Jump on Board the Epistemobile!

Now that my fellow intern Sanna has set the benchmark for an acceptable reflective statement, I’m going to shamefully pilfer from her structure. Hopefully the kudos this brings her means she will overlook the stealing….

Secondly, after Tama foiled my attempt at submitting a haphazard collection of semester-long posts (dammit!) I’ll now proceed to discursify these thoughts into a coherent statement:

Lecture

Like many others, the crux for me of this semester’s Internship in terms of individual performance was the delivery of my first structured lecture. As I’ve blogged below, I perhaps foolishly accepted the offer to do an additional lecture introducing the unit on which I was Interning. This was on the basis that two high-octane sleepless nights are better practice than one, and hopefully the second time around I would be less scared by the whole experience.

While I can confidently say that I was equally nervous both times (my beloved can confirm just exactly how many hours of sleep we both had on the nights in question), I believe there was a certain value in having a “practice run” as it were. Having never given a lecture of that length before, I was uncertain as to what the preparation/talk-time ratio should be, as well as how much ‘content’ vs scaffolding ideas should be used. The answers to both questions, as it turns out, were “not that high and “not too much content” respectively.

I definitely observed the content rule in my second lecture, paring my originally HUGE notes into a series of (hopefully) easily digestible points.

I’ll mention this again because it’s a constant theme for me this semester; I regret not having more effectively used my Learning Partner to observe my teaching sessions.

WebCT Project

What came across quite strongly in our last follow-up session about this project was the lack of clarity as to its objectives. While I believe most people accepted the logic of putting people in a situation where they had to collaborate with each other to gain the skills necessary to put together a decent e-learning project. The point – I think – was not so much to teach people WebCT skills, although this certainly was one of the results – but to give people practice in cross-disciplinary collaboration on a significant project.

Regardless of the putative intention, the project seemed to be received by a number of the intern groups as more of a technical exercise, which is certainly how the Knowledge Pimps approached it. There was considerable consternation when it became apparent that the “support” alluded to from the technical people responsible for WebCT would be more along the lines of simply giving us a log in and letting us go an do things.

While I’m a big fan of how technology can be integrated into the learning process, this mode of presentation took the efficay of e-learning for granted, rather than allowing Interns to critically engage with different theories of learning. This doesn’t diminish the skills I learnt, but – as some people pointed out at the follow-up session – these skills are also taught in Professional Development sessions offered by CATL, and their inclusion in the Internship seemed disproportionally large compared to

Having said that, this may partly have been a function of how seriously our group took the project, compared to some of the others (I have the advantage of conducting espionage on Per’s). Here are some of the vital statistics below:

Number of University Club meetings:                                                         7
Number of inter-group emails:                                                                     50+
Number of conversations about font colours and dashing styles:          3

Rants about WebCT:                                                                                       Ongoing, too many to quantify

Use of Email and WebCT in Internship Teaching this Semester

Following on from this, I’d like to talk about the three more significant ways I employed intformation technology in teaching this semester, and give some idea of how useful I thought each was.

WebCT: Course Materials Online

I found the Course Materials Online (CMO) system is a great way of circulating readings among students. Although I’m not sure they shouldn’t be getting hold of readings themselves, the most commo n queries and complaints I got from students was about the availability of unit materials which could be accessed from home. Since there were a number of articles listed on their Reading List, I put a query in to the Reid Library as to how one would go about making these downloadable via Course Materials Online. This proved to be really successful, and resulted in a vast number of resources becoming more easily available.

While I’m loathe to discourage students from hunting down resources for themselves (my partner described such requests in his inimitable British fashion as “cheeky”), I would argue that there is a certain value in meeting students’ needs in this way. Namely that, beyond being “responsive” to students’s requests as a concerned teacher, it’s increasingly the case that students are doing a great deal of reading work at home. Having had a demanding work schedule doing my undergrad years, I can sympathise with this constraint, and am keen on making course texts as easily accessible to students as possible. More cynically, this can be described as removing as many potential excuses as possible for not doing the reading under the guise of kindness!

Email

As I mentioned in my earlier Critical Incident Analysis (see below), in the absence of a Course Reader for the unit on which I was Interning, I decided to use the “set-text” method in my classes whereby we read a Chapter of a foundational text on the subject each week. Due to the size of the book, it was illegal to put the whole thing on Course Materials Online, so I decided to email chunks of the text to students. I have access to a particuarly wonderful electronic repository of texts called Questa – www.questia.com for the curious – which allows one to read and download the full text of some academic texts, as well as articles from a selection of journals.

Laptop Junkies

In a very limited way during my tutorial sessions this semester, I encouraged a couple of my students who take notes directly onto their laptops (it’s a crazy world we live in!) to look things up on the internet for themseles during groupwork. I regret not having this as an item in my Student Perceptions of Teaching (SPOT) survey. I’d like to explore ways of using technology-based interactive teaching in classes next semester. This could be more difficult to achieve in first-year 45-minute tutorials.

