Sidestepping into a Technical Education Profession

Apr 26, 2019 technical education story

During the Summer of 2016 I felt called to enter into the world of technical education. That means I was feeling led to become a teacher. Was I qualified? Prior to starting I had 3 college degrees and a little over 5 years of professional experience working in different industries and more specifically in the field of IT, which was where I wanted to teach. The college I wanted to teach at was where 2 of my degrees came from, so one could say I had a personal curiosity of wanting to see what the non-student view was inside of the classroom.

So many people have asked me: “Matt, what does the application process look like?” Let me share how it went for me. I applied online like I would any other job using their proprietary software. I submitted my current cover letter, resume, unofficial transcripts of the colleges I went to, and provided 5 references (3 professional and 2 personal). Next, I waited for someone from Human Resources to reach out to me, which after a couple weeks they did to schedule an in-person interview. What was unique about this interview is that they wanted the candidates to teach something; makes sense for a teaching position after all right? They make the candidate teach for 45 minutes in front of a panel of people (5 for me then). During my time I choose to teach the fundamentals of application development simply because that is where the bulk of my professional experience was at that time. Like most educators these days…preparing and presenting a slideshow presentation was what I did. During the lecture, I gave lots of explanations and quite honestly I had no clue on how long it was going to take and I didn’t really pay attention to the time as I was going. After a little over 40 minutes, someone tells me that I had 5 minutes left. I knew I had a lot more ground to cover, so I switched gears and it felt like I was rushing to finish everything I wanted to. After going 10 minutes past the allotted time, I finished and then I sat down in front of the panel of people who asked me some closing questions. After feeling a little exhausted, I was excused to leave and then began to reflect on how things went, which is common for anyone who just gets out of an interview I think. Finally, after a few days I received a call back from Human Resources who extended me a job offer.

After accepting the job offer…things got a little interesting for me. HR asks me to complete employment verification, which on it they requested me provide 3 supervisory references. No problem right? Think about that for a second. There were some positions in my career where I intentionally or unintentionally left. An internship that was ended by them telling me it was my last day in person, a position where I was fired after a big misunderstanding, and another position where I left to pursue career advancement. The whole thing seemed very uncomfortable and in my opinion this was a task that should have been completed by HR and not independently by myself. Wanting to continue forward…I bit my tongue and I complied. After submitting my employment verification, the next week I was headed for employee orientation or “disorientation” as some people like to refer to it as.

At orientation they bring all the new employees together and try to make it a social thing by offering activities to complete, such as a scavenger hunt where you go around, ask people questions, and they write their name on your sheet of paper. Okay? After participating, I bumped into two other guys who said they were also IT instructors. I reacted a little with some surprise and the big question we all had for each other was “what will you be teaching?” Nobody knew and that wouldn’t change until a couple days before the first day of the semester. I’ll talk more on that one later. Eventually we did what you would expect on the first day…get familiar with policies and procedures, getting assigned a parking pass, security access to classrooms and office, and going through the typical “dog and pony show” type of things you’d normally except on the first day of the job. Eventually this would lead up to the teaching academy, which was the college’s version of a teacher boot camp.

At the teacher boot camp, all I can say it was amusing and confusing at the same time. I felt like a student again and it honestly didn’t feel like work at all. The first day I was required to go to a classroom where there was candy, pipe cleaners, pens, pads of paper, and smaller toy monkeys on the tables. I honestly hadn’t seen anything like it in any of my education or industry experience since! Next, we had another scavenger hunt where we had to go around and introduce each other, write some things down, and return to our seat. When called on, we had to stand up, introduce ourselves to the entire classroom, and then call on someone we met, share something we learned about them, and they would continue to introduce themselves. This repeated until everyone was called on. What I didn’t know at the time was what they were trying to do was to simulate the classroom environment and demonstrate ways of setting up different learning activities within the classroom environment. As someone who never taught before…I had no idea. Eventually they flipped things around and everyone was assigned a mentor or a fellow teacher at the college who had years of experience teaching at the college. With our mentor we were asked to teach something in front of the entire group of people. I choose a topic and the day I was going to teach my mentor tells me that he has another obligation and that I would have to go on without him. Thanks a lot! I proceeded to give my talk and I encountered my first obstacle…technology that didn’t work or software that would not install right on the provided computer. Luckily, I had a backup plan, which was to use my own personal computer, and it worked out just fine. Having learned some basic teaching strategies and encountering technical difficulties…eventually I would learn a little more about what classes I would be teaching. After meeting the dean or my immediate supervisor – I specifically asked her what classes I would be teaching and she didn’t know. Scary thought eh? To end the day of academy, a field trip to all the nearby campuses and Pizza Ranch was in order though.

