Excellence in teaching

Di Gardiner is a lecturer in the Graduate School of Education, where she is currently teaching the Study in Teaching course and is the Director of Teaching in the Graduate Diploma in Education programme. She received the Excellence in Teaching award in 1991 and 1995. This award represents a joint effort by the Guild and the University to recognise and reward exemplary teaching.

I consider myself very fortunate to be teaching in the Graduate Diploma in Education programme. In a one-year course, one of the treats is being able to see my students develop skills, competencies and confidence as they build on their undergraduate courses to become professional educators. Sometimes they amaze themselves by coping with difficult and challenging situations confidently and creatively.

Students often ask me what they need to do well in the course, especially in the teaching practice area. My answer used to be, quite simply, an enthusiasm for their subject matter, a genuine interest in their students and a willingness to work hard (and I believed that these were good rules for me to live by too!). However, today teachers find themselves working in a highly demanding and rapidly changing environment. We have changing curricula, for example the introduction of Curriculum Frameworks and Student Outcome Statements; changing structures, with more devolution; and a student population which is more varied and questioning than it has ever been. Teachers constantly have to make decisions and choices and are called upon to undertake values education with regard to inclusivity, gender issues, healthy living and citizenship. While dealing with all of this, they are also preparing and delivering learning programmes and lessons which need to be relevant, to actively engage students in their learning, to cater for individual differences within each class and to provide opportunities for students to develop the necessary skills and competencies to move into the work-force or further study. A tall order by anyone’s account!

So, although the answer to their question was appropriate to a certain extent, there is another skill which they need to develop to ensure their ongoing professional development in order to cope with the very demanding situation in which they will work. They need to become critically reflective practitioners. This process is one in which theory and action are integrated. As teachers, they will define problems, theorise, make plans for action based on that theory, act, and then critically reflect on the whole process. The process of critical reflection is a response to the complexity of a teacher’s role. Teaching is not simply following a set of rules. It requires teachers to shift rapidly from practice to theory to practice, sifting and sorting information to make decisions about what needs to be done. Reflective practice encourages us to ask questions of our teaching such as:

• How could I have introduced this in a more motivating way?
• How can I involve my students more actively in their learning?
• How can I make this assessment more reliable?
• What resources might be more relevant?
• How can I build more open-ended tasks into my programme?
• How appropriate is this to all of the students in the class?
• Why are the students having difficulty achieving these outcomes?

Whereas non-reflective practice would tempt us to claim: this is a boring part of the course, the assessment requirements are too rigid, the students are lazy, the textbooks are uninspiring, there is no time to be creative, and/or the class is too big.

Reflective teaching is appropriate in all educational settings, not only schools but also in the workplace generally. I have found that it is has become second nature to look for and devise different approaches and answers to the problems and challenges which arise in teaching in the Graduate Diploma in Education programme. It has shifted my practice over the years and I hope resulted in more quality learning experiences for my students as they become resilient and competent practitioners.