Chickering and Gamson’s (1987) third principle of good practice in undergraduate education is to encourage active learning. I agree with their statement that “Learning is not a spectator sport”, and as such I endeavour to include as much active and hands-on learning as possible. My teaching philosophy includes a focus on experiential learning, and this principle fits well with that.
One particularly good example of this is the way I design learning to help learners deliver effective oral presentations. I had noticed that in many courses with oral presentations in them, no actual training had been given on how to be an effective presenter. In some cases, as with the Professional Practice course I took over from a lecturer who retired, presenting skills were taught as theory, and the course offered little chance to learn these skills gradually, preferring instead to simply include one practice and one final presentation after a series of lectures about gestures, vocal qualities and body language.
As my lesson plan for oral presentation training shows, I include a series of active exercises which start very simple and get progressively more challenging. These activities target specific presentation skills, such as the ability to think and talk at the same time, and build up to putting them all together for a small practice presentation in the next session. Reflective questions are included after the more challenging activities to encourage learners to pay attention to their qualities as a presenter.
Another example of a lesson plan showing active learning, which is typical of a lesson in the Multimedia course, is this lesson about animation in which the learners have core concepts briefly explained to them followed immediately by putting those concepts into action. Learners get feedback from the lecturer while they work and can compare their work with an example when finished. In other lessons, learners give each other feedback using guiding questions.
Kember and McNaught (2007) propose ten principles of effective tertiary teaching, the first of which is “Teaching and curriculum design need to be focused on meeting students’ future needs, implying the development in students of generic capabilities such as critical thinking, teamwork and communication skills, amongst others” (as cited in Devlin and Samarawickrema, 2010, p.113). Many examples of this principle in use are evident in my design of the Professional Practice for IT course (PP1), as shown by the simplified version of the course blueprint.
When I redesigned this course my aim was to identify those core capabilities that are most crucial to the IT industry as well as those that our typical students need to work on the most. In this way, the course is designed to meet the needs of learners in their future courses (this course occurs in their first semester of the degree) and also to carry through to their careers. The skills I identified as particularly important include oral and written communication skills specific to IT, for example writing technical documents, the ability to learn independently (“lifelong learners”) including time management and using Google efficiently and so on. The course is organised into stages which match up to groupings of important capabilities: beginning with design thinking, then study or learning skills, followed by workflow, teamwork and project management skills both specific to IT and more general, and lastly the skills associated with presenting oneself and making a good impression, including job applications.
I also designed the follow-up course to PP1, Vocational Skills for IT, with the development of capabilities to meet learners’ future needs at the very centre of the learning design because I had identified a need for this within the BIT programme.
As part of my teaching philosophy I mention that my main aim in facilitating learning is to curate opportunities to practice skills and apply knowledge. Chickering and Gamson’s (1987) fifth principle of good practice is to emphasise time on task because “Time plus energy equals learning” (p.4). Thus, a lot of the facilitating I do in the classroom revolves around supporting these experiential practice sessions. The course blueprint mentioned above shows a good example of this in practice, where several sessions are set aside at the end of each stage of the course for project work that allows learners to put into practice the concepts and skills they have learnt up to that point.
This principle applies both to learning design, in terms of allowing time and designing activities for practice, and also to facilitation in terms of how this practice is directed in the classroom. As it is very difficult to show this in a video clip, the best evidence of facilitating time on task is embedded within my teaching philosophy in the metaphor of teacher as coach. In this metaphor, I explain that learners are like a team of athletes, who attend practice sessions and run drills designed to hone particular skills. During this time the coach (teacher) observes and gives feedback, all the while noting which skills will require further training. In this way, both individual and group skills can be further built upon with targeted instruction or further practice.
I think this is an area I would like to build upon for future practice, both in a learning design sense and a facilitation sense. I’d like to design a course that replicates a workplace-like environment even more (I did this for the Prof Prac 2 course which is now part of Software Engineering), and facilitate it like a manager at a workplace. For example, the assessment is a learning contract (Chickering & Gamson, 1987) and the facilitator implements performance management when the learners are not fulfilling this contract and conducts performance and development reviews (PDR) with the learners. This would supplement the other courses where learners acquire technical skills, which would count as professional development.
Enthusiasm comes up again and again in lists of principles for effective teaching. It’s part of the criteria for Tertiary Teaching Excellence Awards and it’s mentioned in almost all the sets of principles covered by Devlin and Samarawickrema (2010). Enthusiasm for learning and for the subject rubs off on students, and the best evidence of this is through student feedback. The Student Perception Of Teaching (SPOT) surveys can be an effective way to gather this feedback, as this extract of a report from 2018 shows. Further evidence of enthusiasm can be seen in these teaching observation notes, which often note that the learners were engaged even though the lesson was quite theoretical in nature. Enthusiasm shows here in vocal qualities and story telling technique, as well as through choice of example which were related as being common challenges that the facilitator genuinely and passionately wants to help the learners to be able to face when they arise.
The main challenge with this principle is to be able to maintain this enthusiasm over time. For me, I think this will involve always trying to keep my subject fresh by keeping up with both industry currency and education currency, and always incorporating new and interesting things into existing courses. For example, as mentioned in the previous section, I would like to include more workplace-like practice in some courses. Another example is this semester where I and my co-teacher updated the software engineering course with a slightly different approach to facilitation as well as a new technology to practice on.
The Australian Learning and Teaching Council criterion three for excellence in university teaching is “Approaches to assessment and feedback that foster independent learning” (Devlin and Samarawickrema, 2010, p. 117). As mentioned earlier in this task and alluded to in my teaching philosophy, learning how to learn is central to a computing career and therefore teaching how to learn independently is central to my learning design, facilitation and, in this case, assessment. This is again most evident in my first year course, Professional Practice for IT, in which the largest part of the assessment is a Professional Portfolio. As shown by the instructions and marking schedule for this assessment, there is a distinct focus on rewarding independent learning, both overtly and implicitly.
Te Kete Ipurangi holds “learning to learn” as the first principle in its Principles of Assessment for Learning section, stating that “Good assessment should focus less on ‘do they have the right or wrong answer?’ and more on making students’ thinking visible to both teacher and student” (Ministry of Education, n.d.). I feel this is a departure from “the old ways” and is therefore challenging to implement at times, but is nevertheless extremely important. Students often ask me whether they will lose marks for various perceived incorrect answers and it can take a while to build their trust that this assessment doesn’t work that way.
Te Kete Ipurangi’s second principle of assessment for learning is that “When students actively participate in assessing their learning by interpreting their performance, they are better placed to recognise important moments of personal learning” (Ministry of Education, n.d.). I have selected this principle because it is clearly demonstrated by the amount of peer and self assessment built into my Professional Practice course. (The reason many of these principles and my teaching philosophy show up in this course more than others is that it’s the one I have taught for longest and have had the most influence over the design of.) As shown in the simplified version of the course blueprint, the course includes an essay which is both peer and self assessed, and in the lesson plan for oral presentation training is an example of informal self assessment and slightly more formal peer feedback using the same marking rubric as the final assessment uses.