7. Professional practice

An important part of my personal teaching journey has been developing effective practices and relationships to create positive experiences for my students, my colleagues, and myself.

Managing a team of demonstrators and tutors

Since 2016, I have coordinated a 120-student first-year subject, EESC102, that I designed. Before this, I had considerable teaching experience but I had never led a subject as coordinator. This meant I jumped straight from simply being a teacher to leading a team of teachers (four demonstrators and four markers). This transition was not without its challenges, especially as EESC102 was a brand-new subject, so no one (including me) knew what would work well and what wouldn’t. After three years of delivering EESC102, I have now put into place a number of strategies to ensure the subject runs smoothly and fairly, regardless of who is involved in the teaching.

The demonstrators play a key role in the student learning experience because (alongside me) they interact face-to-face with the students every week. During the first year of implementation, I realised that the demonstrators generally had little prior training in teaching and were not aware of best practices in interacting with students. In addition to the basics (like guiding students towards solutions rather than telling them how to solve the problems), I also realised that I hadn’t clearly communicated my expectations to the demonstrators. As I articulate in my teaching philosophy, a key tenet of my teaching is using “desirable difficulties” that challenge students early on, coupled with creating a supportive classroom environment that encourages them to tackle these difficulties. For students to buy-in to this process (which can be frustrating not only for the students but also for those teaching them; Perselin and Daniels, 2015), all the teachers need to understand and support this philosophy. To improve both the student and demonstrator experience, I developed a set of Demonstrator “Dos and Don’ts” (Figure 1) that I use in conjunction with an in-person demonstrator training. The feedback from demonstrators has been very positive:

I also realised during the first year of coordinating that the markers, who are responsible for providing marks and detailed feedback on the Wiki Project assessment, were not consistent in the amount and type of feedback they provided or in the marks they were giving (despite using a very detailed rubric). I now use past examples of student work to hold a marker calibration exercise before the first writing assessment. All markers and I test mark four examples of student work, then meet to discuss where our marks fell (and why) on each individual criterion of the rubric. The markers use this to re-calibrate their understanding of the marking rubric. Initially, I provided examples that were mostly at the extremes of the distribution; however, I found that these were easier to mark consistently than student work in the middle of the distribution. I now use more examples of student work that fall in the middle of the distribution. The result has been a marked decrease in the difference between median marks from different markers (Figure 2).

While the marks are important, the nature and tone of the feedback provided is also critical, especially as students use this feedback to revise and reflect on their work. I noticed that some markers were providing feedback that was very negative in tone, which has been shown to de-motivate students and negatively impact their attitudes towards writing (Underwood and Tregidgo, 2006). In other cases, markers were only providing surface-level corrections rather than providing the global-level feedback that leads to more engagement with feedback and stronger learning gains (Underwood and Tregidgo, 2006). I now explain to markers what type of feedback they should be providing and the rationale behind that. I also give them examples of high-quality feedback provided by previous markers.

Contributing to a team of peers

I described in Section 1 how I worked closely with a team of colleagues (the SEES first-year team) to identify skills gaps in our courses and make changes to course and subject design to fill these gaps. Following this effort, we were included in a broader team nominated in 2017 for a Vice-Chancellors Outstanding Contribution to Teaching and Learning (OCTAL) Award. Comments from nominators included:

In addition to the new first-year subject that I have discussed extensively, I have also been involved in the design of a new third-year subject that was delivered for the first time in Spring 2018. With four academics involved, each teaching a different 2-4 week chunk, we were careful to avoid a “divide-and-conquer” approach that would have led to a disconnected experience for the students. We started meeting months in advance of the session and used a backward design approach (e.g., Whitehouse, 2014) to first decide what skills we wanted our subject to impart, then design a set of related assessments, and finally decide what we would do during class. The result was a carefully designed subject that, while not a capstone, assessed and further built upon a myriad of skills we expected students to have developed in prior years, including: reading and interpreting scientific literature, fieldwork skills, data analysis skills, model interpretation skills, written communication, oral communication, poster communication, group work, and reflection. Unfortunately, subject evaluations were not collected in 2018 due to an administrative error; however, from our perspectives as teachers the subject was very successful in its first iteration.

Building effectiveness and resilience through peer mentoring

I greatly value engaging with colleagues about teaching and am receptive to their feedback and ideas. I have particularly benefited from a peer mentoring relationship that has developed between myself and another academic who joined the school shortly after I did, Dr Dominique Tanner. Dr Tanner also coordinates and teaches a first-year core subject, so we share many of the same challenges. We regularly exchange ideas, advice, success stories, and lessons learned with one another. Last year, I suggested we observe one another’s lectures so we could both have a better idea of what our students were experiencing at different points in their first-year journey. Sitting in on Dr Tanner’s lectures gave me a host of ideas to apply in my own teaching. For example, I hadn’t thought to use paper worksheets with my students but was so impressed with how these worksheets engaged her students that I re-framed several of my in-class activities to centre around worksheets. During her subsequent observation of my lecture (conducted as a formal POT), she commented on the success of the worksheets.

The benefits are not uni-directional, however, and I know Dr Tanner has similarly benefited:

References

Persellin, D. C., & Daniels, M. B. (2015). A concise guide to improving student learning: Six evidence-based principles and how to apply them. Stylus Publishing, LLC.

Underwood, J. S., & Tregidgo, A. P. (2006). Improving student writing through effective feedback: Best practices and recommendations. Journal of Teaching Writing, 22(2), 73-98.

Whitehouse, M. (2014). Using a backward design approach to embed assessment in teaching. School Science Review, 95(352), 99-104.