T is for Technology – I have been teaching university accounting courses for almost 20 years now and every summer I rethink my classroom relationship with technology. Technology certainly makes it easier to communicate with the class and circulate materials – but recently I have been backing away from much of the digital technology in the classroom. This year I am keeping the number of slides on each chapter’s content to a minimum and leaving time in my upcoming auditing class to discuss problems and cases and focus on students’ professional judgment.

E is for Energy – September brings a new sense of energy back to campus. For those of us returning to campus there is a sense of renewal and the opportunity to begin again with a clean slate and a sense that all things are possible. I am hoping with ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s new fall break that some of this energy can be maintained further into the semester.

A is for Attitude – I begin each new term with a mixture of enthusiasm and apprehension. Enthusiasm because maybe this term my time budget for each classroom activity will be realistic. Maybe this term I will find a more effective way to teach audit sampling. Maybe with the recent focus on auditing Senator’s expense accounts, students will appreciate the importance and relevance of auditing concepts. The apprehension comes from wondering if I am too optimistic in what I hope we can accomplish in class and whether this year’s innovations will have the desired impact – which brings me to C.

C is for Change – Every year I change my course outline – sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. This year it is a lot. I am teaching introductory auditing for the first time in several years and am experimenting with a new approach – to group work, class involvement, assignments and grading. Best case, every student learns more in this course than when I’ve taught it previously. Worst case, I revamp the outline for the winter term.

Finally, H is for Health – I have family, friends, colleagues and even students who struggle with physical and mental health concerns. When I prepare for a new term, I consider how to maintain and improve my health and I strive to design a course that supports students in living healthy lives themselves. Fortunately there are resources and facilities available on campus to help us all in living well-balanced lives. So there it is – preparing to teach is really about planning to take advantage of the opportunities and resources around us – the technology, the energy, the enthusiasm, the chance to experiment, the facilities – and planning to have a little fun doing it. Hopefully that sense of fun will be contagious – and my students will catch it.

I’ll never forget the sense of excitement I experienced when I learned I was going to teach my first course. I had been advised by a number of parties to avoid teaching for the first few years of my doctorate so I could concentrate on the work at hand, but when the opportunity came, I jumped at it. The course assignment was nothing remarkable—an introductory literature course for non-English majors—but I was ecstatic nonetheless.

Like many people facing the unfamiliar, however, I was also trepidatious. Naturally, I turned to colleagues who had recently gone through the same transition, and they happily provided me with copies of their syllabi and chatted about their experiences over coffee. My department, too, was kind enough to provide still more copies of other syllabi, the names of bookstores and sample textbooks, and other such mundane matters that every professor has to take into account. I hadn’t crossed that magical PhD boundary yet, I rationalized, but I have studied my subject for almost 10 years, and I have consulted with everyone I can think of about teaching this course. How could I not be ready to do this, and to do it well?

From that time until about a year ago, I have been building upon and tweaking my teaching approach, mostly through trial and error and peer consultations. If student evaluations, feedback, and performance are any indicators too, I had to believe that I was doing a reasonably good job and, what’s more, was steadily improving. Five years into my teaching career, I felt like I knew what I needed to know in order to handle the teaching component of any faculty assignment that might come my way.

A year ago, on a whim—or rather, in what I think of now as a happy moment of healthy self-doubt—I enrolled in ’s program. I went into the program with the modest goal of finding new ways to engage my students, but I quickly found out that the experience would be more transformational than I ever could have anticipated. On the first day, Anthony opened with a point that forever altered my perspective on the subject of post-secondary teaching: most graduate programs, he observed, spend countless hours making sure we master content, but precious few dedicate any time to training us how to teach that content. As the enormity of that fundamental truth sank in, I gave myself up wholly to the possibility that I had much to learn about teaching—and, indeed, I did. I still do. In fact, the more I look back on my own development as a teacher, the more strange and, frankly, shocking I find the assumption that people preparing to spend a lifetime teaching don’t need to undergo any kind of instruction that focuses on teaching.

