Excellence in teaching

Dr Robert Patuzzi worked as a research fellow in the Department of Physiology at U.W.A for 14 years, and has worked as a lecturer since 1993 specialising in hearing and deafness. He won an Excellence in Teaching Award in 1994. These Awards represent a joint effort between The Guild and The University to recognise and reward exemplary teaching.

While it's quite an honour to receive an Excellence in Teaching award, it shouldn't go to your head: the students who nominated you may not know what's good for them! In any case, part of my success in teaching appears to be my ability to motivate students, and largely that means trusting them. A teacher needs to believe that students have potential and the best of intentions, even if their educational background has short-changed them. And students often have little enough confidence in themselves without a teacher adding to the problem: at every chance opportunities should be provided for them to test and improve their thinking skills. Most often this can take the form of leading questions. I find it useful to tell students what I am trying to do beforehand:

I am going to ask questions as we go, and I guarantee I don't mind if you give a wrong answer. Either there is no correct answer, you have thought of something that I hadn't, or your answer tells me how our communication is going. Since I need to know what and how you are thinking, try to give your best answer.

Having made such a pact, a teacher has to live up to it by asking reasonable and leading questions, by waiting a reasonable length of time for students to respond, and by listening extremely hard to what they say. There are almost always clues in even the most odd responses about how a student is thinking.

While studying for a Diploma in Education I learnt the important lesson that students need a directive experience before they are provided with a formalised version of reality. And here, again, a teacher needs patience. Under the endless pressure to impart facts in the minimum amount of time, understanding often suffers. And since a student can discover facts with understanding but rarely understanding with just facts, a teacher should avoid the temptation to take the easier option of cramming students with information. That is why the old tradition of the 'demonstration' during lectures was so valuable, and why we should strive to bring it back. While in some fields such as physics the art is alive, in other fields the pressure of time, limited funding and the push for shared facilities has killed the demonstration as a teaching tool. In some lecture theatres, for example, there are no tables or benches for the purpose. The students are thereby condemned to the virtual reality of the overhead projector, and death by a thousand transparencies.