Excellence in teaching

Dr Ian McArthur has been a lecturer in the Physics Department for three years, specialising in theoretical physics. In 1995 he won an Excellence in Teaching Award. These awards represent a joint effort by the Guild and the University to recognise and reward exemplary teaching.

I attended this university in a different era. A university education was viewed not as a right, but as a sometimes hard-won privilege. Relatively full employment meant that students could choose to indulge in the luxury of satisfying a thirst for knowledge, confident that employers valued an ability to think clearly and critically. There can be no denying that the climate has changed: universities are being required by society to justify their existence on economic more than academic grounds, and students are being forced more and more to view their time at university in terms of job training rather than in terms of an education. My approach to teaching is based on the belief that there are values from the "old" system which are worth retaining. I would like to be able to convey to my students the same sense of excitement in learning which my teachers managed to convey to me.

My teaching techniques are stock standard. I believe that the lecture is still the most effective means of teaching at undergraduate level. From my experiences both here and at overseas universities where I have studied and worked, I have tried to copy the techniques of the best lecturers I had and avoid the pitfalls of the not so successful. If I were to emphasize any one point in particular, it would be the importance of preparation and planning of the course, both as a whole and at the level of individual lectures. A lecture has many of the elements of a performance, from a paying audience to potentially critical reviewers. While this does not mean that one has to be a Shakespearean actor, it does mean that the performance has to be professional. I find that careful preparation and a thorough knowledge of the subject can go a long way to achieving this goal, particularly for inexperienced lecturers.

A small class is an advantage both to the lecturer and the student (but not necessarily to the EFTSU counters). I get to give all the tutorials and mark all the weekly assignments (both vital elements in the subjects I teach), so that I am better able to see the difficulties which the students are having with the subject matter or my approach to it. I find that the blackboard is the most effective teaching aid in small groups, though the overhead projector is a good way to present summaries and to illustrate sidelines or extensions to the main thrust of the lecture. A change also helps the students to maintain their concentration. Students are usually more willing to speak out in a small group, and this should be encouraged.

To conclude, I will take this opportunity to thank my colleagues in the Physics Department for freely offering their help and advice. There is a wealth of collective wisdom on teaching in this institution which I would encourage those beginning a lecturing career to tap into. In an experimental subject like Physics, this wisdom also resides with the teaching technicians in the Department, whose enthusiasm and concern for the students should be an inspiration to all.