Excellence in teaching

Dr. David Pannell is a senior lecturer in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics. He has worked at UWA since 1992 and won an Excellence in Teaching Award in 1994. These awards represent a joint effort by the Guild and the University to recognise and reward exemplary teaching.

Since joining UWA I have experimented with a number of teaching practices which fall outside the traditional approach to lecturing and assessment.

Delivery of information

• Use a student debate in place of a lecture or bring in one-off guest lecturers from outside the University. These have always been successful in getting students involved.
• During a lecture ask students to form groups of six to discuss an issue. A selection of groups later reports to the whole class. This can be effective, but the class needs to be small enough for the lecturer to circulate to all groups. You also need to provide clear directions.
• Use alternative media to present information. So far I have found audio tapes to be the most successful in prompting thought and discussion.

Assessment

• Set tasks other than traditional academic written assignments. For example, I ask students to write an article for a farmers' magazine, with the promise that excellent ones may actually be published. Several have been. This forces students to think about the pactical relevance of the information, as well as giving them practice at writing for a different type of audience. Another approach is to allow students to choose the medium for their assignments. In 1994 a particular assignment yielded a video, several posters, traditional essays, computer programs and an audio cassette.
• Encourage collaboration. In one assignment I allocate students into pairs to critically review each other's drafts. They revise their assignments before handing them in, together with their annotated drafts. Each student gets a mark for their final assignment and for the review of their partner's assignment. This works when the students have different topics. In another case I set pairs of students the same topic to be jointly researched. I allow them the option of handing in separate assignments or handing in a single joint assignment for which they each get the same mark.

Feedback (in both directions)

• After 2-3 weeks of a unit, hand out blank sheets of paper and ask for written feedback or comments. You learn some useful things.
• Use audio cassettes to provide feedback on assigments. Record your comments on a cassette provided by the student as you mark their assignment. It allows me to provide more detailed feedback than normal, although it probably slows down marking a bit.

A lesson I have learnt about teaching:

You can't please everyone. Don't worry about it.