Excellence in teaching

Dr Sandra Penrose, Department of Political Science, won a small grant for innovative teaching in 1994. She has 25 years' experience as a university teacher specialising in China and international relations. She describes her project below:

The innovative teaching project arose from reflection on my many years of teaching, during the designing of a new course two years ago. My general aim was to assist the students' capacity for critical analysis which is central to teaching and learning. My particular concern was to improve the effectiveness of the teaching, learning and assessment of one of the major components of students' work, the essay.

Those of us who have been teaching since Adam wore shorts have a plethora of very similar tragi-comic stories. They concern the apparently intelligent student who, having digested the general and detailed remarks on the marked essay, come for an interview. It is only after some bolt from the blue that their brow magically clears and they make some revealing remark such as 'Oh I see - you want me to think!' Another common experience is that of the student who, upon re-examining their essay, discovers 'it really isn't as good as I thought', which is often a result of having mentally written a better essay after submission.

Essay writing is one of the essential skills expected of a graduate and is an important components of student assessment in many faculties. Students generally take the writing of essays seriously, learning a good deal about some aspect of their course, and following any specified guidelines in order to write a satisfactory essay. On the lecturer's side, a thorough marking of the essay including margin notes and an overall assessment, followed by an interview with weak or problematic students would be 'best practice'. Some excellent opportunities for teaching and learning and for improved outcomes in assessment are clearly being missed in this process, which is probably almost universal in Australian Universities.

Briefly, the self-evaluated essay exercise requires students to hand in two copies of their essay to the marker. The marker makes margin comments on one of these and analyses the student's essay under a series of headings. After a suitable lapse of time (a few weeks) the student is presented with the other, unmarked copy of their essay and asked to analyse it under the same headings the marker used, before having seen the marker's analysis. The then compare the marker's comments with their own. The exercise has attracted a very favourable response from students, who see it as an attempt to improve their skills in critical analysis and to better integrate their own work into the course, thus taking student work more seriously.