Teaching clever: Reflecting on experience, heeding students’ feedback, inviting peer review.

Dawn Garbett

Associate Dean Teaching and Learning

Faculty of Education

University of Auckland

What is it about?

This workshop is aimed at teachers in tertiary institutions who regard their teaching practice as a professional endeavour. For those who continue to ask how they can improve the learning outcomes for their students and for themselves, this workshop will consider how we can generate data to reflect on -  from our experience, from our students’ evaluations (both formal and informal, and from peer review).

Why is it important?

Practitioner research can improve our teaching, be this in small groups or large lecture theatres while also contributing to the research culture in a scholarly way. Teaching can be documented by photographing, audiotaping, or journaling so that we can reflect at a later point. The quality of the students’ experience of learning can be ascertained through a variety of different methods: for example Critical Incidence Questionnaires, 3:2:1 strategy, mid-course evaluations. Peers can provide specific feedback or be invited as critical friends to comment on aspects of our teaching. These different perspectives can help us to understand our teaching better.

Once we have this information what can we do with it? Not only can we improve our teaching but we can also make our new understanding public through dissemination.

How will the session be run?

There will be an introduction to the different ways of generating information stated above with examples and how I have analysed the information in the first instance. Then there will be a round where participants are asked to share other ways of gathering data. This will be followed by discussing and critiquing the various ways that new approaches can be developed for future teaching and how we can prepare and maintain a teaching portfolio which highlights our teaching goals and our progress toward achieving them. Research avenues will also be explored.

Dawn Garbett is the Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning in the Faculty of Education at the University of Auckland. One of her responsibilities is the oversight of the formal student evaluation of courses process. Dawn teaches science education to student teachers in early childhood, primary and secondary programmes. In 2007 she won an award for Sustained Excellence in Teaching from the University and in 2008 won a National Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award. She is now a member of the Ako Aotearoa Academy. Her teaching portfolio was based on a close examination of the feedback that students’ gave through formal and informal reviews. Dawn’s research interests include practitioner research, self-study of teacher education practices and early career academics’ pathways into the academy.