Adjunct Professor, Not For The Weak

That's right, you read the title correctly, being an adjunct professor (or any instructor role) is not for the weak. Just a little back story, I recently took on a new adjunct position at a local college, and the academic year had its ups and downs. However, it was a great learning experience on how to do better as a professor when supporting my students and presenting learning material.

The first thing I always tell them is what works for you when learning something new. That can be more discussions, interactive resources, lectures, guest speakers, etc. A lot of my students learn the best with a combination of some things, so making sure that it was available to them to utilize was a priority. However, because I had online and in-person sections, I would record lectures for the online group, which I felt, based on the analytics, was not being utilized. So now, the debate becomes, do I continue it or not? With going into the summer semester and having a hybrid section, I decided to keep continuing with recording lectures but recording them during the in-person class and making them available for those who may have had to miss class for personal reasons.

One thing I piloted with my Introduction to Psychology sections was having a guest speaker panel. The panel included scholar-practitioners in various fields of psychology to speak on topics, such as why their chosen field (fun fact: a high school friend and I both agreed our high school psych teacher was the one who made us fall in love with it), what their academic path looked like, what they can do with their degrees, and areas of interest for research. I found that this was a great way to 1. break the stigma the field of psychology has and 2. expose them, especially business majors, to how psychology can be used in various ways, such as marketing. This was a hit with the students!

What I've noticed is I need to have a more clear boundary with learners and uphold how communication is key and the deadline is the deadline (unless the learner has talked to me and let me know something has happened in their personal life). That's one thing I want to improve on with the upcoming semesters and make it clear that deadlines are there for a reason (or more).

I didn't want this to be a long post, but the feedback from the students has been so great (literally teared up with the amount of students wanting to take more classes with me). There's always room to do better for not only the learner experience but for the instructor experience as well.

Here's to the end of the 2023-2024 academic year!

Candace