subjective objective by putting it in a chart—“mastery of material” or “effective use of evidence” is now clear and undeniably interpretable because it’s in a table!

• I do like the idea of students helping to create these—that would give me a sense also of not only what they expect but what they know and what I could work on explaining.

This list of reactions struck me as interesting for a few reasons.

• First, I am notorious (with myself, at least) for taking notes that have no content other than the quotation I thought was "interesting." Can you elaborate, past Leanna? No, I could, apparently, not.

• Next, wow, was I skeptical! Rubrics "could have potential usefulness"-- that's Leanna-speak for "I guess you may have a small point and I don't like it."

My referenced qualm about the concept of rubrics, meanwhile, now strikes me as being a super-real critique of many rubrics I'd seen as a student and in teaching workshop examples, which I found impenetrable and not very specific, likely because they were trying to be all things to all graders--vague enough you could use them for many different projects or pieces of writing.

What is a rubric?

There are a few different styles of rubric, the most common three of which are well-described in Know Your Terms: Holistic, Analytic, and Single Point Rubrics. I tend to be most comfortable with an analytic rubric, which breaks down criteria of an assignment and helps the grader look at each in isolation to arrive at a total score. For example, the rubrics I’ve featured here previously in posts about teaching The Underground Railroad and The Crucible have been analytic rubrics. 

However, rubrics don’t have to be so detailed to be useful. My simplest "rubric" was one I scribbled quickly on every one of the weekly reflection papers for my Fiction and the Historical Imagination class. It began from the instructions from a document called Weekly Response Expectations:

 

• Comment thoughtfully on reading.

• Use evidence from reading.

• Tie readings together, either within week or with previous weeks.

Which turned into a little abbreviated list that I added to the bottom of each paper with a brief comment about each:

 

• Content

• Analysis

• Connections

 

If you had all three, you had full points. If you missed one or two, I noted they were missing. If you could have done more, I noted which needed a little attention. It's not that this is an example or perfect or ideal rubric making-- this could have been a lot better! But for a frequent and low-stakes assignment, it made life quite a bit easier to organize my thoughts in this way, and it seems to lead students toward some quite intriguing and freeform thinking, which was my hope and my goal.

What Changed?: Why I Like Rubrics

As you can probably tell, my feelings about rubrics changed from the time I was writing about their “potential usefulness” to the time I was creating a new and tailored rubric for every assignment I graded. This moment of reflecting on and talking about rubrics in concert with other teachers set off a chain reaction– I tried it, I liked it, and I didn’t want to go back. So, here's the verbs that rubrics help to do:

Refining

One of the critically helpful things about getting into rubric construction was how it forced me to refine how I was conceptualizing the assignment before grading it-- indeed, before I even assigned it. I wanted students to know how they were going to be graded before they started working on their assignments so that they knew how to prioritize their time and attention, what I was looking for, and so that they had the best chance of actually succeeding at that assignment's goals. So, I needed to figure that out, and often breaking things down into the rubric forced me to clarify my instructions and reflect on what was actually important-- every single one of four criteria cannot be fifty percent of the grade, so how much, exactly, should each be worth in the final score? How can I best express success in each criterion via words on a page to actually make them specific and helpful, rather than leaning on a vagueness like "mastery of material"-- what will showcase that they have mastered the material well, and can I just straight-up tell them to do that in the instructions and isolate it in the rubric?

Prioritizing

Past Leanna was affronted by how rubrics focused on the grade, whereas I apparently saw the process as being more about the mystical process of providing tailored feedback, with the grade hinging upon it but incidental to "the point." I now tend to see "the grade" and "the feedback" as two aspects of the process of grading (which is, obviously, not universal-- if you are ungrading or teaching in an ungraded context, great!). If you can simplify "getting to the grade," you have more time to tailor your feedback. This is something I mention frequently in my current role-- it's not that you are skimping on grading by doing it more quickly; rather, you're making more efficient the parts that are not personalized so that you can spend your time tailoring the more individualized feedback to the student, instead of just writing "Remember to proofread your paper before submitting" on thirty-seven separate papers and trying to ascertain after reading whether this feels like a B+ or an A- paper. 

