As an international student in the United States, I was fortunate to receive a fine liberal arts education at Grinnell College. Now, I believe it is my turn to repay the generosity and patience of my college teachers by emulating them.

Over the past seven years at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, Qatar, I have taught over 25 courses of my own, ranging from introductory courses in comparative politics and international relations to upper-level courses in research methods and Indian politics. Regardless of whether my courses are survey courses or seminars, they are always fully enrolled, if not brimming over. My student evaluations exceed 4.5 out of 5 in 22 of the 27 courses I have taught.

I must be doing something right, but until recently, I have struggled to articulate what this might be.

On reflection, I distill four main lessons from my teaching experience.

First, I’ve learned that student-centered learning in the form of flipped classrooms and collaborative or group-based learning experiences work well in both large and small classes. This is a departure from the traditional lecture-based mode of instruction, which earned the ire of John Dewey and Rabindranath Tagore a century ago. At times, I do offer mini-lectures on topics that are less familiar to students. But, mostly, I’m interested in seeing students grapple with a dense text or rich, varied data to draw their own inferences about politics and society. I also wish to see my students disagree with each other fruitfully so that they can learn why reasonable people differ in the way they see and interpret social reality. Data are, in sum, never simply out there as givens.

Second, I have learned from my students that conventional approaches to grading hinder rather than enhance learning. In the past, I have used grading rubrics to explain precisely where an essay fell short. I have also offered take-home exams or low-stakes assignments to lower the anxiety levels of my students. But over the pandemic, I discovered “ungrading,” a teaching philosophy that allows me to offer extensive qualitative feedback to students and ask them to self-assess their work over a course. At first, like so many others, I was apprehensive. Wouldn’t they all award themselves an A? Yet, to my surprise, they did not. Most students were, in fact, very critical of the written work they submitted even as they appreciated the opportunity to reflect critically on their own effort. Whether on individual or group assignments, I constantly asked students what they learned and how they might apply that knowledge. On evaluations and in emails after the semester, dozens of students reported a fun and unique learning experience that left them confident about the course material and eager for advanced coursework.

Third, my students have taught me that we must embrace technology in and outside the classroom. In my introduction to comparative politics courses, I create a Google Doc for every class session to break down assigned readings into bite-sized chunks in the form of a series of questions. Freshmen, working in groups of four, answer each of these questions, and before we set foot in class, we have not only a concise summary of the key arguments and ideas for the day, but also critical commentary on them. Without an online collaborative tool such as Google Docs, it would be much harder to work together. Students also form their own WhatsApp groups to ensure smooth, real-time communication between group members. Students and I enjoy the use of polling software and simulation games that help us make sense of, say, how voting systems work or how hybrid regimes function. In methods courses, I use Excel, Stata, NVivo, and most recently, Atlas.ti to help students work hands-on with both quantitative and qualitative data and to understand that research is a craft that requires many minute details and decisions to be made. Without the fear of an older adult grading them harshly, my students shine every semester now and push me to innovate further.

Fourth, my students remind me that there are few learning experiences that can beat experiential learning. I regularly organize field trips to museums, bazaars or diasporic community centers to bring alive for students what they may view as dull, lifeless texts. Prior to the pandemic, I led a group of students to India to study the politics of rural and urban development. This was an exhilarating experience for me and the students, though it required meticulous preparation and careful planning to curate a well-rounded learning experience. In Doha, too, I encourage project-based learning so that individuals and groups work over the semester to develop and execute their own research. Such learning experiences also entail active reflection on omitted variables, unrepresentative samples, and fieldwork ethics, especially when speaking to vulnerable or marginalized research subjects. Immersing oneself in a body of knowledge becomes easier, I have discovered, when students see themselves as active producers of knowledge, not passive consumers.

Beyond teaching, I regularly mentor undergraduate researchers to design and carry out their first significant projects. At Georgetown, I have supervised eight independent study courses with some of our brightest students, and mentored nine senior honors theses and eight certificate (“minor”) theses by students. These students, along with others for whom I am the primary letter writer, have gone on to study in top graduate programs in Oxford, Cambridge, SOAS, Edinburgh, Michigan, Tufts, Chicago, NYU, and Georgetown. Two of my students published in top-ranking journals as college seniors, and were admitted to leading US graduate programs. In each instance, I worked closely with students, meeting every week and communicating via WhatsApp between meetings, to ensure that they had my continuous and full support. When they were stuck, they knew they knew I would be there for them.

As I see them succeed after college, I feel assured that I am on my way to emulating my own mentors in college and the time and energy they put in for me