Louise Dennis: Teaching Portfolio

Home The Six Areas of Competence Support of Learning Design and Planning of Learning Activities Assessment and Giving Feedback Developing Learning Environments Evaluating Practice Using Research to Inform Teaching Role as a Professional Access Disability Diversity Accountability and Quality Critical Appraisals Group Project Individual Project Other Teaching Philosophy Mapping Document Reflective Statement Reference (Word) Statement of Intent Evidence	This teaching philosophy outlines the main aims and constraints that I apply to all my teaching activities. Teaching Philosophy I feel it is important to start my teaching philosophy with a brief word about Research. The reason I am an academic is because I enjoy and wish to pursue research. In my field of Computer Science I could relatively easily get a highly paid job as a programmer if I wished and it is quite clear in my own mind that I would prefer to be a highly paid programmer than a poorly paid full-time teacher. On the other hand I would rather be a poorly paid researcher with some teaching duties than a highly paid programmer. I started this philosophy with a statement about research because I strongly believe that the simplest and most effective way to deliver a better learning experience to students is to devote more time to them. In particular I believe strongly in the value of small group (less than 5 students) teaching, if not individual meetings between students and lecturers. All my best learning experiences have involved one-to-one interactions with a teacher and I have had some kind of a personal relationship with every teacher who has made a significant impact on my life in terms of inspiration and motivation. I also believe, however, that with more time my lectures, practicals and assessments would be more polished, would draw on a wider range of materials and, where I am not an expert in a subject, would allow me to gain a better grasp of the material I try to teach. This would make explanations of complex concepts clearer, would remove "accidental" difficulties from practicals and assessments where the task is not made clear enough to the students and would equip me to deliver information in which I had some confidence and allow me to answer unexpected questions on that material. This leads to a real tension in my approach to teaching. It is my belief that more investment of time would dramatically improve the quality of my students' learning experience but this is time I am unwilling to invest both as a result of personal preference but also in terms of my career where I believe my promotion prospects and general success depend far more heavily on the quality of my research output than on the quality of my teaching. Approaches to Learning There are many classifications of learning styles and the way learners learn (e.g. [Honey and Mumford 82, Wolf and Kolb 84, Bulter 87] as described in [Fry et. al. 99]). In general there seem to be three important sets of contrasting styles present in this work. Firstly the difference between students who prefer to learn by "doing" in some sense and those who prefer to learn by contemplating or thinking about the material in a more abstract fashion. Secondly there is a difference between students who want to be presented with open-ended material and unanswered questions and those who wish to learn within a carefully prescribed curriculum with clear boundaries and answers. Lastly there appears to be a difference between students who wish to be presented information in a linear fashion and those who prefer a higher-level view and possibly the opportunity to skip focus from one area to the next. Obviously this is grossly simplifying some complex work but these three contrasts appear to me to be the most important ones to be aware of when approaching teaching. In general, as a discipline, Computer Science adheres strongly to a practical paradigm, even if it is not, strictly speaking, a lab-based science. Practitioners pretty much universally believe that the only way to learn programming is through practice, or at least that the only way to effectively demonstrate that learning is through the production of real programs. This contrasts with anecdotal evidence from other cultures where it can, apparently, be very difficult to get bright students to actually engage with programming activity. Similarly in one of the other main areas of my teaching, mathematics, the only way to truly demonstrate that you can do mathematical proofs is by actually producing some mathematical proofs. Interestingly in both areas a lot of basic talent appears also to be involved and there are some people who after being provided with some basic material can produce programs and proofs with (relative) ease and others who continue to struggle for a long time. As a result it is customary to provide students with a large number of practical exercises (both formative and summative). In general it is my observation that the students who do attempt the exercises do better than those who don't which would support an assumption that students of Computer Science learn best by "doing". However it is hard to be certain whether the exercises enable learning (which is the assumption) or merely allow the students to demonstrate their mastery of the relevant skills which they've obtained by other means. However, in the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, I pursue a teaching philosophy which emphasises practical work on exercises as the primary mechanism for learning. This philosophy extends itself to the use of lectures in G51SWT that are centred around the process of working through examples in as realistic a fashion as possible rather than the presentation of facts or elegant solutions to problems. In terms of the other two contrasts I've picked out of the learning style literature. I would say that one of the attributes a University should promote in its students is a move towards accepting a more open-ended approach to learning and obtaining a high-level view of material. That said, inspection of my own teaching at first year shows me moving more towards carefully prescribed areas of knowledge and trying to avoid as much as possible difficult problems and questions. This