“Safety begins with being informed”: an interview with Pavel Pracný

When you walk into the first class of the semester, what is the most important information you want to share with your students?

I have a whole block of things prepared that I carry over from one course to another. From an informational standpoint, it’s important that students know the scope of the course, the conditions for completion, the grading criteria, what assignments they need to complete, whether there are bonuses for attendance or timely submission of tasks, and so on. Also technical details – where to find materials, recommended literature, etc. Furthermore, I think it’s important that students have a broader idea of what the course will be like and what I expect from them. At the same time, I need to know what they expect. Usually, I can’t significantly change the course setup at that point, but I can tell them right away if it’s going to be a bit different than they imagined. I think that’s important, so they have context and don’t find out a month later that it’s not going to get any better. Finally, it’s also important to set the overall tone of the course and what the whole course will be like.

You’ve mentioned that a safe and respectful environment is important to you. Can you explain what that means to you and how you try to create it?

I’ve come to this through having children of my own and dealing with various situations and challenges together. In teaching, I consider a safe environment to be one where students know what to expect. I try to minimize uncertainty. That’s why I aim to provide as much information as possible in the first session. I always tell them that even though there’s a lot of information, they can find it later in the materials. I also give them printed syllabi. I just want them to know what’s ahead and how demanding it will be. There’s nothing worse than attending a course all semester and then facing an exam that’s completely different from what you expected. I’ve experienced that myself – having a teacher that is entertaining, only to realize they didn’t actually teach me anything because they tested different things than they taught, or I thought those topics were just side notes. That’s why I believe safety begins with being informed.

The second thing is that I approach teaching with the mindset that the student is my partner. That means I’m not a policeman standing over students, checking whether they’re cheating or putting in enough effort – that’s their responsibility. Students are here voluntarily to learn something. I assume they’ll invest some amount of energy. Of course, that varies: some give too much, some just the minimum, and some not even that and don’t pass. I also try to say at the beginning that if they have a problem, they should speak up early and we’ll work something out. I assume that if they can, they’ll come to lectures; if they can’t, they won’t. Life situations vary. I try not to factor that into grading. Although I admit it’s sometimes hard not to be more accommodating to people you know and get along with in class. But that’s always the case and we all do our best.

You also mention that a safe environment is important for everyone involved in teaching, including yourself as the teacher. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Again, people are different and have different needs. I base this on my own perception and needs. I’ve created a kind of framework or outline for myself to think about this. I have a limited amount of social energy in life. Even if it doesn’t seem like it, it’s not easy for me to spend six hours a day in front of students.

I read about a way to maintain energy, stay fulfilled as a teacher, and avoid burnout in Terry Pratchett’s autobiography. He explained why he always wore a hat at book signings. He said the hat literally represented the role he was playing. When he put on the hat, he was the author entertaining people and telling stories. When he took it off, he was himself again. It helped him with mental hygiene – to literally take off the role with the hat. That was a revelation for me: when I teach, I’m in the role of a teacher, and afterward I just need to take off that role and mentally switch. Even if the teacher role doesn’t suit me much because I’m introverted, I can step into it, play it, and then step out of it after class to maintain my own integrity.

The second thing that’s important for my own protection against burnout and overload is preparation. I already have a structured approach to it. If I go into a class without feeling prepared, it’s much harder for me. It’s better when I come in with a step-by-step plan. I also write down my mindset, i.e. what I’m bringing into the class. I spend five minutes making it clear to myself, like a form of affirmation. Even something simple like: “I’m behind schedule, but I won’t let it throw me off and I’ll speak slowly and calmly.” Then I go teach knowing my situation and having a kind of meta-goal like “It’s okay if it doesn’t go perfectly, I’ll do my best and maybe it’ll go better next time.” It helps because when I look back at the class and feel like it didn’t work, I know I had a specific benchmark for that situation. These are little things to trick myself.

Do you have a favourite activity you've recently enjoyed using in your teaching?

My students generally know what to expect from me, although of course this evolves over time, and I use different activities with varying intensity depending on the course. In introductory courses, I often use online quizzes during class. Educational research shows that repetition is key, so I try to include a short quiz at the beginning of each session. Either on what we covered last time, or in more advanced courses, on earlier topics we’ll be revisiting. It also allows the teaching to come full circle. At the end, we can look back at what we didn’t know at the beginning and give it some framing.

I also enjoy practical tasks where I give students a specific problem and let them come up with tools to solve it. This doesn’t always work perfectly, because it’s a loosely structured and relatively open-ended activity. I’ve had experiences where some tasks worked great one year and sort of went nowhere the next one.

