Louise Dennis: Teaching Portfolio

Statement of Intent

At present I there are two important areas requiring immediate improvement in my teaching. The level of interest I inspire in my students (based on SET/SEM scores) and in their mastery of some specific aspects of my modules (based on exam performance in G51SWT).

As I mentioned in my reflective statement it is difficult to ascertain exactly what will inspire and interest students. My own driving interests in the material I teach is related to the elegance of mathematical proof and grappling with practical problems of software development. The former is experienced by only a relatively small number of people and the latter is the result of practical experiences in developing software on a scale outside the experience of most of our students. While I can relate these motivations to students it is clear they have relatively little weight. My current intention in G51SWT is to try and include more examples in my lecture material and in particular to introduce long running examples early on in the module and to refer back to these continuously (this will hopefully also help with the retention of basic ideas). My hope is that this grounding of information away from a more abstract presentation may make the subject matter appear more relevant to the students. In G51MC2 I am adopting a text book which has a closer focus on how the mathematical ideas relate to computer science and how they can be expressed through actual algorithms. Once again my hope is that this will better ground the material in a context that appears more relevant to the students.

The most pressing concern, in terms of student mastery of material, is those subject areas in G51SWT which were covered only by example and on which no exercises (summative or formative) were set. I have a two pronged approach to this problem. The immediate "fix" is in sacrificing some of the module material which is less central (but which personally I find more interesting) to make way for more traditional "information delivery" focused lectures to back up the following "examples" lecture. The second mode of attack is the development of software to support those areas with exercises. The module itself isn't really suitable as a whole to weekly tutorials but does contain weekly labs. With suitable software students could attempt formative exercises in these labs receiving feedback from the software backed up by the lab demonstrators. Since the time and resources are limited I've chosen to develop this software through the mechanism of student group and individual projects. Currently I have a group of second years working on such a piece of software for students to do exercises on whitebox testing.

There are a number of other minor areas of concern, for instance some inconsistency in the time it takes for the G51MC2 tutorial exercises to be completed from week to week. These are addressed where they arise in the other pages on this website.

In the longer term I would like to link my teaching more closely with my research through the provision of an advanced third year module, or section within another module on my own research topic of automated reasoning. I hope this will in turn lead to the recruitment of more final year project students with similar interests to my own and, ultimately, to the recruitment of PhD students.