is partly in a desire to see the students master the basic material which they need as the foundations for the rest of their studies but it does appear to have come at the price of making the material appear very mundane to the more imaginative learner (as can be seen in the SET/SEM scores for my modules). The last difference I've presented as a tension between linear and top-down presentations of information (or say, between reading a book and a web page). In both cases the information is structured (although there is a suggestion in some of the literature that there are learning styles that favour unstructured information). I hope I present information in a fashion appropriate to both styles. Lectures provide a linear thread through the teaching material, but all information is available in a more top-down fashion from module web pages and so can, in theory, be approached by students in any order they chose. Primary Teaching Aims As an ideal I want my teaching to inspire the students with an interest in and understanding of the subject matter for its own sake rather than as a route to a better job or higher status. To that end I strive in my teaching not only to convey facts but to convey a sense of why they are important or interesting and the situations in which they prove useful. Computer Science is a very application driven subject and a lot of lecture and teaching time is devoted to the teaching of techniques and skills rather than the study and analysis of artifacts. When I teach I want want to provide the students with a basic grounding in those techniques and skills. I hope this will then inform their own investigations into that subject as they continue through life. I also hope my teaching will prompt them to use the subject matter in projects undertaken for their own interest, not because they have been set as exercises. For instance, if I teach students the Perl programming language and explain how this can be used to process the input from forms on web pages then I hope that many of them will create and develop their own web pages using Perl, not because it is an exercise that has been set them but because they are genuinely interested in doing this and I have provided them with the basic tools needed to get started. While I hope that my best teaching endeavours will inspire my students to take up a subject and extend their knowledge under their own steam. I also hope that my worst will not cause them to fail. If a student fails my module and subsequently, perhaps fails the year and ends up on an ordinary degree and fails to get the job they want then their University experience has singularly failed to deliver the result they had hoped for. In many cases students fail because they simply do not have the ability to do better or do not put the time required into their work. However it is possible for teachers to make a students' life much more difficult. When a student does an exercise I have set I want them to grapple with and think about the intellectual content of the exercise: understanding the technical problem or forming an opinion on some issue. I don't want them to be struggling to understand the question I asked, grappling with technology that doesn't work or fighting over the one edition of the relevant text book that exists in the Library. Fred Brooks [Brooks, 96] discusses essential and accidental difficulties in software engineering. The essential difficulties are those parts which are genuinely hard and always require careful thought and planning, the accidental difficulties are those which arise through poor tools or management and are not fundamental to the task in hand. I want to judge students on their ability to overcome essential difficulties in the material, not their ability to overcome accidental difficulties caused because I phrased questions badly, or failed to inform the library on time to purchase new books (or because the library failed to order the books until the week before the module started). While such problems tend to be thrown into sharp relief in assessments and exercises similar considerations will apply to lecturing, the recommendation of reading and other teaching situations. I do my best to make my explanations as clear as possible, to illustrate them with well chosen examples and to direct the students towards text books and literature which are up-to-date, accessible and appropriate to the level of the student. I have highlighted these two extremes because I believe that pragmatically I deliver a better learning experience to a wider range of students by concentrating on avoiding mistakes than I do in striving to inspire. Working within the pragmatics of limited time, ability (SET/SEM suggest the students don't find my lecturing style particularly inspiring) and experience my attempts to inspire are likely to touch only highly able students or those already motivated by a love of the subject matter whereas the presence of `accidental' difficulties in teaching material affects all students irrespective of their source of motivation, learning style or their innate ability. For the average student I hope to convey an understanding of why they need to know the information in the module, when and how to use it and the location of further information should they need it. This will be sufficient for them to pass the course and follow whatever path they intend beyond university and, should that path involve the skills I am teaching, will provide them with the basic foundations needed to gain mastery in those skills. References [Brooks, 96] Frederick P. Brooks. The Mythical Man Month, 20th Anniversary Edition, Addison Wesley, 1996. [Bulter, 87] Kathleen A. Butler, Learning and Teaching Style in Theory and Practice, The Learner's Dimension, Columbia, CT. [Fry et al, 99] H. Fry, S. Ketteridge and S. Marshall, A Handbook for Teaching & Learning in Higher Education: Enhancing Academic Practice, Kogan Page, 1999. [Honey and Mumford, 82] P. Honey and A. Mumford A Manual of Learning Styles, Peter Honey, Maidenhead. [Wolf and Kolb, 84] D. M. Wolf and D. A. Kolb. Career development, personal growth and experiential learning, in D. Kolb, I. Rubin and J. McIntyre (eds) Organisational Psychology: Readings on Human Behaviour, 4th edition, Prentice Hall.

