TITLE: Teachers Working Themselves Out Of a Job
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: November 18, 2011  2:10 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
Dave Rooney wrote a recent entry on
<A HREF="http://practicalagility.blogspot.com/2011/11/what-i-do-when-coaching.html">
   what he does when coaching</A>
in the realm of agile software development.  He summarizes
his five main tasks as:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
<UL>
<LI> Listen </LI>
<LI> Ask boatloads of questions </LI>
<LI> Challenge assumptions </LI>
<LI> Teach/coach Agile practices </LI>
<LI> Work myself out of a job </LI>
</UL>
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

All but the fourth is a part of my job every day.  Listening,
asking questions, and challenging assumptions are essential
parts of helping people to learn, whatever one's discipline
or level of instruction.  As a CS prof, I teach a lot of
courses that instruct or require programming, and I look for
opportunities to inject pragmatic programming skills and
agile development practices.

What of working myself out of a job?  For consultants like
Rooney, this is indeed the goal: help an organization get
on a track where they don't need his advice, where they
can provide coaching from inside, and where they become
sufficient in their own practices.

In a literal sense, this is not part of my job.  If I do my
job well, I will remain employed by the same organization,
or at least have that option available to me.

But in another sense, my goals with respect to working
myself out of a job are the same as as a consultant's,
<B>only at the level of individual students</B>.  I want
to help students reach a point where they can learn
effectively on their own.  As much as possible, I hope for
them to become more self-sufficient, able to learn as an
equal member of the larger community of programmers and
computer scientists.

A teacher's goal is, in part, to prepare students to move
on to a new kind of learning, where they don't need us to
structure the learning environment or organize the stream
of ideas and information they learn from.  Many students
come to us pretty well able to do this already; they need
only to realize that they don't me!

With most universities structured more around courses than
one-on-one tutorials, I don't get to see the process through
with every student I teach.  One of the great joys is to
have the chance to work with the same student many times
over the years, through multiple courses and one-on-one
through projects and research.

In any case, I think it's healthy for teachers to approach
their jobs from the perspective of working themselves out
of a job.  Not to worry; there is always another class of
students coming along.

Of course, universities as we know them
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2009-06.html#e2009-06-11T20_24_02.htm">
   may be disappearing</A>.
But the teachers among us will always find people who want
to learn.
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