Only 3 days before the start of the semester I finally found out what classes I would be teaching. Those were: 2 sections of Network Diagramming, Networking Concepts, Computer Hardware, and Network Directory Services. During my “work days” I began asking around internally within my department and College Professional Development (their acronym is CPD and you can pretty much think of them as the department who controls curriculum or who try to dictate how a teacher should act). The verdict was the content was non-existent. As someone who has spent a career solving problems – challenge accepted. I took it upon myself to begin creating my own learning materials so that I had something I could use with my students when they arrived – all 106 of them. Keep in mind this was something I had never done before and in some ways I was operating outside of the college’s norm, simply because I was rewriting courses as I was going along. To be fair, their competencies were antiquated and having come straight out of industry I was determined to close the gap between what was being taught and what was sought after by employers. After putting in longer days…I had enough material to cover just the first day. The first semester I taught it was me creating material, printing it off, and taking it with me to class. A person could say it was rather rough around the edges at times, which was frustrating for both the students and for myself. Students want quality instruction, set their expectations high for those teaching the class, and only provide little latitude in unusual situations. For myself, I was struggling to keep up creating content and for meeting the demands of CPD, who were nitpicking me every which way to try to improve my teaching practices. I remained open and honest with everyone about the situation I found myself in, yet in student evaluations I find out I couldn’t please my students and in my teaching development plan I needed development in my teaching methodologies. Ever ask for help and nobody knew how to help you? That’s exactly how I felt the first semester.

After surviving the first semester as being a teacher…I was determined to take what I had learned and to try to flip things around. Instead of 5 classes, I now had 3 classes: 2 which I had already taught before (Computer Hardware and Network Directory Services) and Computer Maintenance & Support. In Computer Hardware, where I struggled mostly was with trying to come up with enough activities for the students to work on. To solve this, my focus was on having them create their own activities to work on, working in teams, self-organizing their activities that they were working on, and I even threw in Scrum, which is a project management methodology which you leverage post-it notes to visually represent tasks and progress. I acted more as a facilitator, demonstrated areas that I needed more attention, and of course I added in required components like activities I wanted them to do, a midterm, and a final exam. This was a radical change, but it freed up a lot more of my time by allowing me to interact more with my students and I could put more work into the Network Directory Services (NDS). NDS needed a lot more structure in some of the labs, so I worked to standardize them. What do I mean by this? Surprisingly, if you asked a student to complete a task…they didn’t know where to begin. For example, I asked students to install Ubuntu Linux operating system onto their hard drive. A number of students were lost because they hadn’t used Ubuntu before, yet they used Mint in the class that was a prerequisite to this one. So what this meant was I had to spell everything out…where to find Ubuntu Linux and really spend time creating a step-by-step approach the first few weeks of the class. Over time I provided less and less to the point where it was expected for them to do the research and complete the task on their own. The ability to problem solve independently is a highly sought after skill by employers after all, so I purposely made sure students struggled some before I would offer help. Another challenge was trying to fit in everything we needed to into the schedule of the class. After refinement I was able to make everything work and was even able to build in additional activities such as more time for review before the midterm and final exams. Students seemed to be much happier with this. The best part of all these changes was it freed up even more of my time, which allowed me to do on the spot grading, provide immediate feedback, students always knew what they still needed to complete, and ultimately what their current grade was in the class. While most instructors were chained to their desk grading…I was out and about talking with students, assisting with college recruitment activities, providing tours to high school students, and I even went with students on tours to see local employers who hire graduates. I was very interested in better understanding what students needed to succeed and a number of the employers I talked to about the changes I was making were very excited because it aligned very positively to what they expect for those looking to get hired on by them. Sounds like a winning strategy right?