In every course, I try to include group work in the form of larger assignments that students solve together. It’s not just about training subject-specific knowledge, but also collaboration skills. I always remember one student who once complained that five people in a group was too many and it was hard to work with them. I told her to take a step back and think about why we’re doing it. I wanted her to understand that we do it precisely so they can practice teamwork. What determines success in the job market? You can be incredibly smart, but if others can’t stand you because you’re not a team player, it’s hard to realize that potential.

That moment also made me realize that we need to go further. It’s not enough to just let students complete an activity and evaluate the academic output. It’s important to give them space to reflect on the collaboration and what worked and what didn’t. At the end of larger group assignments, I now use a reflection table. I tell them: it doesn’t matter what you write in it, what matters is that you think about it. You can lie and say everything was perfect. But the important thing is that you genuinely reflect on how it went. That’s actually a trick that often works in teaching. Students don’t know – or I don’t directly tell them – what the goal of the activity is or what I expect them to learn. Sometimes they think they’re doing something purely academic, but from a teaching perspective, my goal is something else entirely.

This is even more important now with the rise of AI. In some courses, I assign students to create study materials on a given topic for their peers. With large language models, the difficulty of the task is obviously changing, but I haven’t cancelled it yet. Mainly because part of the assignment is to write evaluations of materials created by three or four classmates. And that still can’t be done any other way than by a real human. I feel that evaluating others is often more important than what they create themselves. It uses a different kind of thinking, because they have to look at someone else’s work and try to analyse it. I know this from personal experience: when I was doing my PhD and writing reviews of bachelor theses, I learned the most about how to write properly. At first, I couldn’t say what was good or bad, but after twenty-five reviews, I could point that out.

You’ve recently started teaching a CORE course. How is it different from your other courses?

Our CORE course was quite different, because during registration it had about 25 students, and during enrolment it suddenly jumped to 87. Even though we collected feedback, I still don’t know why that happened. Probably because it was scheduled at a time that fit well into people’s timetables. I was very pleasantly surprised that the feedback on the course was quite positive. One of the main reasons was that we included a field excursion and showed students things on-site that we had previously discussed theoretically. We took them to a cave that they normally wouldn’t be able to visit. The final colloquium was then based on evaluating a field journal they had to write during the excursion. Of course, I have no illusions, and I know students have a survival instinct and no one will tell me during the colloquium that it was bad. What was also interesting for me was that the course was prepared by several teachers, so there was an element of collaboration and coordination among teachers. I enjoyed it and I’m looking forward to next year.

What was it like preparing content for students who you know don’t have subject-specific foundations?

That wasn’t difficult for me, because the course was designed that way from the beginning. It’s much more challenging when someone joins an advanced subject-specific course without being the target audience or the graduate profile. For example, if students don’t have basic knowledge of mineralogy, they simply can’t keep up. What I liked about the CORE course was that I could start completely from scratch. Especially when I was starting out at the university, I often didn’t know how much detail or how basic I should go. Over time, I’ve adopted the approach that I always start from zero and repeat everything to some extent and in some form. I tell students that it’s for everyone and it won’t hurt anyone; at worst, it’s too simple for some. In the CORE course, it was also great that we could teach history and broader context, like how people started to take interest in karst phenomena and study them, which we can’t do as much in regular teaching. It was motivating to step outside the narrow subject focus.

You’ve also gained teaching experience outside the university, for example at the EkoCentrum organization. Can you tell us what that involved and what you did there?

Since high school, I’ve been attending volunteer events with the Brontosaurus movement, and later I started organizing them myself. During my PhD studies, I worked at EkoCentrum Brno. My main role was delivering off-site educational programs for schools. It was a major experience because I taught programs for children ranging from preschoolers to high school students. And I didn’t only teach topics I was personally interested in or passionate about, but I also led Easter and Christmas-themed children’s programs, for example. It gave me a lot of experience with direct communication. You really see how diverse children and schools are, and how much depends on the teacher when it comes to working with their class. Compared to traditional university teaching, it taught me to appreciate alternative methods more – more hands-on learning, more work with reflection. It was a large volume of short-term teaching, so you also develop a mindset that sometimes things just don’t go well. In university teaching, it’s harder because a course might be repeated only every two years, and you’re left wondering what worked or didn’t work last time. But when you teach three programs a day and one goes great, one doesn’t, and one is just okay, you get much faster feedback, and you train your ability to iterate and improvise.