Excellence in teaching

Ian Saunders teaches in the English Department, where he is currently the Head. His fields of interest include literary theory, literature and ecology, and contemporary literature. He received the Excellence in Teaching Award for Arts in 1997. This award represents a joint effort by the Guild and the University to recognise and reward exemplary teaching.

One of the challenges in designing assessment processes is to maximise the extent to which the assessment tool is also a pedagogical one, and in the following I report briefly on one process I have found useful. My background is that of the humanities, and literary and cultural studies in particular, so I should first contextualise my observations. Within that broad field I have always been struck by the level of enthusiasm and intellectual energy that students bring to the classroom. Of course humanities students, no less than any others, want to find rewarding employment on graduation, and the kind of generic, analytic and organisational skills that they will acquire in the course of their studies are important in helping them achieve that. "Generic" skills, though, are not discipline specific, and that means for the most part when a student pursues a particular disciplinary focus in the humanities the underlying motivation is at least as much in the intrinsic interest of the material itself as in a discipline- specific vocational dividend.

Within that context, assessment can become problematic. If not a straightforward matter of vocational certification, it can be registered as necessary, but somehow divorced from the intellectual enterprise that constitutes the field. That is not to say that students don’t take it seriously: they certainly do, and the commitment they bring to their work is often evident in the care and pride which accompanies written work. The challenge, as I see it, is to make that work more than evidence. As such it is often of high quality indeed, but it should be part of the pedagogical process, too.

The strategy I have developed is based on a peer/self-assessment programme. Following and extending the work of Michael Jackson (Political Science, University of Sydney) and Annette Marfording (Law, University of New South Wales: both cases are described in Nightingale et al., Assessing Learning in Universities), it takes the following form. To complete the programme, students are asked to submit an essay in the normal way, which is then read and returned with comments, but without a grade. In the session that essays are returned, students form groups of three, and spend the two hours reading each others' essays, expanding and defending their work, questioning their peers, and making a note-form record of the process. Two days later students submit a two or three page response, which reflects on what they think their peers had achieved, and - in the light of the group session and their tutor’s comments - which evaluates their own work. The point of the exercise is in part to develop a sense of collegiality amongst students, in part to expose individual students to different kinds of conceptual and communicative work, and most importantly to re-insert assessment into the learning process. To date it has been an extraordinarily successful exercise: I have never seen such enthusiasm about assessment amongst students. If anything, essays are of higher than usual standard (and many have indicated that knowing that a peer was to see their work is a significantly greater stimulus than knowing that an academic was to read it!), students were astonished about the range of ways in which similar tasks could be approached, and most were able to use the "reflection" to build on their essay in a way that demonstrated a tangible gain in their understanding of the material.

• Nightingale, P. et al. (1996). Assessing Learning in Universities. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.