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Becoming a teacher for adults - as a university professor - requires upgrading your skillset in several ways.

I’ve coached hundreds of experts and aspiring instructors and these are the points that really matter:

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Never stop learning.

This is the core feature. Teaching is a powerful tool for learning, according to Feynman. Consider teaching your personal learning journey. Be intentional with your learning from your teaching.  

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Know your stuff

You need content expertise. You have a deep understanding of the most relevant concepts. And you can address misconceptions and help learners correct them. You get the facts right and you know the limits of what you don't (yet) know.

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Be a guide, not a guru.

Remind yourself of how you got to where you are. You are just a few steps ahead of others. Share learnings from your journey. You don’t need to be a sage on the stage. You can be a coach on the sidelines, too. Actually, that’s also way more exciting!

5/

Write your Teaching Statement

You have clarity on this personal question: what kind of teacher do I want to be? Write out your personal goals and values as an educator.

This is a living document, revisit it every year to update it. Over time, it will document your growth.

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Write how you want to think about your learners

How do you want to think about the humans who are investing their time to learn from you? Are they bright and curious minds, or a loud crowd of annoying kids?

Your perceptions and expectations make a huge difference.

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Instructional Design Skills

You need to master standard course components such as writing a syllabus, selecting learning materials, and creating a performance assessment. These are lower order teaching skills. They are merely a foundation.

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Higher order teaching skills let you map the learning journey for your students. You chart Bloom’s Taxonomy on your teaching and learning activities and draw from different teaching formats (flipped classrooms, PBL, the case method, ...) to pick what works for your course.

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Course Administrative Skills

New instructors underestimate how much time course management can take. There is a lot of communication before and after spending time with learners in class. Grading, sending reminders, responding to emails, re-reading regulations.

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Writing good course copy

Write to your learners with clarity. Take care to avoid misunderstandings and reduce follow-up communication. Learners really need unambiguous text in emails and postings, otherwise they'll come back to you many times.

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Know your learning management system

This can save you a lot of time and make your life easier!

On YouTube, you'll find concise tutorials for your LMS.

And for those at ETH Zurich, I recommend this course: https://moodle-app2.let.ethz.ch/course/view.php?id=2028 

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Instructional Delivery Skills 

Broaden your portfolio. Teaching is not only delivering a lecture. It’s true, giving an input is how you can efficiently convey your expertise and share what you know. But learners don’t dig it too much. Try more.

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Try active learning strategies

Effective teaching uses different active learning strategies. Next to learning by acquisition (listening to a lecture), there is learning through discussion, collaboration, production, practice and investigation. 

(kudos to@ABC_LD!)

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Teach more!

If you want to become a better teacher, then teach more.

Talk to other teachers. Visit them in their courses. Write a first draft of your own teaching statement.

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Experiment!

Try out a few new teaching and learning activities. Get feedback and do AARs (after action reviews) to reflect on what works for you. And most importantly: have open conversations with your students.