Gripe (Like a grape, but tetchier): Said login took a fair while and much email prodding to materialise, thus confirming my grievances against the service skills of IT-types. Since I’m in a generalise discipline, I can make this kind of massive generalisation and get away with it!

Evaluation of Teaching

Once again Sanna – whose intimidating SPOT scores make her the new benchmark for teaching – conducted not one, but TWO SPOT surveys, the first about halfway through semester and another one at the end.

I think this is a massivly good idea. I regret somewhat not being a bit more organised about the evaluation component of my teaching this semester, which comprises both this formal process, and using one’s Learning Partner to conduct Peer Observation. Such feedback as did occur came back with the following scores (I haven’t received the copies of students’ comments yet):

1. The teacher has given clear and understandable instructions (3.94)
2. Class sessions have been well organised (3.83)
3. Overall, this teacher has been an effective instructor (4.06)
4. I have learned a great deal compared to other units at this level (3.82)
5. I have enjoyed attending the classes (4.0)
6. I have been encouraged to take an active part in the sessions (4.22)
7. I have been encouraged to think critically (4.33)
8. The teacher has shown enthusiasm for teaching the subject (4.56)
9. The teacher has shown concern for students (4.11)
10. The teacher has been approachable (4.39)
11. The teacher has been responsive to student needs and interests (4.00)
12. A clear and comprehensive view of the field has been given (4.00)
13. Constructive and helpful feedback has been given (4.28)
14. The tutor has established an effective relationship with the tutorial group (4.33)
15. I have found the in-class discussions helpful in preparing my written work (3.83)
16. I would recommend other people take this unit (4.06)
17.The content of this unit has been presented in an interesting and engaging way (4.17)

As I’ve blogged below, the three ‘core’ items are the first three questions. From this it can be gleaned that – perhaps – my focus on the more abstract side of classroom discussion neglects the

Marking and Feedback

This semester I gave all my students a detailed sheet of feedback on their first essays, after spending a bit of time in class discussing the purpose of this exercise. This was to:

(1)Make the first assessment more valuable, and give them feedback which they could use to significantly improve their work for the second research essay.
(2)Attempt to break students’ marks into specific categories addressing quality of expression, depth of research and other categories, like so:

It remains to be seen whether Obective (1) will be served, ie whether or not students have in fact taken into account the feedback from their first assessment in writing the second. To date, the only student who has approached me about their first essay is the Mark Disputer I blogged about below. They went through each category with me, and gave me some quite challenging feedback about how a couple of my categories could be read as pertaining to similar attributes. This is definitely something I shall incoporate into next semester’s grading breakdown, as I believe it is a valuable tool, but could do with some ‘honing’.

Realising we were approaching the final class of semester last week, and my teaching was as-yet unvalidated by statistical analysis (gasp!) I ordered myself a swag of SPOT (Student Perceptions of Teaching) survey forms.

These evaluations are not compulsory, but they come in mighty handy when you’re trying to get a sense of how the unit went. Students are given a list of standard questions regarding the tutorial sessions for their particular unit, as well as some more specific ones which you can choose from a list. They read said statements, and select a response ranging from “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree” – five possible responses for the question, each corresponding to a numeric value. Stay with me here, people; the scale looks something like this:

Scoring System

SA (Strongly Agree) = 5

A (Agree) = 4

N (Neutral)* = 3

D (Disagree) = 2

SD (Strongly Disagree) = 1

* A somewhat dodgy category (see below).

I’d undergone the rigours of student scrutiny before, so was roughly aware of what to expect. However, upon receiving the scores this time around, I read the accompanying links explaining how one was to interpret the information. Apparently (I didn’t realise this before) there are THREE ‘core’ questions, according to the literature, which are:

“About the teaching of Mr David Nel.”
Item 1. The teacher has given clear and understandable instructions (3.94)

Item 2. Class sessions have been well organised (3.83)

Item 3. Overall, this teacher has been an effective instructor (4.06)

Analysis

As groovy as quantitative evaluation can be, I love a good narrative – one of the many reasons I’m entering the stimulating but immensely unprofitable world of literary study! So I’m going to analyse these babies in natural language:

The figures you see above are mean scores for the featured questions, ie that the ‘average’ response for Item 3, for example, was 4.06. This doesn’t tell us how many people ticked individual items (this breakdown is included in the report you get back), but it does give you some idea of how you went across the board.
You might notice that two of my results for the ‘core’ questions fall between 3.0 and 4.0 in numeric terms, which sounds fine.. However, when translated into verbal results, this seems to imply that on average, people were somehwere between ‘Neutral’ and ‘Agree’ on the question of how organised the class sessions were, and how understandable instructions were.

