How to help postdoctoral researchers gain experience in teaching

Just when their research careers are taking off, postdoctoral researchers look at the promotion criteria or start perusing academic job adverts and discover that they need teaching experience. How will they acquire this experience? 

Here’s how we have tried to create teaching opportunities for our postdoctoral researchers, while respecting funding boundaries that often restrict the hours you can spend teaching.

Be clear about what teaching experience might look like

Everyone thinks they will give a “big lecture”. They might be lucky, but the reality is that few are going spare. That said, it is always worth postdocs asking around the senior researchers in the team. 

Instead, young academics need to think outside the lecture box to see the many other educational opportunities that will be valued by their local education teams. These include marking, small-group work (including facilitation of tutorials), being a personal tutor and supervision of student research projects. It is all about getting a little experience for their CVs but also making sure they are heading in the right direction. 

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We run a workshop called “How to become a lecturer” to help manage expectations and signpost alternative education opportunities. We also tell our researchers that they have a great skillset for teaching, including reading and understanding complicated research papers and condensing information into manageable chunks for presentation to a broad audience. 

Make opportunities more visible to the right people

Our faculty is good at advertising education opportunities to everyone, but we realised early on that our postdoctoral researchers couldn’t distinguish what was suitable for them and what wasn’t, so they were not taking up these opportunities. Now we repost all suitable opportunities from an email address they associate with postdoctoral researcher information, with a header making it very clear that “this is for you”. 

Our postdoctoral association has produced an education page on its Sharepoint site, listing opportunities and contacts so that the more proactive researchers can contact education teams directly to enquire about teaching opportunities. We steer clear of advertising roles such as module leader to postdocs, because it could create tension between researchers and supervisors and/or funders if they take a demanding and time-intensive role. Meetings with our senior education and research staff helped us to refine our approach.

Support researchers in their first education steps

Creating a nurturing and informative environment for new educationalists allows them to see where their teaching fits into the overall programme. Co-teaching with an experienced member of staff can be helpful, as can working with peers to develop teaching resources. 

We signpost postdoctoral researchers to our faculty staff mentoring scheme, which has many mentors with educational experience and experience in balancing teaching and research. We also run a workshop on getting the most out of postdocs’ appraisals and see them as safe spaces to plan their futures, identify their training needs and possibly have difficult conversations. 

The Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers provides a framework for researchers to pursue a minimum of 10 days’ professional development a year, which could be used on teaching activity. We work with our university concordat team to disseminate this information to researchers and their line managers to smooth the way for professional development, including teaching. 

Has our multi-pronged strategy worked? 

Feedback has shown us that we have postdoctoral researchers who are now facilitators and personal academic tutors for our students through our rebadging of emailed adverts. We know we have engagement with researchers in marking and supervision of projects. We also know that our researchers seek mentoring, including education-related mentoring. We have raised the profile of teaching for our postdoctoral researchers, so they have more options to head towards and possible ways of getting there.

Our final words are about the enjoyment and challenges of combining research and education. We share our thoughts authentically as we have taken different career pathways involving research and teaching. We both understand that it is difficult at that early stage of your research career to know what the future will hold, let alone how to get there. We also know that our researchers are important contributors to education, sharing state-of-the-art knowledge and love of their subjects with our students, and that it is our responsibility to create and signpost education opportunities for them and to support them when they take those first steps into education.

Nicola Englyst is a principal teaching fellow and chair of the mentoring scheme, and Delphine Boche is chair of the postdoctoral association, both in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Southampton.

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