The Teaching Job Changed. Did the Job Description?

There’s the job you were hired to do. Then there’s the job you’re actually doing.

Most university instructors were hired because they have deep knowledge in their discipline. Yet a growing share of the work surrounding that expertise can feel surprisingly far from the discipline itself.

An instructor may spend one hour discussing economic models and the next navigating a politically charged conversation about tariffs. A psychology professor teaching asynchronously may become one of the most consistent people in a student’s life. A chemistry instructor may discover that students who have used technology since childhood don’t know how to install software. And everyone, apparently, has been drafted onto the AI committee, whether or not an actual committee exists.

We asked educators on The What & Who of EDU what teaching challenge nobody trained them for. Six themes kept coming up.

1. Instructors Are Teaching Across a Wider Range of Starting Points

“Meet students where they are” sounds simple until you ask where they actually are.

Dr. Sara Lahman, Professor of Biology at the University of Mount Olive, described classrooms where one 18-year-old may arrive with a two-year degree while another needs significantly more foundational support. Add athletics, jobs, extracurriculars, mental health, and what she describes as a different kind of emotional exhaustion, and the idea of an “average student” starts to get fuzzy.

“Teaching at the middle just doesn't work,” she said.

Economics professor Dr. Ryan Herzog sees that widening range in math preparation. Students are arriving through dual enrollment, transfer pathways, disrupted schooling, different K–12 systems, and very different life circumstances. His challenge is keeping material rigorous enough for students who arrive well prepared while creating a path for students whose foundations aren't as strong.

A short ungraded diagnostic at the beginning of a unit can expose gaps before the first exam does. Optional review gives one student a bridge without making another sit through material they already know. An extension question can give the student who's ready to go further somewhere to go.

2. Student Support Has Become Part of Course Design

Betsy Langness teaches psychology asynchronously at a community college. Sometimes she may be the only consistent person a student is talking to, which means school, work, family, and crisis all arrive in her course, whether her syllabus anticipated them or not.

The list of expectations gets long fast. Be empathetic, flexible, available, knowledgeable about campus resources, responsive to mental health needs, and somehow still finish grading before midnight.

She doesn't always have the answer. “It's okay to say, I don't know,” she said. She manages by knowing her resources, boundaries, and who else may be able to help.

Dr. Christin Monroe faces a related question with accommodations, which is how to adjust a course without losing the point of the assignment. Her rule of thumb: "move the parking spot instead of the whole parking lot."

A lot of student support happens before anyone asks for it. Making those resources easy to find can keep every problem from landing at the instructor's door. That could mean keeping advising, counseling, accessibility, tutoring, emergency aid, and technology-support information somewhere easier to find than the university website's seventh dropdown menu.

3. Students May Need More Room to Struggle Productively

English Professor Jennifer Duncan remembers a version of technology that required improvising. If the internet didn’t work, you figured out why. If the library book wasn’t where it belonged, you looked around. She now sees students hit the first roadblock and just stop.

She traces part of it to how smooth everything else has gotten, "the world works so seamlessly in so many ways, then the first time something doesn't happen, they just don't push through that. They don't want to say, ‘I don't know how, how can I do this?’ But they also don't want to figure it out by themselves, so they just stop.”

Dr. Ed Lee sees a particularly interesting version of this with technology itself. The Director of Service Laboratories at Texas A&M University recognizes that sometimes students can't struggle productively until someone teaches them the basic tool they're struggling with.

Students who have spent their lives using apps may never have needed to learn file architecture, software installation, or basic troubleshooting. His team discovered this when students needed Microsoft Excel. “Oh, you don't know how to install a program onto your computer, okay,” Lee remembered thinking. “I didn't realize that that was something I needed to…” Apparently, it was.

Both examples ask where students can safely struggle. If every obstacle has an immediate escape hatch, students don't get much practice troubleshooting. If every obstacle carries a major grade consequence, experimentation becomes expensive.

Low-stakes work can create room between those extremes. Give students a problem with more than one route through it. Let them attempt something before giving the instructions. Ask what they tried before stepping in with the answer. Build enough attempts into an assignment that the first failure produces information rather than catastrophe.

4. Assessments Now Have to Answer a Bigger Question

Much of the early conversation around generative AI focused on detection. Did the student use it? Can we design an assignment it can’t complete? University of South Florida Economics Professor Dr. Erika Martinez is wrestling with a more fundamental question, which is what does the grade certify?

She believes that a college education has two responsibilities, helping students to increase their knowledge and skills and then to know that the education means something in the world beyond the classroom. “How do I certify their proficiency in the age of AI?” she asked. “How do I ensure that these assessments are authentic?”

Martinez is already hearing about smart glasses that could someday read an exam and feed information back to the student wearing them. AI keeps changing what students can produce. Instructors still have to decide what counts as proof they learned it.

One place to start may be with the learning objective itself. What would a student have to say, show, explain, or do for you to feel confident they actually understand it? The answer may lead to a very different assessment than asking what AI can or can't complete.

5. Students May Need Help Finding a Reason to Try

Professor of Education at Landmark College Rebecca Matte has taught for more than 30 years, much of it working with students facing dyslexia, executive-function challenges, and emotional dysregulation. The hardest version of the job, she says, is a student with no clear sense of why they're there at all, especially once anxiety makes them afraid to try the things that might help them find out.

She advises her students to "Just go try something, and then come back and tell me how awful it was."

We ask students to choose majors and career paths surprisingly early, often before they've had much chance to test either against reality. Matte sees internships and conferences as low-cost ways to gather that information early. One student discovers they love fieldwork and hate the lab. Another discovers the opposite. Both learn something important.

Purpose can get built from a growing pile of “yes, more of that” and “absolutely not that.”

6. Attention May Need To Become Part of the Curriculum

Dr. Kevin Revell sees AI as part of a much larger information environment. Students move through rapid-fire content, social media, constant notifications, and now generative AI. The Chemistry instructor and General Chemistry author wonders how instructors can make learning accessible and engaging while still stimulating deep thought.

Teaching Professor Dr. Jennifer Ripley Stueckle sees the challenge from another direction. Students may physically be in class without engaging with their peers, their instructor, or sometimes the material itself. Instructors lose important signals when that happens. The confused face doesn’t need to raise a hand to demonstrate that they’re not keeping up.

Attention used to be considered the student's job to manage. That's harder to expect now that it travels in everyone's pocket, watch, and browser tab. Instructor included. Some faculty are responding by changing the rhythm of class itself. For example, ten minutes of explanation, then a problem. A pause to write before discussion begins. Maybe attention is becoming something we have to teach by giving students places to practice it.

The Job Description Is Still Being Written

The faculty handbook can tell you when grades are due. It doesn’t reference how to manage a classroom where one student arrives with two years of college credit and another needs to start from the very beginning. Or the student who is waiting for college to give them a reason to care about any of it. Then there’s a politics problem hiding inside an econ lecture. Or a student who talks to one instructor more than anyone else all week. The list keeps going.

These challenges are already part of the job. Instructors are working through them in classrooms, office hours, department meetings, and conversations with each other. Five years from now, many may even feel routine. New faculty may arrive having been trained to design assessments around AI, recognize digital-skills gaps, or build flexible course policies from the start. They'll also inherit problems we haven't named yet.

Because when the same “unexpected” task shows up semester after semester, eventually it deserves a place in the job description.

Hear all 10 educators discuss the challenges nobody trained them for in 10 Teaching Challenges No One Trained You For on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.