Excellence in teaching
DR GREG HERTZLER is a senior lecturer in Agricultural and Resource Economics in the Faculty of Agriculture. He won an Excellence in Teaching Innovation Award in 1992. These awards represent a joint effort by the Guild and the University to recognise and reward exemplary teaching. he also won a Research Assistance Award for Outstanding Teachers in 1994.
I began to take the old joke seriously and wondered how I could animate the students. One approach was to use multimedia. The approach I took, however, was a step backward in technology and a step forward in the teaching of problem-solving skills. I developed a textbook on production economics that was linked directly to applications solved with microcomputer spreadsheets. Students read the concepts and were instructed in using the concepts to do their own calculations, draw their own graphs and find their own answers. This approach had disadvantages. Software applications must be developed and exercises devised to teach students how to construct the applications. The exercises are more difficult to debug than the software. This approach is also messy becasue students make a lot of mistakes and ask a lot of questions. But there are significant advantages to this messiness-by having to work out solutions to problems, students actively learn from their mistakes and become equipped to solve their own problems in the future. Perhaps lectures to large classes are a necessary evil, but I believe we should continue to develop problem-focused teaching materials that supplement the lectures and allow students to develop active learning skills. |
The old joke is that a teacher of economic principles delivers laughs and graphs using chalk and talk. Students watch and listen. I, like other economics teachers, lecture first-year students on equating marginal revenue with marginal costs. Most can reproduce the magic formula in an exam. Since they answered my exam questions I assumed students were learning-until I marched them into the computer lab. There they were instructed to calculate and graph total revenue and total variable costs and to use the graphs to find the most profitable solution. Then they were instructed to graph marginal revenue and marginal costs and were asked one of the simplest possible exam questions: ' Given the most profitable solution, how can you find from it the graph of maginal revenue and marginal costs?' About a third of the class were puzzled and about a third of the class took a very long time to work it out. For most of the students, my carefully planned and executed lectures had little meaning outside the lecture theatre.