Tip: What is "good enough"?
Some of us have thrived in our teaching over the past three semesters, despite considerable challenges. What sets the thrivers apart from those of us who have struggled more?
Last October, in Good Teaching is Emotional Work, I shared some thoughts about the challenges of supporting our students and lowering the expectations we hold for ourselves during this time. In The Good Enough Professor, Douglas Guiffrida asks readers to consider some differences between instructors who have successfully met the challenges of the past year, and those who have struggled. He argues that some of us have thrived, mostly by doing exactly what I argued we should be doing last fall:
Faculty who seemed to do the best described themselves as not only highly committed to making the online format effective, but they balanced this commitment with a spirit of understanding, patience and kindness with both their students and themselves. They recognized they would not be able to accomplish everything they might have wanted at the start of the semester, so they made realistic adjustments in their expectations…They also provided space for students to share their experiences and frustrations with their transitions to online learning and established a collaborative environment that allowed them to work with their students to make adjustments as issues and concerns arose.
While others, those who clung to particularly stringent internal standards of what “good teaching” looks like, struggled with “feeling an inordinate amount of pressure to get everything done right and to cover the same content in the same way that they would have during a normal semester.” Technology was likewise a frustration rather than a support, and students’ lack of engagement was a point of annoyance rather than something to be met with compassion and understanding. These pressures were “overwhelming, which caused such faculty members to feel defeated and, in some cases, to even become disengaged.”
This narrative of choosing high standards versus choosing compassion - for ourselves, our students, and our colleagues - might sound familiar. Women, in particular, feel echoes of this “self-oriented perfectionism” across their work and home lives. For everyone, perfectionist tendencies can tend to be triggered by significant life changes, and particularly when those life changes involve a shift in identity (such as becoming a parent or making a career change).
For more reading & watching…
Researcher Kristen Neff writes about the importance of choosing self-compassion, and her TEDx talk focuses on her research and practical advice for developing self-compassion.
To answer the question of what sets apart instructors who have thrived in their teaching versus those who have struggled, at least part of it is the story we tell ourselves about setting (overly) high standards versus offering compassion. As the semester continues to pick up steam, I hope that we all can hold on to self-compassion and let that guide our decisions about what is “good enough” in this third pandemic-disrupted semester.