Now as I said, I’m as big a fan of number-crunching goodness as the next person, but I’m a little confused as to what a value situated IN BETWEEN “Neutral” and “Agree” means? Granted, the breakdown we were given separates students’ responses out into how many picked which response for each question, but the mean (which I’m given to understand is what the University looks at for awards, promotions, etc) seems a bit… well, meaningless, so to speak.

A couple of weeks ago, my Internship colleagues of mine (or Inmates, as we called ourselves in the more cynical moments of the semester) launched our project for the semester. Our task was to design and produce an online learning module pitched at first-year students, and we chose – perhaps foolishly – to put together a series of essay-writing exercises, using software called WebCT.
After the hilarity of the “concept” stage generated ideas ranging from hip hop cats to a dungeons and dragons theme (which I still think could be incorporated), we were presented with the harsh reality that we would have to make this work on WebCT. The original vision was pared down somewhat into a more rigorous 6-module program that looks a little bit like this:

As part of my extensive thesis-distraction program, I was reading the voluminous discussion paper for UWA’s Course Restructure today. Time permitting, I’d love to attend the forum. They’re allegedly going to hold forth on the “relationship between our course structures and international trends” and other such lofty topics. However, what I’m most interested in are the questions appended to the paper, namely:

3. To what extent, and in what areas, should UWA aspire to compatibility with international models such as Bologna, and how would such compatibility sit alongside our internal priorities, principles and institutional mission?

Keywords here: Bologna, as an international model (who knew?!)

6. To what extent should UWA aim to loosen its existing prerequisites, to equip students via bridging course in order to diversity intake into (currently) prerequisite-rich courses?

Keyword here: (OK, this is implicit) The pre-med and pre-law model they use in the USA.

On this theme, the next question:

11. Should UWA units include a general first year, and in what would such a first year consist?

Keyword here: (Again, implicitly) Yay! A similar point to the notion that we should pursue a generalist model in the initial years, then hone down to specialties later in the degree program. I’m not sure about the educational philosophies underpinning this, but it seems to make a lot of intuitive sense.

April 1st, 2007 by neld

Today marked my entry into the realm of personal counselling! A student who hadn’t attended classes for the majority of semester mystersiously turned up, contributed to the class discussion in an intelligent manner, and asked to speak to me at the end of class. He proceeded to inform me of his crippling depression and anxiety, which had prevented him from coming to tutorials – and some lectures. He apologised, and asked me what it would take for him to pass the rest of the unit!

Recently we were required for my Teaching Internship (insert plug for UWA and its commitment to training its staff here!) to complete a Critical Incident Analysis. I felt the need to share mine, if only to boost the number of posts I’ve put up here so far!

Thus, voila!

Critical Incident Analysis

This analysis was written with the basic principles of reflective writing in mind. These principles can be enumerated as follows:

• Unstructured reflection is generally less effective in garnering a critical response than something in a written format.

• The narrative format is particularly successful at representing the inconsistencies in particular situation.

• Moreover, presenting an entirely fictional or slightly fictionalised story has the following benefits, as Alyson Buck argues:

The fictional format thus provides an immediate creative opportunity for the reader, and it also provides protection for the writer. The ambiguity of a story means that there is uncertainty as to where the writer stands in relation to the text. Discussion about the meaning of the text does not, therefore, put the writer ‘in the dock’, whereas writing a descriptive account of one’s practice and then awaiting others’ views as to its underlying assumptions (as Brookfield proposes) is potentially highly threatening. … the relative safety of sharing a fictional story (as opposed to a descriptive account) has been specifically noted by participants in our fiction-based workshops and reflective writing courses, often with surprise and relief.

Scenario

I proposed to students in my 2nd/3rd year unit Ecotexts: Nature/Writing/Technology that we collectively read a basic text in this area of scholarship, in order to enhance our classroom discussions. My reasons for doing so were as follows:

• There was no course reader for this unit, and students appeared to have some queries regarding which texts they were ‘expected’ to read and which were discretionary

• Previous teaching experience had taught me the value of combining a variety of different methods in classroom situations. While the ultimate aim of tutorials is to encourage students to develop their own ideas in relation to the work done in lectures, there is room I think for some ‘directed’ reading in the classroom situation.

Introduction of a Set Basic Text in a 2nd/3rd-year English Unit

(1) Change to Group Dynamic/Learning Experience

I found that this strategy immediately had the effect of taking the focus away from the primary text under discussion. It is often the case for English tutes to devolve into a discussion or argument about the relative merits of the novel, poem or film under discussion for a particular week. While “close reading” of texts is a mainstay of more traditional “literary” English studies , I felt it was important to encourage students to think in comparative terms (as this is a key skill that they will be required to evidence in their written assignments) by engaging with theoretical material which addressed the central themes of the course. In this case the course dealt with how different narratives – principally film and novels – represent the interactions between humanity and its environment.