Guiding and Aligning

When I was a teaching assistant, there was quite a bit of uncertainty regarding the role of the teaching assistant. In many ways, our sections were like our own class, and we ran them in fairly individualized ways. In others, we had little power to craft the class in our own image. The result was quite a lot of inconsistency, as an assignment you interpreted as being "about" one skill or content area might be interpreted by another teaching assistant for the same course to be "about'' a different skill or content area, and the professor leading the course might have still another take. Now that many of the folks reading my blog are likely professors or teachers of some type themselves (hooray!), you have the power to help the folks you are supervising or may one day supervise in your courses figure out how the heck to grade student assignments by creating a rubric and collaborating on minor edits as each assignment approaches in order to align assignment expectations between sections. In an individual way, making rubrics also helped me create consistency across assignments-- is there a reason why I think organization should be thirty percent of this project but only ten percent of the last one? If so, I should make that clear; if not, I should try to figure out how important organization should be to this type of project.

If you have strong feelings about rubrics (positive or negative), you’re obviously not alone. If you want to share them with me, feel free to drop them in the comments! 

Take My Advice: Four Tech-Fueled Efficiency Tips I Wish I'd Known Four Years Earlier

If you'd like a tech-fueled inefficiency tip, this image should serve. 

I have always been technologically curious, but as one grows and changes, perhaps it is inevitable that one realizes what they didn't previously know or appreciate; so too have I realized that there were lots of technological possibilities that I was slow to take up. There seems to be an undertone of skepticism among folks in academic humanities circles about using technology, systems, or techniques for efficiency and an even greater fear of admitting one has engaged in such behavior, and so I perhaps unnecessarily developed an aversion to using it to support my research; though I was keen on incorporating tech into teaching, my process of doing so was admittedly prone to making my preparations more time-intensive rather than less (implied, I think, by my observation in this 2018 reflection on preparing my Fiction and the Historical Imagination course). Part of this, I think, was a symptom of a peculiarly humanistic tendency (or so it seems to me) to feel that to save time is to be cheating in some way; that if our work is valuable it is valuable because we agonized over it at great length, and can be said to have depended upon no one but ourselves and our incredible intellects. Ultimately, however, both students and the work, not to mention my own well-being, have been better served by embracing ways to make life a little easier and a little more collaborative. As a result, in this post, I'm reflecting on four things I came to appreciate in the last two years or so that I really, really wish I'd been doing the whole dang time.

Use OCR

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is much better than it used to be, and it doesn't have to be perfect to be helpful. I think I became hesitant to try again with OCR after an ill-fated attempt at digitizing a single issue of Cosmopolitan magazine so I could "perform Digital Humanities" on it as an undergraduate. However, toward the end of my dissertation writing process and into my current work I've seen how improved the technology is and how much I now take it for granted. If you have archival photos or scans, try using Adobe Acrobat or a free OCR tool to recognize the text. This will not only make it more accessible if you are distributing it to students, but also make it easier for you to search for terms within it (which would have come in very handy had I figured this out earlier in my dissertation research process, as I worked almost entirely from archive photos and scans while writing).

Use Excel

You know you can use Excel for whatever you want? You don't even have to be a card-carrying "quantitative researcher." Here's one thing I now use all the time and which would have worked well in conjunction with the idea of OCRing things: the UNIQUE function, which can take a list of items and strip out all the repeats, leaving only one iteration of each name, number, list item, etcetera. Imagine how much more easily I could have answered questions about how many disabled children were represented in an issue of a periodical if I'd known this.

