Reflections of a postgrad lecturer-in-training: Part 1

In a previous post, I mentioned that I was beginning a stint as postgraduate teaching intern at UWA, and that part of the internship involved keeping a reflective journal.  So I’ve decided that instead of merely writing down my thoughts (and possibly becoming lazy about it as the year goes on) I will share my journal on this blog!  To my mind this has numerous advantages, including transparency (including the students I teach), holding myself to accountability and killing two birds with one stone!
Part 1 will be about my thoughts on the first two days of the professional development part of the course, but before this I think it would be worthwhile to discuss what this academic journal will be about (after all, I will be adding to it consistently over the next year, and you all need to know where to pull my up on from time to time!).

The scope of the reflective journal
This reflective journal is NOT meant to be a simple description of my teaching methods and experiences. Instead, I should aim to make this journal a place for honest and critical evaluation of my teaching and learning experiences, with space for reflectance on how I may make changes in similar situations in the future. In addition, the journal should display facets of my teaching philosophy, and is a place to discuss my preconceived ideas on teaching, and how the change during the course of the year.

My pre-conceived notions
As I said in a previous post, I already have goals that I have set myself that I believe I can reach over the next year.  In short, the theme of these goals are centred around motivating students and instilling them with a passion about the environment around them.  I believe I can do this by conveying my passion to the students at all times, and by using technology to allow them to become more interactive with the subject matter in all aspects of the course: from lectures, to tutorials, to assessments. So now that we are all on the same page, let’s start looking at what I have learnt during the first couple of days!

Professional Development days 1 and 2 – The value of a key strategy

Day 1 started by giving us a real foundation in the theory and philosophy of teaching and the learning process.  There was constant reference to the importance of a cycle involving planning, acting and reflecting on our teaching, which I hope this journal will fit in nicely to!  Another aspect that really stuck with me was the difference between an instructivist and constructivist approach to teaching,  I really see myself as wanting to take a constructivist approach to teaching i.e. helping students to reach answers and solve problems on their own through active engagement, instead of the traditional knowledge transmission that only leads to rote learning and not proper understanding.  In addition, the idea of motivating students also came to the forefront during the first day, with repetition of the formula M(motivation of student) = V (value of outcome/process) x E (expectation of success).  I love the idea of keeping this in mind when designing lectures and assignments, and I really feel like this fits in well with my idea of designing an assignment that will be later put into the public domain.  I really hope an assignment like this will be highly valued by the students, hopefully increasing their overall motivation and the final quality of the assignments!

Given the nature of the subject discussed in the first day (based on teaching philosophies), I was slightly concerned that there was too much focus on our thoughts and feelings about teaching instead of actual strategies about how to make lectures and tutorials more interactive.  I thought there was slightly too much emphasise on this side of the development course.  However, more strategies were provided during day 2, dealing in both large and small classes.  Whilst these strategies were undoubtedly useful, I felt that there was not enough focus and discussion around them.  On the plus side, I have a stack of reading on strategies that could increase interactions in both small and large classes.  In addition, I found out about a new resource called Poll Everywhere that I really hope to use during my upcoming lectures.  Basically, I design questions before the beginning of a lecture (they could be to check students understanding, prior knowledge etc.) and work it into my powerpoint at a specific point of the lecture.  I then ask the students the question during the lecture, and they can answer the questions using their computers or mobile phones.  Within a matter of seconds, the class results are shown on the powerpoint, and we can start a debate, go over key concepts again or just chat about the results as a class!  I really feel this will help students to stay engaged without the fear of giving wrong answers in front of 70-80 of their classmates.  Students also struggle to keep taking information in after about 15 minutes of a lecture without a change of pace, so I feel that proper timing of the questions during my lectures may help students to retain more of the take-home messages in my lectures.

I admit that I already have fairly deep set views as to how I can further the learning process for the students that I will be teaching.  As a result, I found myself really agreeing with certain suggestions at some points during the first two days, and questioning the effectiveness of other suggestions elsewhere.  Not that I think this is a bad thing though; all teachers teach differently, and a one-size-fits all approach definitely does not apply in this situation.  Instead, I see the professional development component as supplying us with a diverse set of tools (some generic, some specialist), which we will pick and choose from based on a wide range of factors such as background, class sizes, teaching subject and (probably most importantly) personal preferences and experiences!

