Blog – Why You Should Teach Alongside Your Research

Among researchers, teaching is often seen as a burden, a necessary yoke to supply the academic beast that restrains your important experimental work and mires your time with marking. However, I believe teaching can be wonderful: a vital part of the experience and process of science, something that can help your research, and help you become a better researcher. In this article, I want to try and make the case for why you should absolutely try doing some teaching, especially if you’re a student yourself.

Teaching in the university context can take several different forms – from being a teaching assistant (TA) and demonstrating in labs, to being a tutor and assisting students in small group settings, all the way to lecturing larger audiences. You can start small, especially if you’re new to it, but teaching as a postgraduate student can still be intimidating though – do you know enough? Are you qualified enough?

In some ways, I would argue you are far better qualified to be teaching than some of the more senior academics! After all, you were very recently right in the shoes of the student, and remember all too well what was really hard, what was easy, how best to learn the material, and how to approach classes. You can empathise and develop a rapport with students much more easily, and from the students’ perspective, you’re often much less intimidating to talk to and ask questions to.

Nevertheless, there can be a strong feeling of impostor syndrome while teaching as a postgraduate – especially the terror of being caught out not knowing some part of the content you’re teaching. Usually this can be turned into an opportunity to demonstrate the research process and show that’s its ok to not know everything. But beyond this, the ’illusion of explanatory depth’ is a rarely used term for a phenomenon that is widely apparent. This is the idea of feeling like you know something, or how to explain something, but as soon as someone asks you to explain it, you realise that you knew far less about it than you thought. Teaching makes you aware of this – embrace it! It’s a good thing! It forces you to raise your game, make sure you know what you’re talking about, and really understand your topic. It’s often said that the best way to learn something is to teach it.

This past year, I’ve had to opportunity to conduct tutorials (small group teaching where students write an essay on a set topic beforehand and come to discuss their essays and the topic) on cellular pathways leading to neurodegeneration – helpfully, the same topic as my PhD project. Not only has setting papers to read for my students forced me to actually read more papers myself, but it also pushes me to make sure I really understand what those papers are talking about and think critically about them. The feeling of obligation I have to demonstrate thoughtful criticism keeps me honest, and I feel like I’m learning just as much from teaching as when I was in the position of the learner. It’s certainly helped me understand my topic in completely new ways as I try and find analogies to explain concepts to different students, and I’ve loved having back and forth discussions with students who push back on my preconceptions and bring their own perspectives.

Teaching has even inspired me to come up with new research ideas. Some years ago, while working on tau pathology in the brains of dogs with dementia, I was demonstrating in an undergraduate neuroanatomy lab, and showing some students the anatomy of the Papez circuit, a limbic pathway. Mid-demonstration, it occurred to me that the brain regions I was pointing out – hippocampus, alveus, fornix, thalamus, etc. – matched many of the places I was seeing tau pathology in the brain tissue I was studying in the lab. As soon as the session was over, I dashed back to the lab, checked my images to confirm that the tau I was seeing in the thalamus was in fact in the part linked to the Papez circuit, and then planned a series of further experiments to test whether other brain regions that made up the circuit (like the mammillary bodies and cingulate cortex) were also affected. Lo and behold, they were, and this idea that was sparked while teaching neuroanatomy to undergrads formed a titular idea behind my first first-author paper.

Teaching can not only help you with your research though – it can also help you become a better researcher.

A key part of science is, after all, communication. Being able to clearly articulate your ideas, explain complicated concepts in easy to understand ways, and working out different ways to frame topics are all essential skills in communicating your research, and teaching is a great way to practice this. As alluded to before, teaching forces you to break through the illusion of explanatory depth and challenges your own understanding. It forces you to think critically about what you know, and empathetically about what others understand, and how to bridge that gap.

There are of course other benefits to teaching – it can make a nice break from the routine nature of lab work, a way to get on your feet and out of the office. A notable advantage as a student is earning a little extra money, but teaching also earns other dividends including getting to know other researchers and academics in the department, helping you network within your institution and build up the pool of people whom you might eventually be able to ask for references from. It doesn’t hurt on the CV either.

This all misses the real point though, which is that teaching isn’t just useful for you personally but also essential for science and even further, just kind of wonderful in itself. Training the next generation and cultivating new ideas is vital for the future of dementia research and science more broadly. We’re not going to solve the big issues without more hands-on-deck, and if nothing else, teaching is a great recruitment avenue for your lab. We were all students once (maybe you still are!) and know the influence a great teacher or mentor can have – from inspiring lecturers to a friendly lab demonstrator or a helpful tutorial, providing useful advice or helping you to finally understand a topic and become passionate about a subject. Meeting one of my first supervisors through a “Stem Cells for Alzheimer’s Disease” seminar series was what put me on the path to where I am today. You, dear reader, can be this for people too. After all, it’s more than likely that you are among the most enthusiastic and knowledgeable people when it comes to your research. Students respond well to enthusiasm, and not only is studying the brain objectively really cool, but dementia research? That’s life changing.

Perhaps what I most and finally want to convey though is that teaching doesn’t have to be a burden, or a necessity; something you have to put up with to get something out of. Teaching can be joyful. All researchers understand the thrill of discovery, and there’s a similar wonder to being able to help and watch others learn and understand things for themselves too. I’ve always enjoyed the “ooh” breakthrough moment of dawning comprehension myself, but seeing it in the face of others and knowing you helped put it here is something else. Watching students grow and develop into better and more confident thinkers and scientists gives a meaning and purpose to teaching that can sometimes be a little less frequent in the lab. Indeed, students can bring a fresh eyed enthusiasm that reminds us after a day of Western blotting and Excel plotting that ‘hey, actually neuroscience is pretty cool’.

In sum, yes teaching is time out of your research, it’s not all sunshine and roses, and it can certainly be daunting – but it’s time returned in spades. It will build your confidence, your communication skills, and your connections. It helps develop empathy, can give you new ideas, and can give you a break from the lab. But most importantly, it is essential for bringing along a new generation of researchers, it brings a more diverse sense of meaning and achievement when experiments or applications are getting you down, and finally, it’s just fun. You should definitely give it a go.

Ajantha Abey

Author

Ajantha Abey is a PhD student in the Kavli Institute at University of Oxford. He is interested in the cellular mechanisms of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other diseases of the ageing brain. Previously, having previoulsy explored neuropathology in dogs with dementia and potential stem cell replacement therapies. He now uses induced pluripotent stem cell derived neurons to try and model selective neuronal vulnerability: the phenomenon where some cells die but others remain resilient to neurodegenerative diseases.

Follow @ajanthaabey