The Skillful Teacher

Generate External Recognition of Your Efforts
When we fight organizational battles, it is easy to focus all our atten-
tion on internal foes and obstacles and forget the world outside. Yet
one of the most important hedges against our efforts being squashed
is having those same efforts be noticed approvingly by eyes outside
the college. If people external to the institution are talking favor-
ably about a program inside it, then it’s much harder for the insti-
tution to shut that program down. So one of the greatest assets
teachers can call on in support of their internal activities is that of
external recognition. When an organization knows that people out-
side it are watching the activities of a particular program, the teach-
ers working within that program are less easily dispensed with.
Nothing disturbs an institution so much as knowing that if a pro-
gram is cut or closed, or its staff are sacked, that there will be an out-
cry from institutions and individuals outside the organization.
My own career as a writer stemmed from this realization. At one
community adult education institution where I worked I faced great
Dealing with the Politics of Teaching
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pressure to cut the educationally valuable but financially negligible
community services I was overseeing. As a way of staving off the
inevitable day of closure, I began to write articles describing these
services for national educational journals. Many of these services
focused on nontraditional forms of education (a supporting
autonomous learning groups scheme, a walk-in educational advi-
sory clinic, a home study service, a precollege study skills program
for so-called “disadvantaged” adults) and consequently caught the
imagination of editors. I also cultivated relationships with local jour-
nalists, and as a result features on these services were written up in
local papers and broadcast on local radio. Although the program
was eventually closed, I did buy a couple of extra years for the pro-
gram’s operation and some breathing time to consider my next
move.
In pedagogic terms this means that whenever a student tells us
just how much a particular course meant to them, or how much
they’ve learned from us, or how they admire some aspect of our
teaching (such as our ability to explain difficult ideas, the amount
of attention we give to each student’s work, or the degree of respon-
siveness we demonstrate regarding students’ concerns), we should
respond in a certain way. First, we should thank the person con-
cerned for their feedback, letting them know how it fuels our moti-
vation to keep working in the face of student resistance or whatever
other obstacles we face in our teaching. Second, if the person con-
cerned has already left the institution, and therefore has nothing to
gain from pleasing us, we should suggest that they send a letter doc-
umenting their satisfaction with us to the head of our department,
copying this to us as well as relevant senior administrators (such as
the dean, division head, or vice president for academic affairs). One
letter documenting an alumnus’ satisfaction with and appreciation
for our efforts is worth fifty such conversations we might have with
a superior trying to convince him or her of our value to the institu-
tion. When questions are raised within the institution regarding our
efforts, these letters of appreciation are worth their weight in gold.
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