Imagine my delight, then, when I learned that one part of my new job with the EDC would be to teach a certificate course that tackles the gap that Anthony had pointed out, and which I myself knew too well. is a 9-week, 27-hour certificate program designed, as its title announces, to prepare upper-year PhD students to teach in a post-secondary environment. The program covers issues such as assessment, feedback, and learner-centered teaching, and it requires students to complete a number of practical assignments such as designing a course, preparing a lesson plan, and delivering it during a microteaching session, and drafting a teaching philosophy statement. Having both taught for years with minimal official training and braved the job market, I can’t exaggerate how directly applicable such topics and assignments are for students nearing the completion of their PhDs—not only will they prepare you for your first classroom experience, but they will also help you to build a strong teaching portfolio for prospective employers.

In spite of in a number of disciplines, academia might not yet be at the point where it is ready to integrate fully the twin mandates of mastering the complex, diverse content of a discipline and instructing its students how to teach that content. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t seek out partners such as the EDC to help close that gap for yourself. If you’re considering a career in academia, I urge you to take advantage of the unique opportunity that Preparing to Teach represents. As tenure lines become increasingly scarce, , and more schools produce still more PhDs, the competition for faculty appointments grows ever-more fierce, and employers want reassurances that the people they are hiring are cutting-edge researchers and amazing teachers. Earning the Preparing to Teach certificate is one way to signal to potential employers that you are committed to teaching—and also, more importantly, to learn what goes into great teaching.

Often, when I speak with contract instructors, instructors and faculty, they express surprise when I tell them they are innovative. With last week’s annual conference being hosted at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, I had a lot of time to think about how we define innovation in education. CNIE is a national organization which, in its mission statement, is defined as “the voice for Canada’s distance and open education communities.” The CNIE website has quite a bit on educational technology, framed as a way of ensuring justice, inclusivity and accessibility. New technologies can, and I would say, most certainly should be used to achieve these goals. Innovation in education, however, is not only about using the latest technologies. I think it is the conflation of innovation and new technology that leaves so many educators I speak with, with a sense that they have nothing innovative in their pedagogical toolkits or that they are not creative in their teaching.

Over the last few years that I have been a graduate student, contract instructor and educational developer at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, I have spoken to Legal Studies professors who teach through literature, a Canadian Studies professor who asked students to research key players in political debates and participate in classroom discussions as that person, and professors across several departments who give students the option of submitting non-traditional expressions of their academic arguments. These professors certainly take risks with their students, but rather than , they embrace the learning opportunities for themselves and students that come with taking such risks. These professors are creative, they are innovative and they give their students the opportunity to surprise them through their own creativity. Most importantly, these professors and their students are creative and innovative in ways that do not rely on the use of new technologies.

This is not to say, of course, that new technologies do not offer avenues for innovative teaching. They do. One professor this year gave her students the task of using such technologies to communicate ideas from their various disciplines to one another and the results were amazing! Yet, even at the CNIE conference, there were papers about applying “old practices in non-traditional ways,” ways of using practices like – long associated with – without technology, and the use of comic strips in medical education. Being innovative, in other words, is not simply about using digital technologies to communicate with students or to have them communicate with one another. Being innovative is about taking risks by bringing things together that may not have previously been associated with one another in education: comic books and medicine, literature and law, painting and social science. In each of these cases, what emerges as we hear instructors speak about their classes is a sense that using a different medium of expression often offers us new perspectives on the world around us.

When new perspectives become available to us and the students in our classes, the learning environment is enriched by a deeper engagement with the material being taught. What is old becomes new again, it becomes exciting, there are new avenues to explore, new insights to share. Innovation is not just about new technologies. It is, instead, about developing new standpoints, intellectual invigoration and collaborative discovery. It is something we all do in our own ways. It is time we began to recognize and celebrate this.