So, it’s helping to bed down analysis, problem solving, doing the sort of detective work to get to an answer. And the students also seem to quite enjoy having material presented to them in that way - here’s a spectrum, what do you think the structure is, because it’s a more active form of learning as well. So I find I enjoy teaching it, and they respond well in terms of, they keep coming in and asking me for additional problems to practise on which is clearly evidence that they feel it’s challenging them.
I think it’s a key teaching topic, also because it’s teaching students to look at data and to interpret data, to assess which part of that data is going to get them to the answer and which part is exquisite detail that they can come back to later on.
It now does come down to the quality of the presentation in terms of what you put on the PowerPoint I suppose, cos we all use PowerPoint. But I try most lectures to switch that off and use the visualiser and write things down by hand, where I can see that something is missing on the PowerPoint, or if I think the students haven’t got a particular message, don’t understand a reaction, don’t know about a mechanism. I’m happy to stop, go to the visualiser and write it down at the correct sort of pace, by which they can actually write it down themselves.
I think we’ve all sat in lectures and gone, that was dreadful, so we learned quite a lot from understanding how not to do it as well as how actually to do it. And of course the key is preparation and organisation..... whenever I go into a class knowing that I am beautifully organised, that gives you that extra confidence to project and to present, and you come away with that feeling that you know that the class has gone well and you’ve got the information across to the students in the way that you wanted.
Many years ago, lecturers only had one style, you know they just wrote on the blackboard, actual blackboard with chalk. That was the only style. They just talked...
I started lecturing before I did my Diploma of Education and I would have recommended to all of the lecturers to do it because it really helped me in my teaching. Mind you, I already had a bit of experience, I don’t know, you know, the chicken or the egg type thing.
I think it’s really important that people mark assessments. Mark, and see what the students actually end up knowing. Because they can pretend to themselves that students have understood everything, but if they actually have to mark the exam papers, or the quizzes, or whatever it is, they actually are confronted with the students actual knowledge. I think that’s really influential. The second semester of teaching, when you think you’ve explained things well, and then 90% of the class have not got it, then it’s not the students fault at that point, it’s probably your fault. So I think th
So the first thing that I really stress that people do, is that they actually go and watch some classes. I think that’s the most important thing. When they’re coming straight out of a post doc, or they’re coming straight out of the Research Centre, and then, they’re told they’re going to be lecturing 300 first year students, they’ve got to go and sit in the back of the lecture theatres for a few weeks....
So you shouldn’t be rigid, you shouldn’t be rigid in what you’re going to do. It’s always stunned me that people say you should know where you start a lecture and where you’re going to finish, and if you get to that point and you finish ten minutes early you then should just finish. I’ve never worked on that principle. I never know where I’m going to start because I never know where I’m going to finish, right. So where I finished the lecture before is where I start the next day, I haven’t got a set content. If a student asks me an interesting question and I get the feeling that they wa
