A few years into my consulting career, I started teaching design at the university level as an adjunct professor.

I have always thought that when I come to retire I would teach. I told myself it was about giving back and getting a taste for teaching. You know, sharing what I'd learned. Helping the next generation of designers avoid some of the mistakes I'd made. All of that was true, in a way.

What I didn't expect was how much teaching would change the way I practiced my craft as a designer and leader.

Not in a soft, abstract "it renewed my passion" kind of way. In a concrete, uncomfortable, genuinely useful kind of way. Preparing to teach something forces you to understand it differently than just doing it. And standing (in-person and remote) in front of students who will ask you why ... with no client relationship to protect and no deadline to hide behind ... has a way of exposing the gaps in your own thinking that professional practice lets you paper over.

Here's what I actually took back to my day job.

You Don't Understand Something Until You Can Explain It Simply

The first time I tried to explain design critique to a room of sophomores, I realized I didn't have a clear framework for it. I'd been doing crits for years. I'd given feedback in dozens of reviews. But when I tried to articulate why certain feedback is useful and certain feedback isn't. What makes a critique generative versus deflating ... I was reaching for words I didn't have and it was eye opening.

So I had to build the framework. I had to get precise about something I'd been doing on instinct.

That process repeated itself constantly throughout my time teaching. Stakeholder presentations, design systems, research synthesis. I thought I knew these things because I could do them. Teaching revealed that doing and understanding are not the same thing. It's also worth mentioning, mentoring, although a form of teaching is still functioning on instinct ... this improved as well once I adjusted my approach.

When I went back to client work with those frameworks built, I was sharper. Not because the frameworks were magic, but because I'd done the work of making implicit knowledge explicit. That's transferable in ways that instinct alone isn't.

The takeaway for practitioners: Find something you do well and try to teach it to someone else. The gaps in your explanation are a map of the gaps in your understanding.

Beginners Ask the Questions Experts Have Stopped Asking

Students will ask you things that nobody in a professional setting would ask. Not because they're naive ... because they haven't yet learned which questions are "too basic" to raise out loud.

Why do we center the user when the client is paying the bill? Why does accessibility matter if our users are all 25-35 year-olds? Why do we prototype if we already know what we're going to build?

Some of these questions have good answers. Some of them are more uncomfortable than they appear. All of them are worth sitting with and spending the time to answer.

In professional practice, we develop a kind of conversational shorthand that's efficient but occasionally calcifies into assumption. We stop interrogating the fundamentals because we've agreed, collectively and tacitly, that those questions are already settled.

Students haven't made that agreement. And sometimes they're right to resist it.

I came back to client work with a habit I didn't have before: when I find myself reaching for a standard answer, I ask myself whether I actually believe it or whether I've just said it enough times that it feels true. That's an uncomfortable question, because what got you to where you are is now being questioned frequently. However, it's also one of the most useful ones I know.

The takeaway for practitioners: Spend time around beginners. Not to mentor them but to be unsettled by them.

Feedback Is a Design Problem

Nothing in my professional career prepared me for the challenge of giving feedback to twenty students in a two-hour crit all with wildly different levels of output and craft capability.

Feedback at work is usually bilateral in nature. You and a colleague, or you and a client, with context on both sides. In a classroom, you're giving feedback to a person you're still getting to know, on work that carries real emotional weight for them, in front of their peers, on a deadline that doesn't move.

Get the tone wrong and you shut down the person in front of you and everyone watching. Get the content wrong and you send someone in a direction that wastes weeks of their effort. Be too soft and you rob them of the honest assessment they need to grow.

I had to get much better at feedback, fast. I had to learn to separate the work from the person, to lead with curiosity before conclusion, to be specific without being prescriptive, to challenge without deflating.

Those skills translated directly. My client reviews got better. My team feedback got better. The way I receive feedback got better, because I understood the mechanics of it more clearly from both sides of the table.

The takeaway for practitioners: If you want to improve how you give feedback at work, find a context where the stakes of getting it wrong are higher. It'll sharpen you.

Teaching Is a Practice, Not a Product

The last thing I'll say is the most obvious and the one I somehow needed to learn by doing.

Every semester was different. Students changed, contexts changed, what landed one class fell flat the next. The lesson plan that worked brilliantly in the fall needed to be rebuilt in the spring. There was no "finished" version of a course, just an evolving attempt to meet people where they were ... almost as if it was it's own product.

Design practice is the same. The instincts you built on your last project are a starting point for the next one, not a formula. The framework that got you through a healthcare engagement won't map perfectly onto a financial services one. The stakeholder approach that worked with one executive team will need to be recalibrated for the next.

What teaching gave me more than any specific skill was a deep comfort with iteration as a permanent condition. Not iteration toward a final answer, but iteration as the work itself.

That's the thing I try to carry into every engagement now. Not certainty about the solution, but confidence in the process of finding one.

I don't teach full courses anymore, but I do see a future where I am back in the classroom teaching.

Until the next volume, thanks for joining me. 
- Andrew Preble