I’ve talked about this a few times here on the podcast before. But, just in case you haven’t heard, I left my teaching job at St. Louis Christian College this past summer in order to focus full-time on ghostwriting and running my Daily Writer membership community.

Now that SLCC has announced it will be merging with another school at the end of this school year, I have been reflecting a lot on what I learned as a professor during the previous 17 years.

One of the most important things I learned as a teacher is the value of assessment. “Assessment” is a broad term for a set of practices designed to help you see if you’re reaching your goals.

Most people in higher ed honestly hate assessment because it feels like a huge pain. It’s time-consuming and often feels like busy work. However, being in this world taught me the value of taking a detailed, honest look at how you can improve.

One of the most important skills we can develop is the ability to separate our personal identity from our work. If you always base your self-worth on what others think of you, you’ll be an emotional yo-yo. The big lesson for writers here is that we need to evaluate and assess our work with a critical eye. We also need other people’s help in doing so.

We get so emotionally tied to our work that we get defensive whenever someone criticizes our “baby.” But there is often a nugget of truth in people’s criticism, even if we don’t like the way they deliver it. The question is, can we set aside our ego long enough to listen? Is there something we can learn? Do we care about our work enough that we can see if there is any truth to the criticism?

In the entrepreneur community, there is a huge emphasis on “doing things my way” and sticking it to the critics and doubters. I totally get this, and this kind of attitude helps us move past obstacles and get things done. But there is also a dark side to this approach. When you push ahead at all costs and totally ignore the critics and doubters, it’s easy to become blind to your own shortcomings. That is why we all need to surround ourselves with people who give us feedback and hold us to a higher standard (It’s also why I created the Daily Writer Community).

When I was a professor, the college did a formal evaluation of one of my classes each semester. But I also did a separate assessment of every one of my classes, every semester. I asked students to answer a few questions to help me improve the class for next time. I learned three critical things from having students evaluate every class, every semester. I want to share these with you and apply them to our writing.

1.) The best ideas for improving a class almost always came from students.

For example, I used to teach a public speaking class. The way I taught this for years was to focus on doing two or three big speeches. We would work on these for weeks, and then they would deliver it in class. Each speech was a pretty decent chunk of their grade.

However, one comment I would often hear is, “We would like to have more practice speaking, instead of just doing two or three speeches.” Eventually, I completely changed the course so that students were doing shorter speeches, but a lot more of them. They had more fun, there was less pressure to make each speech awesome, and they got a lot more practice upfront.

If you are the one creating the content, either as a writer or teacher, it’s easy to think of yourself as the expert. You know more about your “thing” than anyone else, so why would you listen to someone else’s comments? But the truth is that we get blind to all the ways we can improve what we do. Oftentimes, it takes a beginner’s perspective to give us a fresh perspective.

So, make sure to listen to people who don’t know much about what you do. Your expertise might be blinding you to some obvious and simple ways to improve.

One little caveat here: students wouldn’t volunteer these ideas—I had to ask first. They weren’t going to go out of their way to give me ideas for improvement, which leads to the second lesson.

2.) I emphasized to students that I did not take any of their comments personally.

In fact, I WANTED them to tell me what to improve. I wanted them to know I was not emotionally attached to the class. My one and only concern was improving the student experience. This gave them the freedom to say what they really thought. Without that freedom, they would hold back and not tell the full truth.

This is a very hard lesson for writers. We love what we do. We put our heart and soul into it. It’s hard not to take things personally. But if we are approaching our work like professionals, we have to maintain some emotional distance from our work. We can’t get emotionally wrapped up in it. Our work is ultimately a product that is either working, or it isn’t. The question is, do you have the courage?

3.) I had to be willing to take the best ideas and actually change the class.

It was easy to do a survey and gather comments. But once I had the data, I had to be willing to put in the work to revise the class. If you have never taught a college course, this isn’t just a matter of changing a couple of things. When you do a substantial update to a course, it usually involves several things like changing textbooks, changing assignments, changing your teaching notes, figuring out how to best meet your learning objectives, adjusting how your gradebook is set up, and so much more.

Over the course of a semester-long class, this can mean over a hundred hours of work when all is said and done. You’ve probably had the experience as a student where you had a teacher or professor, and they were infamous for teaching a class the same way over many years. In fact, I remember taking a Bible history course in college, and I honestly don’t think the professor had changed the course in thirty years.

It is easy to make fun of this approach until you’re actually a professor who is faced with the gargantuan task of re-doing a whole course. I have done it many, many times and I sympathize with the impulse to leave a course alone and do it the same old way year after year, although ultimately that doesn’t serve you or the students very well.

This is where the rubber meets the road. Are we willing to put in the time and effort to create a better experience for our students and readers? Are we willing to not only listen to feedback and evaluation, but actually put it into practice?

I can tell you for sure that as a professor, I had a lot more fun when I listened to feedback and did the work to change a course and make it better. The students had a lot more fun as well. In fact, in my last few years of teaching, I completely changed my teaching style. I transitioned to a more “flipped classroom” approach where I did very little lecturing and talking, and we had a lot more learning activities, presentations, group work, case studies, and so forth.

And as I did that, I noticed something interesting… the more that students were involved, and the less that I lectured, the more they seemed to learn and have fun! There are some important lessons there not only for teachers, but for all of us who are writing, communicating, and trying to impact lives with our words and ideas.