As a teacher who was getting a few wins during the second semester, CPD did not see it that way. Despite my numerous attempts at asking them for help in specific situations, they kept giving me negative remarks in my performance. They assigned me a mentor that was located at another campus and one who had a schedule that overlapped mine, so it was next to impossible to coordinate a time with that person. A second mentor was assigned and they did some checking before working with me. They sided with me by saying that there was no curriculum available at my start and really understood where I was coming from by being put in a difficult situation. Two weeks after being assigned this mentor I was called into a meeting where they decided to not renew my contract, which pretty much means I was out of a job at the end of the semester. This seemed very ironic considering CPD informs all starting teachers that they are given 3 years to develop as a teacher and I was being let go after my first year. I once again informed them of the situation I was in at my start and they pretty much rubbed it in my face that they reserve the right to not renew my contract. I left that meeting and later went to discuss with my colleagues who were speechless about the decision that was made. They suggested I call another meeting, which was something I later did. In this meeting was HR, my supervisor, and someone from CPD. I informed them once again of my numerous attempts at asking for help, taking action to solve the problems I had myself, and provided facts of the successes I was seeing by the changes I made. For example, 6 students received their industry certification a semester sooner than in previous semesters! Also I had created curriculum that could now be used and it would allow me to develop my teaching practices. It didn’t matter to them and they made it pretty obvious that they were not going to change their decision. Just to satisfy my own thoughts I asked the dean if she knew already that there was no curriculum to start with when I started and to my surprise her answer was a yes with zero hesitation. That was disturbing to hear, but at that point it didn’t matter because I had already overcome the challenge and I knew my time at the college would soon be over. The college wanted me to write a resignation letter, which I refused to do because in my heart, mind, and soul I know I was doing the right thing.

Over the last few weeks it was very psychological for me. I was still attending advisory board meetings, I was working on the analysis and revision of the IT Networking Specialist program, I suggested new course offerings, I transitioned all of my courses/materials over to the department chair of the IT Networking Specialist program (a much better spot compared to what I was left with at my start!), and the toughest part was I could not tell my students that I would be leaving. I completed all of my responsibilities by grading assignments, working with students on outstanding work, meeting with students to discuss any matters they had, writing letters of recommendation, and submitting final grades one last time to the registrar of the college. Through it all I managed to job search, interview at a couple places, and decided to try my hand at the world of IT management.

Do I miss teaching? Sometimes I do. My favorite part was being able to interact with students and really take the time to listen to their stories or overall opinions of things. Plus, it was very enjoyable to be able to answer a number of their questions, such as what it was like being a student at the college, what it was like working in the field, or even more deeper questions about whether the IT field was for them or not. It’s important for people to understand that some people are lost and are really searching for answers in different parts of their lives. What I do not miss is the shady practices that go on within the colleges. For example, some students are purposely pushed through classes or the entire degree program, either because of inability to handle their behavior, a connection to an active member of the executive management team, or at the college-level, which is that, they get their state funding through successful completion numbers. I have attended internal meetings where they feel all students should pass their first-semester classes and the college doesn’t understand why the failure rates are so high in first semester classes. Common sense would tell us that maybe college isn’t for everyone or it takes a certain level of personal responsibility to take college seriously, like show up for classes or do the assigned work for example. As an alumni of this same college I once taught at…it has really changed my view of its leadership and I really hope someday a change happens internally where some of these unethical or questionable practices are reprimanded or removed so that improvement can be made to the system as a whole.