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
But if you’re honest, they’ll be honest right. And I think that’s really important. If you b*gger something up and you really do make a blue or even a little blue, tell them. Say ‘oh look this was wrong, you know this is what it should be’. So that’s important - to be honest, to be upfront. Recognise that we’re dealing, in 2015 or 2014, we’re dealing with OP1 to maybe 14. Recognise the breadth of that class.
At the start of every class my standard thing was ‘can you see me, can you hear me, can you see the slide?’ I would always look up the back for someone to put their hand up and always I would never talk to the front row. I’d always talk middle and back row and if someone was talking in the back row I’d pick them up and say ‘hey you, be quiet’ and then they know that I’ve seen them.
So the strategy is to reflect, to change things, to be flexible, to talk to them but not talk down to them, and certainly I would say to any young lecturer don’t be writing the lecture the night before. Know what your course is because then you can jump back and forth as you talk about something. You can say yeah we talked about this a week ago or something like that, you know. Know what you’re going to talk about, the whole thing, because then you can put it all together as a package.
We teach way too much stuff. We teach way too much stuff that we used to teach because students didn’t have the resources available to them that they’ve got now. I mean if you look at the resources - they’ve got textbooks, they’ve got electronic media, they’ve got Sapling. They can do the problems in their own time in a guided way with something like Sapling.
They [students] reveal great misunderstandings about the molecular world. So the difficulties and limitations are as a result of not spending sufficient time on getting them to think about this world, and spending too much time on doing. You know, we’ve got to spend some time, but you can’t spend too much time, I think, on a lot of the ideas that we do teach, and doing calculations and things that, really, no one else does. It’s really something that’s done almost like it’s make-work-type stuff.
So my approach to teaching is that I want students to be actively engaged with the material throughout the lectures, all the tutorials, all the workshops or whatever, and so I’m not giving didactic lectures, I’m not using lots of PowerPoint slides. I’m giving them information. I’m describing things to them, but then I give them lots of examples and lots of things to do, lots of activities to do.