The structural effect of introducing assigned reading beyond the primary texts to the course was to create a space after the beginning of each tute where the readings for that particular week could be discussed.

This method introduced a separation between students in two respects:

(a) Between students within groups who are more theoretically-oriented, and students who worked better discussing the fictional texts at the level of plot and character.

(b) Between the two classes I have, one of which was less inclined to theorise and generalize than the other. The “theoretical group” were somewhat inspired by the abstract material introduced in the ‘directed reading’ portion of our classes, while the other group were visibly bored (at least I think so) and seemingly more engaged with discussions of the primary texts.

(2) Would I do the same in future?

My only concern with this method is that, as I mention below, it does intuitively seem a far cry from the student-centred approaches currently being theorized in pedagogical literature. Please see below for my (tentative) justification for taking this route!

While each class is different in terms of the student composition and should be handled with this in mind, I thought in this case that devoting at least a small portion of class to this kind of activity would engage students from a range of dispositions and abilities.

(3) What was my role in what happened?

Although the initial impetus for this approach came from my desire to establish a clear requirement that students engage with a more complex text than they might have been presented with before, I believe there was a great deal of receptiveness from students for more structured work in classes beyond their discussions of the primary texts.

I would defend this teacher-centred learning method, which was admittedly imposed on the students (with a certain amount of consultation), on the basis that it did extend students the opportunity to do some in-class reading. As conventional and un-creative as this might sound, it has resulted so far in students leaving the class with a wealth of quotations from their primary texts that they can look at in further detail, and (hopefully) include in their written assignments.

(4) Other factors in the result.

General Course Design

The major factor producing this result is the rather freeform nature of the Unit Guide for this particular course , which lists some text-specific readings and then has a long list of general articles and books for students to look at in their leisure. I think this gives tutors considerable scope to design their own course content in consultation with their class, which is what I attempted in this instance.

Week One: David vs. Lecture
April 1st, 2007 by neld

I decided to jump in at the deep end this semester – my unit coordinator was going away, and asked whether I’d fancy doing the Introductory lecture for the unit. After leaving the room temporarily to scream quietly in the corridor, I agreed, figuring this would be a good idea to embed my face forever in the students’ consciousness. Obviously the stakes were high: if I tanked, I could provide mirth to an entire generation of tertiary students. If I wowed them on the first day, they would love me forever, and I could simply make up anything I wanted in class. Surely this was how it would work?!

Anyhow, after starting off with incredibly high ambitions in the nature of “what if I launch a satellite into space, then beam the lecture, in Klingon, directly to students’ laptops. Or better still, into their brains?”… I resolved on something a little more simple. I would deliver the lecture, in English, using the tried and tested method of writing it out and reading it in as interesting a voice as I could muster. There would also be, in keeping with cutting edge research on learning styles, a bit of multimedia in the form of … yes, a Powerpoint presentation … to mix it up a little, and keep things interesting.

For the sake of my own self-esteem, I’m going to split the following narrative into two lists as follows:

(1) Things that worked well,
and should be used again for sure.
(2) “Well OK, that’s how we learned that particular lesson”.

List (1):

* Reading a prepared paper was the perfect antidote to the case of stagefright I got on the day in question. Anything in note form would have reduced me to a gibbering idiot.

* Injecting bits of humour seemed to work nicely, although I should perhaps work on my comic timing.

List (2):

* Object Lesson One: Technology will only be your friend if you practice talking to each other nicely before the lecture. Although there was apparently some storm-related damage to the multimedia system that particular week which was unavoidable, I have to take some responsibility for the 5-minute session of “oohs” and “errs” that took place when my laptop refused to cooperate with the projector. Followed by a panicked phonecall to the (of course) absent tech support guys, a last ditch effort to haul a colleague in to help me, and the eventual resorting to the spoken word.

* Object Lesson Two: More of a question, really. Did students notice that I was sweating profusely up there? Is there some sort of special deodorant that lecturers use?

Some of the most consistent feedback I’ve gotten all semester is regarding my lecturing style…

Download

March 29th, 2007 by neld

Behold, the online commencement of my teaching career! One wonders whether or not if the website crashes, my career will too? Just in case, I’m going to keep the entire pedagogical part of my life on hard copy, in a voluminous folder. Mmm, filing…

Undaunted by the untimely demise of my previous blog Pedagoguery, I’ve decided to relaunch my e-blogging career with a frenzy of wordplay and cliched hyperbole! Read on for the patiently cut and pasted posts which were lost when I ‘misplaced’ both my password and username for the old site (boohoo).