This teaching philosophy outlines the main aims and constraints that I apply to all my teaching activities.

Teaching Philosophy

I feel it is important to start my teaching philosophy with a brief word about Research. The reason I am an academic is because I enjoy and wish to pursue research. In my field of Computer Science I could relatively easily get a highly paid job as a programmer if I wished and it is quite clear in my own mind that I would prefer to be a highly paid programmer than a poorly paid full-time teacher. On the other hand I would rather be a poorly paid researcher with some teaching duties than a highly paid programmer.

I started this philosophy with a statement about research because I strongly believe that the simplest and most effective way to deliver a better learning experience to students is to devote more time to them. In particular I believe strongly in the value of small group (less than 5 students) teaching, if not individual meetings between students and lecturers. All my best learning experiences have involved one-to-one interactions with a teacher and I have had some kind of a personal relationship with every teacher who has made a significant impact on my life in terms of inspiration and motivation.

I also believe, however, that with more time my lectures, practicals and assessments would be more polished, would draw on a wider range of materials and, where I am not an expert in a subject, would allow me to gain a better grasp of the material I try to teach. This would make explanations of complex concepts clearer, would remove "accidental" difficulties from practicals and assessments where the task is not made clear enough to the students and would equip me to deliver information in which I had some confidence and allow me to answer unexpected questions on that material.

This leads to a real tension in my approach to teaching. It is my belief that more investment of time would dramatically improve the quality of my students' learning experience but this is time I am unwilling to invest both as a result of personal preference but also in terms of my career where I believe my promotion prospects and general success depend far more heavily on the quality of my research output than on the quality of my teaching.

Approaches to Learning

There are many classifications of learning styles and the way learners learn (e.g. [Honey and Mumford 82, Wolf and Kolb 84, Bulter 87] as described in [Fry et. al. 99]). In general there seem to be three important sets of contrasting styles present in this work. Firstly the difference between students who prefer to learn by "doing" in some sense and those who prefer to learn by contemplating or thinking about the material in a more abstract fashion. Secondly there is a difference between students who want to be presented with open-ended material and unanswered questions and those who wish to learn within a carefully prescribed curriculum with clear boundaries and answers. Lastly there appears to be a difference between students who wish to be presented information in a linear fashion and those who prefer a higher-level view and possibly the opportunity to skip focus from one area to the next. Obviously this is grossly simplifying some complex work but these three contrasts appear to me to be the most important ones to be aware of when approaching teaching.

In general, as a discipline, Computer Science adheres strongly to a practical paradigm, even if it is not, strictly speaking, a lab-based science. Practitioners pretty much universally believe that the only way to learn programming is through practice, or at least that the only way to effectively demonstrate that learning is through the production of real programs. This contrasts with anecdotal evidence from other cultures where it can, apparently, be very difficult to get bright students to actually engage with programming activity. Similarly in one of the other main areas of my teaching, mathematics, the only way to truly demonstrate that you can do mathematical proofs is by actually producing some mathematical proofs. Interestingly in both areas a lot of basic talent appears also to be involved and there are some people who after being provided with some basic material can produce programs and proofs with (relative) ease and others who continue to struggle for a long time. As a result it is customary to provide students with a large number of practical exercises (both formative and summative). In general it is my observation that the students who do attempt the exercises do better than those who don't which would support an assumption that students of Computer Science learn best by "doing". However it is hard to be certain whether the exercises enable learning (which is the assumption) or merely allow the students to demonstrate their mastery of the relevant skills which they've obtained by other means. However, in the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, I pursue a teaching philosophy which emphasises practical work on exercises as the primary mechanism for learning. This philosophy extends itself to the use of lectures in G51SWT that are centred around the process of working through examples in as realistic a fashion as possible rather than the presentation of facts or elegant solutions to problems.

In terms of the other two contrasts I've picked out of the learning style literature. I would say that one of the attributes a University should promote in its students is a move towards accepting a more open-ended approach to learning and obtaining a high-level view of material. That said, inspection of my own teaching at first year shows me moving more towards carefully prescribed areas of knowledge and trying to avoid as much as possible difficult problems and questions. This is partly in a desire to see the students master the basic material which they need as the foundations for the rest of their studies but it does appear to have come at the price of making the material appear very mundane to the more imaginative learner (as can be seen in the SET/SEM scores for my modules).