Use the Internet

You don't have to do everything yourself. Some subjects have existing resources, whether entry-level memorization and practice activities on tools like Quizlet or Kahoot or mid- to higher-level activities created by other instructors and distributed on educational resource sites like MERLOT or the Zinn Education Project or through affinity groups like the Reacting Faculty Lounge or via personal blogs (hi!). Some activities pitched to high school learners can be employed usefully in a higher education setting with a few tweaks. Some materials can also be created by students as part of their learning process; instead of making a Quizlet for students to practice with, ask groups to create their own Quizlets of the top five or ten topics / terms / concepts and compare their results. 

In short, I wish that I had appreciated earlier how many other things existed that I could use rather than reinventing the wheel every time. Sometimes it seemed like it would have been harder to find and enact an idea elsewhere than creating it myself, but looking a little harder could have paid off-- not only would this have saved me time, but it would have been useful to me to see how other people were approaching teaching various topics to inspire the activities and assessments that I created.

Use a Repetition-Mitigator

Relatedly: If you do have to do something yourself (making an activity, grading), you don't have to create everything from scratch every time. It's great to make something new! As I've mentioned in a previous post on career preparation, if you are an early career teacher, it's in fact essential to make some new things if you'd like to be able to fruitfully reflect on those experiences in later job interviews or teaching statements. However, if you save time on some of the more rote requirements and/or incorporate already existing resources, you'll have more time for creating novel activities and giving meaningful feedback. 

Efficiency in grading is one example of this. Rubrics and comment libraries (either technological ones, like within LMS systems, or low-tech numbered lists you can show to students in conjuction with papers marked with corresponding numbers) can allow you to skip writing "Needs to use at least three sources" in paper comments seventeen times, leaving additional time to write more specific and useful comments like "Your paper's argument might benefit from a closer read of Source A" or "If your goals are X, you should focus on Y aspect of the homework for next week." I only started appreciating what a time-saver this could be late in the game, and I wish I'd used it more thoughtfully and more often.

What tips, strategies, or tools do you wish you'd appreciated and used earlier? Feel free to let me know in the comments-- I just may have to start adopting them myself.

Related Links: 

One of my favorite activities supported by an existing resource: after being asked to deliver a short lesson to a group of epidemiology students on the fly during my time at the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, I followed a brief lecture on the history of polio with asking students to play the Smithsonian National Museum of American History's Got Ramps? Architectural Barriers Game and compare notes on which endings they achieved. 

If you're interested in the NMAH's work on polio, or thoughts on incorporating museum resources and exhibits into teaching, you may be interested in revisiting this 2017 post on the curator's interview with David Serlin.

Current Project: Taking, Talking, and Thinking Through Career Development

I made this graphic in Canva. 

Recently I had the pleasure of joining current and former graduate students from the UIUC Department of History to discuss my experiences with career diversity and my embrace of a non-tenure track career path. Teaching can play a critical role in that path, as teaching is often (though not always) the first chance that many graduate students get to apply their skills in a different way than their writing and research, and to something that often feels like a space more within their control and more akin to "paid employment" than other aspects of their lives and work. 

  

Because of this connection between teaching and career development, I wanted to reflect today on some takeaways of that session, particularly since teaching is instrumental to that story. I've divided these into three key topics (as you may have guessed from the graphic): mindsets that in hindsight I found to be the most helpful things I did without always knowing that's what I was doing. 

A note that most of these observations are for people thinking about their place on this path, not for the people who organize graduate programs, except insofar as those people might well take the idea from this to emphasize creating space and opportunity for these things to take place. The reason why is twofold; first, this was my experience, and I can speak to it better than just about anything else. Second, at the end of the day, I am fairly aware of who makes up my readership (friends, current and former graduate students, and some of my former students, hello!), and no one is more capable, more interested, or more qualified to make the kind of decisions I made, wish I made, wish I'd made more often and in more ways, than you are. 

