Where do you find your educational drive?
I find it motivating to collaborate with colleagues on our teaching. Lecturers at university are often huge professionals who know exactly what they want and how to get it done. But there are so many different ways you can design teaching and when I collaborate with colleagues, I always learn something new. We all have our default strategies that we intuitively apply in our teaching. I find it very refreshing to see colleagues do things very differently from me and draw inspiration from that for my own lectures. You also notice when you work together that everyone faces similar challenges and you can exchange advice and support.
What do you hope your students take away from your education?
That it is important not only to focus on the content of the lecture material, but above all to find out which way of studying the material works for you. Both Dutch and international students often do not know which way of studying suits them best: do you like to summarise the theory and learn it by heart, or do you prefer to visualise how the concepts in that theory are connected? Do you like to study alone or do you find that you remember the material better when you talk about it with another person? Finding out what works for you, including planning and prioritising, is very useful and will benefit you for the rest of your life. Yet it is something that is often left implicit: we tell students what they have to learn but no longer how or whether there are several ways to do it. I try, especially in my first-year lectures, to reflect on this and make students think about their own preferences so that they can shape their studies in a way that suits them.
As a lecturer, what are you proud of?
Students tell me that I manage to create a safe teaching environment where they feel free to ask questions or express doubts. These two things, in my view, are important academic skills and essential for successful knowledge transfer. I also encourage my students to make as many mistakes as possible during lectures. They are always surprised by this, but making mistakes and learning from them is a crucial and very normal part of the empirical cycle (and life for that matter), so why should we pretend that everything must always be flawless? Above all, make mistakes! You'll learn from them, your lecturer will know better how to support you, and learning that making mistakes and getting back on your feet is just part of the process also makes you less stressed when it happens.
What was your biggest learning moment as a lecturer?
I think my biggest learning moment as a lecturer is mainly to do with the practice of teaching at university. The reality is that teaching tasks often take more time than the time you have for them according to your task load. I have found that, especially as a beginning lecturer, to be stressful at times. Teaching tasks are always urgent and important (and often more urgent than other tasks, such as those related to research) and that makes it very difficult for motivated lecturers to set a limit anyway. I have learnt that I have to accept that sometimes a lecture that is 'only' 60% good in my eyes has to be good enough. Since a few years, I am also a programme coordinator and from that I have learned that it is difficult to do my best in research, as well as teaching, and management tasks at the same time. I find that I can achieve great results in one or two of those areas, but not all three at the same time. This has helped me set priorities and adjust them every so often, allowing me to manage my expectations better and do my work more happily.
What is something that you still want to try in your education?
Two things I would like to do again and maybe even combine are project-based learning and international collaboration. In the International Business Communication programme, we already do a lot of project-based work, but I would love to cover this skill more explicitly as a teaching subject. Project management is relevant in very many fields of work, whether students want to enter academia or the business or public sector. I find Paul Ketelaar's TLC voucher project, which adapted the scrum method to university education, very inspiring, but I have not yet got around to trying it out in my own teaching. If we could manage to do that in combination with a collaboration with a foreign partner university, it would totally fit into our international classroom!