The last difference I've presented as a tension between linear and top-down presentations of information (or say, between reading a book and a web page). In both cases the information is structured (although there is a suggestion in some of the literature that there are learning styles that favour unstructured information). I hope I present information in a fashion appropriate to both styles. Lectures provide a linear thread through the teaching material, but all information is available in a more top-down fashion from module web pages and so can, in theory, be approached by students in any order they chose.

Primary Teaching Aims

As an ideal I want my teaching to inspire the students with an interest in and understanding of the subject matter for its own sake rather than as a route to a better job or higher status. To that end I strive in my teaching not only to convey facts but to convey a sense of why they are important or interesting and the situations in which they prove useful. Computer Science is a very application driven subject and a lot of lecture and teaching time is devoted to the teaching of techniques and skills rather than the study and analysis of artifacts. When I teach I want want to provide the students with a basic grounding in those techniques and skills. I hope this will then inform their own investigations into that subject as they continue through life. I also hope my teaching will prompt them to use the subject matter in projects undertaken for their own interest, not because they have been set as exercises. For instance, if I teach students the Perl programming language and explain how this can be used to process the input from forms on web pages then I hope that many of them will create and develop their own web pages using Perl, not because it is an exercise that has been set them but because they are genuinely interested in doing this and I have provided them with the basic tools needed to get started.

While I hope that my best teaching endeavours will inspire my students to take up a subject and extend their knowledge under their own steam. I also hope that my worst will not cause them to fail. If a student fails my module and subsequently, perhaps fails the year and ends up on an ordinary degree and fails to get the job they want then their University experience has singularly failed to deliver the result they had hoped for. In many cases students fail because they simply do not have the ability to do better or do not put the time required into their work. However it is possible for teachers to make a students' life much more difficult. When a student does an exercise I have set I want them to grapple with and think about the intellectual content of the exercise: understanding the technical problem or forming an opinion on some issue. I don't want them to be struggling to understand the question I asked, grappling with technology that doesn't work or fighting over the one edition of the relevant text book that exists in the Library. Fred Brooks [Brooks, 96] discusses essential and accidental difficulties in software engineering. The essential difficulties are those parts which are genuinely hard and always require careful thought and planning, the accidental difficulties are those which arise through poor tools or management and are not fundamental to the task in hand. I want to judge students on their ability to overcome essential difficulties in the material, not their ability to overcome accidental difficulties caused because I phrased questions badly, or failed to inform the library on time to purchase new books (or because the library failed to order the books until the week before the module started). While such problems tend to be thrown into sharp relief in assessments and exercises similar considerations will apply to lecturing, the recommendation of reading and other teaching situations. I do my best to make my explanations as clear as possible, to illustrate them with well chosen examples and to direct the students towards text books and literature which are up-to-date, accessible and appropriate to the level of the student.

I have highlighted these two extremes because I believe that pragmatically I deliver a better learning experience to a wider range of students by concentrating on avoiding mistakes than I do in striving to inspire. Working within the pragmatics of limited time, ability (SET/SEM suggest the students don't find my lecturing style particularly inspiring) and experience my attempts to inspire are likely to touch only highly able students or those already motivated by a love of the subject matter whereas the presence of `accidental' difficulties in teaching material affects all students irrespective of their source of motivation, learning style or their innate ability.

For the average student I hope to convey an understanding of why they need to know the information in the module, when and how to use it and the location of further information should they need it. This will be sufficient for them to pass the course and follow whatever path they intend beyond university and, should that path involve the skills I am teaching, will provide them with the basic foundations needed to gain mastery in those skills.

References

[Brooks, 96] Frederick P. Brooks. The Mythical Man Month, 20th Anniversary Edition, Addison Wesley, 1996.

[Bulter, 87] Kathleen A. Butler, Learning and Teaching Style in Theory and Practice, The Learner's Dimension, Columbia, CT.

[Fry et al, 99] H. Fry, S. Ketteridge and S. Marshall, A Handbook for Teaching & Learning in Higher Education: Enhancing Academic Practice, Kogan Page, 1999.

[Honey and Mumford, 82] P. Honey and A. Mumford A Manual of Learning Styles, Peter Honey, Maidenhead.

[Wolf and Kolb, 84] D. M. Wolf and D. A. Kolb. Career development, personal growth and experiential learning, in D. Kolb, I. Rubin and J. McIntyre (eds) Organisational Psychology: Readings on Human Behaviour, 4th edition, Prentice Hall.

Louise Dennis: Teaching Portfolio

The Six Areas of Competence

Role as a Professional

Critical Appraisals

Other

Teaching Philosophy

Approaches to Learning

Primary Teaching Aims

References