 

Take

 

Lots of people talk about the "tenure-track academia" path and the "not that" path as two separate ones, but there was really never a "two roads diverged in the wood and I" moment for me.* During the course of our conversation, I concocted a somewhat tortured but nevertheless illustrative metaphor about the journey. For me, deciding to go to gradschool was a bit like going to the store for apples. I knew that I was going to go in and come out with apples-- or, as a professor. As I started moving through the aisles, though, I started grabbing some other things, and realized by the end that I had a basket filled with a lot of things, which I could use in service of a lot of different goals. And every time I grabbed an extra thing to put in that basket-- that is, developed a new interest, took on a job or volunteered to do a task-- I didn't do it with a perfect grand plan in mind. It came from following my interests, trying things that sounded interesting and that I wanted to know more about. In short, you don't have to make a large decision to pursue keeping your options open-- you just have to take things and put them in your basket, knowing they might give you options later.

Talk

 

Networking isn't schmoozing, it's reciprocal and thus is tied with knowing the value of your labor. Alison Green has pointed this out in many ways on Ask a Manager, and the topic came up in our conversation as well. When someone is in dire need of a job, it can be hard for them to see the other person as a person rather than as an opportunity-dispensing machine. But most folks I know are actually interested in other people! So, approach your talk with mutual gain in mind. Most people love to know that something from their experience helped you. And if you know the value of your labor, you'll know that it can incredibly helpful for someone to be able to say, soon or far in the future, "oh yes, I know someone who might be able to fill that position/consult on that work/ direct that project." But it probably isn't something they can do immediately-- networking in this way is setting yourself up for the potential future, just the way the opportunities you put into your grocery basket are. Most folks don't have the power to just pick you up and slot you into a job, and if it worked that way it would be even more unfair than the process often is currently. It's like any other relationship you build with another human: you can't rush trust, comfort, or intimacy. You have to build it with small bits of evidence about your interests, skills, and work style. 

That also means networking doesn't have to be overly complicated or awkward. For me, networking was volunteering a couple of hours of my life to keep time during the university's teaching assistant orientation's microteaching sessions. It was joining a professional organization in a field I was interested in and attending a virtual event. It was scheduling a meeting with a graduate career advisor who introduced me to someone in a field I was interested in. It was doing a couple of informational interviews with various people who were, uniformly, happy to talk to someone about what they do. Even the things that I didn’t want to do, ultimately, were helpful. Some of the useful information I got from informational interviews was "well, I don't want to do that!" So, talk-- to anyone and everyone who knows something about something you think you might like to know more about. 

 

Think

Teaching skills-- like all skills-- can stand you in good stead in many markets, but you have to actually think about how you are doing it and why. Unfortunately, many graduate students do not feel encouraged to do this reflective work, at least in my experience and my conversations with others. They are instead told to go and do what is necessary to keep their funding and get through the semester, but they are not encouraged to develop pedagogically beyond what is "always done." As unfair as this may be, this means that most have to use the opportunities they have to make this sort of experience count through their own initiative, as rarely will anyone scaffold this particularly well for you. Going into class and telling students "discuss the reading" will not provide useful experience for you; nor will putting lots of effort into things without reflection, like painstakingly writing the same three wordy comments on every essay. 

This doesn't mean you need to agonize over every lesson or reinvent the wheel every time you open your Zoom window/classroom door/Canvas course. Instead, I suggest finding one topic, idea, or objective you want to emphasize the next time you teach and really think about how best to do so: do some research on how others have taught similar ideas, create a novel activity or assessment, and talk to your most pedagogically-minded colleagues about what you're planning, how it went, and what they do in their own courses. In doing so, you'll have created an example that you can forever use as an indication of your teaching style and your work style.

I hope take, talk, and think are as useful to you as they have been to me. And of course, you're always welcome to take from (the archives of Activities and Materials are open for your perusal!), talk to (contact info is on the right sidebar!), and think along with me. 

Notes:

*Not especially a huge Robert Frost person, but I always find myself quoting him in writing; just like experiences, I often throw little bits of language that strike me into "my basket" for later. (My favorite which I slipped into my dissertation is "Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in.")

Enough About Me: Deformalizing and Deformatting