Make Teaching Part of Your Lifelong Learning Plan (Part I: Dusting off the Shelf)

This is my second year teaching in an e-marketing certificate program at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my professional career.

I’m addicted to history podcasts, I take classes on everything from inbound marketing to how to set letterpress print type, and I practically inhale online blogs about design and color theory. Sound familiar? If you’re like me, you are an unabashed life-long learner. You are that person who isn’t afraid to try on new ideas and point out the connections across industries and disciplines.  

But when you’re a collector of ideas, someone who is always working on becoming, it’s easy to let those burgeoning thoughts collect dust on a shelf while you’re out collecting more. Enter teaching.

Teaching forces you to articulate your opinions and draw conclusions about your experience

Let’s face it; we all have opinions, especially professional ones related to experience.  But nothing calls you to the carpet quite like teaching your opinions or rather being forced to define and provide sources for said opinions.

One of the classes I teach is effective email marketing. As a Director of Marketing, I easily spend a third of my week planning, designing, sending and analyzing promotional emails. I love reading blogs about email marketing and I get a little thrill when I see a bump in my click through rates.

If hard pressed, I could probably tell you the genesis of those little bumps in click through rates. But when you’re teaching a class on email marketing, suddenly those ideas you had about why your click through rate increased are compared to industry averages, are evaluated within the context of industry thought leaders and turned into a handy list of best practices for increasing your click through rates.

Those burgeoning ideas you had are no longer sitting on the shelf. You’ve been forced to polish them into respectable ideas of your own that you can now share.  

If I had not taken on teaching email marketing, I would have remained a passive consumer of blogs with an underdeveloped theory of how to increase click through rates.

But my life-long learning journey had other plans.

Stay tuned for more ...