– “Wait… I just have to pretend that these senior academics interviewing me are… a bunch of undergrads…?!“
– Almost every person ever who’s asked to do ‘mock teaching’ in an academic interview
When I started working in post-PhD careers, one of the most common distress calls quickly became: ‘HELP! I’ve been asked to plan and deliver a mock-teaching session as part of an interview: where do I start?’ And the scariest part:
… ‘and do I just have to pretend that the interviewers are students…?!’
Fair point. Weird. Delivering a piece of ten-minute teaching designed for 15 second-year undergrads to an interview panel of four senior academics? Cringe. So, now I’ve had time, space, and experience to wrap my head around this task, I thought it was time to talk about it.
After all, it’s not just for ‘traditional academic’ teaching jobs where this is standard practice. In fact, it’s not uncommon for those of us working in other student-facing roles in universities (think careers, researcher development, academic skills, etc…) to be asked to design and deliver an example teaching (or training) session as part of a recruitment process.
So, this is how – very recently – I ended up with the daunting task of designing and delivering a virtual fifteen-minute small-group session (via Zoom) for an interview panel. Now, I don’t want to muscle in here and say that the way I approached this task is the right way or the only way to do it. What I will say though is that, out of over 200 initial applicants, the session I delivered got me into the final two, and garnered some really positive feedback in the final round (where I was unsuccessful, but based on something totally different). And… in my current job, I’ve seen my fair share of mock teaching sessions when running practice interviews. That’s why I thought I’d share my approach, on the off-chance it might be useful to any of you out there with these kind of interview tasks to prepare, but few ideas where to start.
Firstly, let’s get a few things out of the way.
Basics
- Unless they say otherwise, then YES, you do need to pretend that the people interviewing you are students. If you’ve been asked to deliver something appropriate for first-year undergrads… then prepare something appropriate for first year undergrads. As odd as it may feel, MEET THE BRIEF, and try not to worry about ‘patronising’ your audience if you end up teaching X SUBJECT 101 to international experts.
- Again, it sounds awks, but… try to practise. At one point I had my partner in a different room and a friend 100 miles away both on Zoom at the same time, so I could run the session through with them as ‘test students’ to check interest, pace, and timing. This meant that I could put a ‘time stamp’ half way through to keep me on track (a little post-it note to myself along the lines of ‘you need to be at about 8 minutes at this point’). In the end, this was probably the most useful thing I did in the whole piece, and made me look (if I may say so myself) like a little wizard of time management.
- It’s useful to think about what your interview panel/ audience will be looking for in your design and delivery. Things I feel they aren’t looking for include:
- Absolute perfection
- For you to know absolutely everything about the given subject.
Some of the things I think we can safely say they are looking for are: - Your ability to follow a brief, which means sticking to the allotted time, and pitching it at the appropriate level for the audience stated in the brief;
- Your ability to engage your audience in the learning process;
- Your ability to set learning objectives (or outcomes), and then design structured teaching that meets these objectives.
- If you’re asked to design a longer teaching session, but only to deliver 10 or 15 minutes of it in the interview, be shrewd. Most people will default to delivering the first 10-15 minutes, but think smart… which section or topic best shows you off as a teacher? But also, crucially… which part do you feel the most confident with? All things to factor into your choice. The same advice goes for if you’re given an open choice of subject matter… go with what you know.
Now we’ve covered the basics… let’s talk structure.
Structure
I was asked to design and deliver a 15-minute training (teaching) session on any topic I felt would help a small group of Postgraduate Researchers to communicate their research to audiences beyond academia.
I took my own advice and went for something I’ve covered before: the simple marketing concept of ‘features vs benefits’, and how to apply this concept to communicating research more effectively. Here’s how I laid it out, with structure being one of the things that got me the most positive feedback from the panel:
1) Learning outcomes & agenda
Simply put, this is about telling your audience what they should be able to do as a result of the learning from your session. One of the biggest mistakes I see when running mock interviews is people forgetting to say what their mock teaching session intends to actually teach to their audience. If we don’t know that, then we don’t know whether the teaching has done its job or not.
So, keep it simple. What you can actually achieve in 10/15/however many minutes? In the end, I just went for three learning outcomes, saying that after my session researchers should be able to:
- Identify the differences between features and benefits
- Distinguish between research descriptions which only talk about features of the research vs. those which also emphasise its benefits
- Apply this to an example
My thinking here was that if I just told my ‘students’ about what features and benefits are, I wouldn’t know whether or not they’d understood the concept I was teaching them. So, I wanted to include an activity to end the session: an opportunity for them to apply what they had learned, and hence ‘prove’ that they had understood. This worked out pretty well (see point 5).
As well as telling the audience what they’ll get out of the session, I also like to say a little bit about how they’ll do this. This is the agenda part: a quick heads up about what activities to expect and when, so there are no nasty surprises when I put people into groups and ask them to do something.
2) Starter exercise: ‘structured chaos’ (+ feedback)
Given the limited time, I wanted to engage my audience early. So, before ‘teaching’ them anything, I gave them a quick group activity. I call this bit ‘structured chaos’ because I deliberately chose a discussion question that they would find difficult without the learning we were going to cover in the session. My rationale here was that this initial ‘confusion’ would increase their motivation to listen and engage with the rest of the session, so that they could ultimately ‘solve the puzzle’ (if that makes sense).
After giving them a minute to confer and come up with ideas, I asked them to feedback ‘to the whole class,’ including what they found difficult about the task and why.
3) Resolving the chaos: the actual ‘teaching’ bit
Next, after that mild confusion caused by the starter exercise, I then moved into explaining the difference between ‘features’ and benefits.’ NOTE: this is the only bit of the session where I really gave any significant ‘information’ to the students. The rationale here was that in explaining these two concepts, it then became clearer why the ‘students’ had struggled with the starter exercise. My explanation (and an example) helped them to see that the text I’d asked them to consider in the starter exercise only highlighted a few features of a product (and not its benefits), so it was difficult for them to even work out what the product was, never mind come up with a useful sales pitch for it.
This bit therefore ‘resolves the chaos,’ helping the ‘students’ to see why the initial task was difficult, and what might have made it easier.
4) Application: applying learning to an example
To make sure the ‘students’ had grasped the concept we were covering, it was now to time to apply what we’d learned about ‘features’ and ‘benefits’ to the purpose of the learning: research communication. So, in the last part of the session I presented a brief example ‘pitch’ of someone’s doctoral research, asking the students if they felt this pitch highlighted ‘features,’ ‘benefits’ or both, and why. Hey presto… they got it right! Cue reassurance all round that I’d helped them to achieve the learning outcomes.
Here, I gave them a choice of how to participate: either via microphone, via chat, or via an anonymous Padlet. Here I was showing off that I can use a range of feedback methods, but also that I care about offering students options to help mitigate anxiety or fear over ‘getting it wrong.’
5) Summary
Quick bit at the end to summarise the key learning points from the session. Boom. Done. Fourteen minutes, forty-four seconds.
So, as I say… it’s one model, and is by no means the only model. Plus, I realise that my subject matter is heavily-social-sciencey: what, I hear you ask, if you’re teaching a very technical area of engineering, or an abstract aspect of pure mathematics? All I can say on that is that in my experience, practising, sticking to time, and going with content I was confident with made all the difference. It got me through the session and, I daresay, actually helped me to really rather enjoy the experience.
Have you designed and delivered a mock teaching session that got you through to the next recruitment stage, or even got you hired? Or did you learn the hard way when things didn’t go to plan? Tell us about it below, if it might lend a helping hand to a soon-to-be-interviewee.