Empowering Professional Teaching in Engineering. John Heywood

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      JOURNEY 2

       “Oh that we the gift of God to see ourselves as others see us,” Learning from Beginning Teachers 2

2.1 INTRODUCTION

      I confess that the quotation is the only line of the poetry by Robert Burns that I know. At least I was told he wrote it, and I was also told that it was about a lice on the back of the neck of a Lady in her “Sunday best,” who was, as one might expect, attending church.

Self-accountability demands that we try and see ourselves as others see us even if what we find is unpleasant. I take Rokeach’s proposition that generally, we want to know the truth about ourselves, to be correct [1]. Engineering educators with an interest in teaching and learning are still a rare breed and finding a person or better still persons interested in teaching is often difficult yet, the height of self-accountability is to be able to invite a colleague to observe one’s teaching. Such liaisons are the basis of educational change. You may read about an attempt by a primary (elementary) school teacher in Ireland to engage his colleagues in changing the curriculum of their school in appendix A (Section 2.5).

One important thing that a beginning teacher has to learn, if he or she does not know it already, is that students do not always see things in the same way as the teacher [2]. A component of the competency of self-accountability is to be able to see ourselves as others see us, more especially our students. The concern of this chapter is with techniques for achieving that goal.

2.2 RECORDING ONE’S CLASS

When John Elliott developed his thoughts about accountability in the 1970’s, he suggested that the teacher should make an audio recording of his/her lesson/lecture [3]. At that time it would have been very expensive to have made a video recording and, in any event, the equipment would have been very large. Nowadays, we are probably being recorded by one or another of the students in our class! We can certainly prop a laptop with a camcorder on the lecture room’s rostrum, whatever that may be, and make a visual recording of the activity.

      I have nothing against that, but I want to suggest that from listening, yes- just by listening, we may learn a great deal about ourselves, the way we present knowledge, and the way we interact with students. It is much easier to do these days because we have the technology that makes omni-directional-recording easy.

      Listening is an important skill and helps us to focus on the issue we want to study, as for example, how we respond to questions in class. It won’t, of course, necessarily tell us if we are selective in the choices we make about whose question we will take, unless we do a more detailed analysis.

      After a few audio sessions we can begin to make and analyze video recordings and cope with the much greater “noise” that is generated.

      One of the other ways my colleagues used to train beginning teachers—called “microteaching”—was to bring in half-a-dozen students from a local school, ask the student to teach them for ten-minutes or so while making a video recording of their teaching. The recording is then played back to the student with comments from the tutor. This procedure can be changed so that a group of beginning teachers review their teaching together, and comment on each other’s presentations. It is quite a useful method for introducing beginning teachers to the art of teaching. But, it is only the beginning of self-accountability.

The first time that I tried to make a videotape of an introductory lecture came as a shock. What I thought would be a doddle turned out to be very stressful. The producer harangued me and continually stopped to re-take and re-take. Apart from learning that it was a considerable skill I began to appreciate just how little a learner can address, that 50 minutes to an hour is far too long for a continuous presentation, and that it was very easy, even then with all the electronics available, to introduce noise into the learning system [4].

      Farah and Neelam did their very best to make me presentable in the first of these minilectures. I had to do a lot of re-learning.

      A quite different approach was advocated by the Stanford educator Elliot Eisner (see below).

2.3 PERCEPTUAL LEARNING IN THE CLASSROOM

      One of the difficulties that student graduate teachers have in trying to understand classroom performance is to get behind (understand, if you prefer) what the students are thinking. In evaluating their classes the emphasis is often with what happens to them rather than what happens to their students as a result of their instruction. This is not at all surprising. At the same time it is a reminder that what happens to teachers in classrooms is all too easily forgotten by politicians and administrators when they criticize them. The teacher is as important as the student in the learning process, but the teacher has to be aware of the perceptual processes at work.

      The relationship between teacher’s and their students is deep and personal and can be encouraging or hurtful in both directions. That said, teachers do need to understand what is happening in their classrooms both to themselves and to their students.

The teachers who provided the examples given in this text taught in schools under supervision throughout the school year for half of each week. Throughout the academic year they attended the university during the other half of the week. At the beginning of the school year, to assist them with their practice, the