Traits and Skills that Make for an Effective Professor
I just reviewed my evaluations from last semester and updated the interactive data visualization here. It’s obvious to me that I’ve made quite a bit of progress as a professor. This begs the question: Why? In this post, I’ll describe some traits and skills that help make me an effective professor.
Public Speaking
When I accepted my position more than two years ago, I knew that my history of speaking in front of large groups of people would translate well in academia.
I wasn’t wrong.
To be sure, being an effective professor entails more than just speaking good well. If my students can’t understand their professors, then how can they learn from those at the lectern?
I look at the ability to speak well in public as a quintessential hygiene factor. That is, its presence doesn’t guarantee anything but its absence certainly does. In the publishing world, analogues such as book endorsements or covers come to mind. Put differently, speaking well is necessary but not sufficient for doing the job well.
Tact
Academia in general can be a fickle place and ASU is no exception to this rule. Agency Theory is alive and well, a lesson that I learned on a separate project that I managed for my department. The question isn’t if conflict or disagreements will occur. It’s when.
If my students can’t understand me, then how can they learn from me?
Fresh out of grad school, few of my friends and colleagues would have given me high marks here on the tact scale. Over the last twenty years, though, I have significantly improved in this regard. I look back at a few prickly situations over the past few years and know that my tact helped achieve the outcome that I desired—or al least averted a disaster.
Willingness to Change
This is a key tenet of my teaching philosophy. Although most of my in-class exercises achieve their desired outcomes, some did not. Case in point: an early effort in my analytics class to predict Twitter’s acquisition price. It turned out to work far better in my head than it did in front of 30 students. In that case, I decided to junk the exercise and replace it with a better one. In another instance, I listened to student feedback and routinely granted five minutes at the end of my capstone courses for brief group meetings.
Humility
I sometimes poke fun at myself in class. Sure, I take what I do seriously but don’t take myself too seriously. (As a longtime Rush fan, I am stealing from the band’s playbook. Rush is infamous for its sense of humor, especially on stage.)
What’s more, I’m not afraid to say “I don’t know” when that’s the case. I do the same thing during the Q&A session after my keynote talks. I can’t imagine having an opinion on everything and some student questions come from left field.
Finally, I’ll freely cop to mistakes. If I get a date or fact wrong, I’ll admit as much. A few times, I’ve misstated something but no one caught me. I then posted the correction in Slack. Facts matter more than ever.
Simon Says: The effective professor is self-aware.
By no means am I perfect but my evaluations and feedback are largely positive. Perhaps it all stems from being self-aware.
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