Blog – To teach, or not to teach?

When you’re thinking about setting off alone, there are two major routes to choose between.  Every university treats these pathways differently, so it’s important to ask questions at the place that you are thinking of applying to about how the tracks work there.  In general though, there are two routes.  You can choose to focus on Research only, with training of MSc and PhD students as your main teaching responsibilities.  If you pick this track, which allows you to focus on running your lab and doing the science, it’s likely that you’ll be expected to fund most or all of your salary through Fellowships and percentages spread across grants that allow it (spoiler alert – this is fewer grants than you might think!).

If you choose to pick a track with some Teaching responsibilities, then you will be responsible for a significant amount of undergraduate teaching, which may range from large lecture courses, smaller interactive group teaching, and the worst part, exam setting, marking and returning.  Especially when you’re starting out, these roles can be hugely time consuming, and difficult to balance when you’re also trying to get your lab off the ground.  However, it is a route that should come with more career security, with all or a significant portion of your salary covered by the University.  The routes are not parallel, and there is some fluidity – you may start on a Fellowship that actually prohibits you from taking part in substantial teaching, but then transition onto a teaching based role.  If you’re on a mixed contract and you get a really massive grant, you may be able to reduce your teaching hours.  Make sure you know how things are done at your Institution!

Some data to start with. This distinction between tracks is a relatively new development, with the British Academy saying the two paths have diverged significantly over the last 5-10 years¹. The proportion of contracts that balance teaching and research dropped from 51 % in 2012 to 44% in 2019, with a marked increase in research-only and teaching-only contracts.  As no one will be surprised to hear, there are gender and race inequalities in the contract types, with women more likely to be employed on teaching-only contracts (53% of teaching-only contracts, while men hold 58% of the balanced contracts), and an increasing proportion of these contracts are awarded to non-white academics².   There are a whole host of reasons behind these changes, including the general funding crisis in UK Universities, the competition for research resources, and changes in student expectations .  What this leads to is a less-stable employment environment for all young academics, with an increasing lack of flexibility and greater pressure.

So far, so depressing.  I think at this point, I should reveal my decision; I have chosen to teach.  Oxford has a somewhat unusual teaching system for undergraduates, with university wide lectures, labs and exams for each subject, and then a big focus on small group teaching within your residential college.  It’s in these small groups called tutorials that students write essays, get detailed feedback and develop their critical skills.  While I do a handful of lectures, these are relatively low effort endeavours in terms of hours, as they don’t come with associated graded work.  Tutorials are small but intense, requiring a huge amount of preparation for an hour long to and fro, and come with detailed essay marking and feedback each week.  Oxford terms are short, but the first year I taught Metabolism to first year Medics almost killed me.

It took me 2-3 days to prepare for each tutorial, I felt like I was an inch ahead of the students one I was in the tutorial, and had to plan a series of essays that tested their understanding of something I barely grasped.

There is no training, although luckily I’d been in tutorials myself twenty years ago and knew how they should go! I’m now in my third year of teaching and I’ll say now – I wouldn’t change a thing.  I decided to teach metabolism as basically everything that was coming up in my unbiased proteomics studies was a metabolic enzyme of some kind.  The subject was simply too complex for me to find the time to figure out how to take these findings further without an external force making me learn it.  Three years down the line I’m excited about starting this term, with a much stronger understanding of the subject, a memory of those moments when you see a light come on in a student who has been struggling, and I’m sure when I go to review each tutorial, I’ll extend my understanding further.  As impossible as it seemed in that first year, it has been totally worth it.

There’s a couple of other more selfish reasons to teach.  Admissions is a big part of teaching responsibilities, and I’ve been on MSc and DPhil admissions panels for a couple of years now.  As “the molecular person” on the panel, I have to come up with questions for all applicants with a molecular background.  Having senior academics across the department see you manage to pull together a set of coherent questions for a cancer genomics student one minute, followed by a high-throughput iPSC screen student the next, can be a pretty powerful thing when you do it well (which I mostly do, occasionally having to resort to “in layman’s terms, can you describe XYZ”).  I also learn a lot in these sessions about the interests of other scientists in the department, and can spot opportunities for collaboration and grants.

Teaching allows you to spot talented students early on, that may well go on do Honours projects, Masters rotations, and perhaps even PhDs in your lab.

The Masters students in particular gave my lab significant momentum in the early days, and one fantastic student, Georgia Morgan, did a piece of analysis that is launching a whole new line of collaborative research for me³. The visibility you have as a teacher makes students more likely to pick your lab for these experiences, and this has been really valuable. And finally, getting to spend time with people who are at the start of their careers, developing a sense of wonder and excitement without the jaded views of someone who’s had too many grant rejections, is an absolute pleasure.  I leave tutorials mentally energized, if a little physically worn out.