Quick wrap-up of day 3 of the professional development course to follow soon!

A first step into the unknown world of academia…….

At the beginning of this blog I did promise to include some writings that would at least be semi-useful (hopefully!) to future students hoping to move into a career in marine science; so here it goes!

From today I am beginning a year long Postgraduate Teaching Internship at UWA.  I was lucky enough to be accepted into the course last year, and with teaching semester 1 just around the conference the professional development aspect of the course will begin soon!  One of the pre-requisities for the course is keeping a reflective journal of my experiences (good and bad!) during the year…so why not just do this on my blog!  At least it’ll keep me honest about whether or not I’m meeting the original goals I set myself at the beginning of the internship, it’ll be interesting to see how my approach to teaching changes over this time and who knows, someone may even find it useful to read through!

The real purpose of this internship is to give some formal training to PhD students who are potentially interested in entering into academia at a later stage in their careers.  Most lecturers (or at least many that I have spoken to) never received formal training, and instead had to ‘learn on the job’, gaining the good and bad habits of other faculty members around them and bringing teaching strategies learnt from their own time as a student.  The professional development aspect of the course aims to teach us some of the main principles about teaching, that could be useful in any subject (from art to physics to marine ecology!).

I will be teaching in two units this year: “Marine Systems” (an introductory marine science unit for 2nd years) in 1st semester and “Ecological Processes” (a 3rd year unit focussing on both terrestrial and marine ecosystems).  For me, there are some broad goals I hope to achieve during this time:

Engaging the students with more relevant assignments: Back when I was an undergraduate, I remember working on many assignments, but not feeling a great deal of pride or love for the final product.  Instead, it felt like more of a ‘box ticking’ exercise needed to pass the course, with the work produced looked at once by the marker and then cast aside forever.  Given the huge amount of time that goes into some of these undergraduate projects (e.g. 100 students putting 5 hours into a project is 500 hours worked!), this seems like a huge waste to me!  Why not get the students to produce something with the aim of it being in the public domain, availabile for anyone else to read, something that they take a great deal of pride in?  I have a few ideas about how to work this into the existing course structure (many of which involve the use of social media), so this will be one of the main points I bring up during my training!

Instil passion for ecology and marine conservation into students:
I love what I do, and possess a strong passion for both ecology as a science and the conservation of the marine environment.  I try to get this passion across to audiences in every single presentation that I give, as I feel people are most engaged with my research when I am excited to tell them about it.  Since this approach has served me well in the past, I hope to use it again when teaching the students.  It might be a bit lofty to imagine that I will give them an inspirational lecture that they will remember for the rest of their lives, but if I could at least engage them, challenge their views of science, and get them discussing (however briefly) concepts I have raised over a cup of coffee or a pint of beer after class then I’ll feel pretty good about it all!  And if I can see the students getting genuinely excited during my teaching, then all the better!

Make some long term changes to the teaching of marine science units at UWA
The internship itself only runs for one year, but I really hope that some of the changes that I make in this time last significantly longer than this.  Yes, not everything I attempt will work, and yes, I’m not going to revolutionise university teaching in a year, but if I can make some significant, lasting changes to one aspect of the way both units are taught then I think the internship will have been fairly successful.

Most of all….have fun!!!
Of course it is a serious project to undertake, but this internship will allow me to communicate with like-minded people for a significant amount of time over the next year, discussing exciting research, future directions of ecology, and how this is important for humanity as a whole! I believe that it is the responsibility of researchers such as myself to pass on the knowledge and skills that will allow future marine scientists to develop….but this doesn’t mean we can’t have lots of fun while we do it!!!

One pre-requisite of the internship is to keep a reflective teaching journal, so I may try to incorporate this (or at least some of it) onto this blog to keep everyone up to date with how it is going!  As for now….I’m off to start reading through some of the effective teaching texts I’ve been given!!!  If anyone has any advice for this aspiring lecturer, feel free to leave some comments!