Also, start early to gather feedback from students about how class is going, rather than waiting until the end of term for formal student evaluations. It feels much better to confront students' perceptions of your teaching when you can make adjustments than to receive negative feedback that you cannot act on at the end of the semester. Unfortunately, says Boice, graduate students and professors often resist suggestions from others, because they feel it is letting go of control and counterintuitive. Our society credits special genius to artists, inventors, writers and teachers who seem to work alone. It perpetuates the myth of writers and teachers who apparently produce single-handed finished, flawless work in a flash of brilliance.
Collaboration is tantamount to weakness or manipulation.
But most writing and teaching is a recontextualization of and building upon previously stated ideas, and collaborating and accepting assistance from colleagues and students creates more dynamic teaching and learning.