So those are the positives for me, and the reasons that I will continue to teach going forwards.  At the end of my Fellowship teaching will contribute towards a proportion of my salary, which opens up my ability to apply for grants further into the future, and really solidify the progress I’ve made in building the lab over the last two years.  I’m sure though, that you’re ready for the but…

The proportion of academic contracts that balance teaching and research has decreased from 51% in 2012 to 44% in 2019.

The first con is obvious, probably by far the biggest, and something I’ve referred to already.  Teaching takes an astonishing amount of time and energy if you are committed to doing it well, and a significant amount of time if you’re box ticking your teaching requirements. A 3000 word essay takes at least 20 minutes to mark well, a lecture takes hours to prepare before the one hour of delivery, and students e mail you at all hours with all kinds of questions and you’re expected to respond in a reasonable timescale.  Add to that the need to adapt your methods to pupils with a diverse range of strengths, abilities and interests, and you can see how this piles up very quickly.  If you’re a young parent who needs to get to daycare pick up in time, or you have experiments to do that must be tightly planned, fitting it all can become difficult to impossible.  It’s not hyperbole to say my first term almost killed me, I was a shell of a person by the end of it, unable to give my interns and students the full energy and attention that they needed. Luckily, they knew I’d come round after a break, and just got on with things.

When you start your own lab, there is a lot of admin to do.  Risk Assessments, Ethics applications, Hiring, HR, Budgeting, grant writing, the list goes on.  Teaching adds a whole extra admin burden.  Admissions must be carefully documented, student reports must be written, Student Support Plans read and actioned…the list goes on.  This is such a huge shock when you move from spending most of your time at the bench to most of the time at the computer.  The online systems we use are universally slow and unintuitive, with a different system for every aspect of teaching.  It is an energy drain and of course, another time suck.  In terms of things that always drop to the very bottom of my to do list, using our Teaching admin systems falls below making a non-catalogue order on our ordering system, which feels like the sixth circle of hell.

There’s not always much training in place when you begin to teach.  Whilst more teaching focused roles may require you to gain a University teaching qualification, the quality of these programs varies.  I was lucky to take a fantastic year-long course in interactive teaching skills while I was at Yale, which really showed how innovative approaches can make the classroom a more engaging and open place for all participants.  But a lot of the time you can be handed a syllabus, and if you’re lucky, someone else’s twenty year old lecture slides, and just told to do your best. This is even harder for academics for whom English is not their first language, and the support is minimal.  I don’t really get anything in the way of structured and constructive feedback, although students are usually very happy to tell you if you have made them unhappy!  This can be an isolating and difficult experience, and adds to the huge pressure that exists in the first year that you teach.

The final thing that I feel, and I’m not sure that this is universal, is that there is a stigma to choosing to teach.  Other Departments in the University demand tutorial teaching for all academics unless you have a Fellowship that specifically prohibits teaching, and they don’t have this problem to the same extent.  When making decisions it was clear that in some opinions I was going into a specific box (named anything from the polite “enjoys teaching” to the much crueler “can’t do the science, needs to teach,” box), and that despite my success in obtaining major grants, it would be a hard box to climb out of. This was intertwined with the icky knowledge that this decision is often gendered, and that many women feel their choices are more limited given the high likelihood that they are the primary carer in their household. The more predictable teaching track is definitely an attractive option in that position. I’m at peace with that, but I can’t deny it caused me some serious pauses when making my decisions.

So there you have it – a tricky decision with no easy answer.  The final thing I might say is that there is no way I would have made the choices I have if I didn’t enjoy teaching. I’m going to leave you with a couple of comments from colleagues who’ve made different choices while starting their own group.  “I would say I am definitely NOT against teaching. It’s a very important part of what we do but it’s very difficult to juggle setting up a competitive research lab, getting grants and supporting research students so I deliberately limit the amount of teaching that I engage with. This enables me to keep the quality high for the teaching that I do. I am sure that when my lab is on a more stable footing teaching will naturally become a larger part of my role.”  And finally, “The honest answer originally was that I taught because it was good for my CV and they paid me extra money. Now I only teach stuff I actually enjoy and because I really love discussing complex subjects with people who are totally new to them, they have such fun ideas and interesting questions. I’m occasionally stupidly enthusiastic about a variety of topics and I like to try and pass on that enthusiasm for discovery and lateral thinking to others.”

It would be fantastic to hear from other researchers about their teaching decisions – feel free to comment below!

Dr Becky Carlyle

Author

Dr Becky Carlyle is an Alzheimer’s Research UK Senior Research Fellow at University of Oxford, and has previously worked in the USA. Becky writes about her experiences of starting up a research lab and progressing into a more senior research role. Becky’s research uses mass-spectrometry to quantify thousands of proteins in the brains and biofluids of people with dementia. Her lab is working on various projects, including work to compare brain tissue from people with dementia from Alzheimer’s Disease, to tissue from people who have similar levels of Alzheimer’s Disease pathology but no memory problems. Becky is also a mum, she runs, drinks herbal tea’s and reads lots of books.

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