Being a better teacher: 5 things not to do.

Yes, the Zeroth law of teaching should be “Don’t be negative” but that’s another post (as well as a comedy routine). Here are five things that I’ve stopped doing and my students seem to appreciate it.

1. Confusing attendance with participation.
   Everything that I do with students should give them the opportunity to participate and engage – if I want them just to be exposed to knowledge I can give them readings outside of class and then use my presence and teaching skills to reinforce that in contact time. Taking a roll that demonstrates that they were physically present while I read the text book at them achieves very little. It’s the same for any other activity: a tick represents that they did something, not just that they were there.
2. Bluffing.
   When I started out, there was always the temptation to have to appear all-knowledgeable at all times. Much as, in the PhD process, I finally learned that knowing a lot about an area also meant knowing what you didn’t know, sometimes teaching is about accepting that you’re wrong, or you weren’t clear, or that you need to take another approach. I didn’t try to bluff my students often, but I did it once or twice and it was dumb. Better to admit your mistakes and fix them than try and bluff. Your students will lose respect for you – and you’ll lose respect for yourself.
3. Recycling Tired Material
   Some material should get carried forward into new courses because the fundamentals stay the same. However, where possible, every course should be reviewed and refreshed. If you are going to re-use something, update any time or context sensitive references. Putting up a piece on Steve Jobs the week after his death is timely. Three years down the track, unless it’s part of a very specific series of other material, it looks like you’re lazy. In particular, if you inherit slides or material from someone else, check it. Make it yours. Much as you will probably never win the 100m dash in borrowed shoes, you will probably never excel at teaching in someone else’s material and students can and do feel the difference.
4. Overstating my authority
   “Because I said so”, however you state it, is the argument of last resort of a tired parent, it’s not going to achieve very much at all when you’re attempting to form high-reasoning, professionally competent people. Lecturers usually have very good reasons for almost everything that they do, whether shaped by good practice, current and past research or University policy, but it sometimes takes a lot of time to explain the reasons for something. That means, on occasion, when tired, or in a hurry, or because this is the 30th person this week to ask why they can’t just hand something up late, the temptation to appeal to your own authority can be tempting. Initially, when I first started teaching, my problem was that I expected all of my students to have read every single line of the policies so, when they questioned them, I assumed that I was being challenged. Stepping back, educating people to look at all of the relevant detail in pedagogical and professional terms is just part of my job. We now have course profiles that clearly describe everything a student needs to know. When questioned on things that are supported by course, school, faculty and University practice and policy, I depersonalise what is (most usually) not a personal attack at all and say “Look at the course profile. It will clearly explain everything” and refer all of my discussions to that.
   I am most definitely not saying that we have no authority in our teaching, or that we should abdicate our responsibility, but I am saying “know the limits” and use it when necessary and appropriate.
5. Expecting students to be me
   What have I done? I have a Bachelors, a Masters and a PhD in Computer Science. I have a Grad Dip in Oenology (that’s wine science). I was a Captain in Royal Australian Armoured Corps. I run marathons up and down mountains for fun. Does this tell you what kind of student I am now? Maybe. You’d expect me to be driven, self-reliant and self-motivated. You’d be pretty right. Does it tell you what kind of student I was when I started? Not at all. My first degree took longer than it should because I was a terrible student, with no self-discipline or understanding of what I was doing or why I was doing it.
   When I first started teaching, I made the mistake of thinking that because I could get to where I got, every student in my class had that potential and that the way to realise that potential was the way that I did it. In hindsight, this is laughably stupid because my pathway was based on having an excellent secondary education, which I could draw on once I decided to become a good student, having a good support system, not running out of money, living in a safe city, being part of an un-repressed group (white Australian male) and having a lot of good luck, including meeting my wife, who is the cornerstone of all of my success. Due to Australian polygamy laws, not everyone will be able to marry my wife, so this approach is obviously not generalisable.
   More seriously,  my students have a wide variety of life and educational experiences before they come to me. What affects the way that they learn, participate and grow will vary from student to student. While every student has the potential to pass, assuming we have set up our entrance criteria correctly, it is up to me to be aware of the wide variety of student when I’m teaching and try to hold that delicate balance that meets most people’s needs most of the time.

Learning from mistakes and improving for the future is one of the most important skills my students learn – it makes sense that I value it as well and I practise what I try to teach them.

Five things that made my first-year programming course better.

We’re always looking for ways to make our teaching better – more effective, more engaging and the kind of class that students fight to be in. I recently got the chance to write a new first-year course from scratch and, based on my previous experience, there were five things I did that, from early results, appear to have made a positive difference. Caveats: As always, there’s always the risk that any change will bring about an improvement or that this is cohort variation or many other factors. I’m basing this list on the intersection of things that I did and the things that my students thought made a difference.

1. Modern, appealing design of all course materials. The course materials had the same look and feel, based on a modern design template that used simple typefaces (Helvetica Neue and Courier New) with a straightforward colour scheme. When the lecture approach changed, as we’ll discuss shortly, there were strong cues in the material to indicate that we were in a different mode. My students are surrounded by good design all day, every day: advertising, games, magazines, TV, films, … If the most boring, listless and dull thing they see all day is my visual aids, there will be an association.
2. Lectures had two sections of content, one more lecture-y, one more tutorial, with a five minute break in the middle where we discussed topics of interest from outside the classroom. Every lecture hour contained coursework material, the chance t practice it and the opportunity to see how it all fitted into a bigger picture. Students were very positive in their support of the five-minute ‘distraction’ and it also provided an excellent transition point from ‘lecturing with participation’ to ‘student-focused peer-level activity with lecturer overview’.
3. Giving the students their own ‘interesting things’ space on the electronic forums. We had standard information fora, student questions and a couple of others where students could just chat about things. Participation in the ‘offside’ forums was optional although all students were enrolled at the start. It is some 3 months since the last class and there is still occasional traffic on the interesting things fora. It kept the main lines of communication clear but allowed, in much the same way as the five-minute diversion, space for expansion and thought.
4. We increased the difficulty of the practical work, once we had confirmed basic skills and provided practice in the skills required to approach the harder programming work. After several weeks of small ‘1 week’ scale C++ programming exercises, we dropped a deliberately loosely-spec’d problem onto the students that required them to carry out a proper design, plan their testing and write their code efficiently, over a two week timeframe. Before this we had rewarded design with a few marks and also had the in-class demonstrators discuss and encourage testing, as well as presenting it in lectures. Student feedback on this prac was very positive – challenging but highly rewarding. The code standard of the class jumped up after this. Also, students who had wondered why had been preaching design for such ‘simple’ problems indicated that they now understood that they had been practising design as a process, at the same time that they were practising coding. This startled some of them because we had apparently been thinking hard about the design of the course itself. (Which we had, but it’s nice when people realise it.)
5. We encouraged and rewarded student reflection on process with cold, hard marks. Student were required to provide a written reflection on their software development process at two stages, just after the hard prac and at the end of the course. Both times, most marks were awarded for clarity of communication and addressing key points, rather than any definition of a ‘right answer’. As a result, the final reflections were written at a very high level, showing a clear understanding of the requirement for design and testing, as well as having almost no syntax or grammar errors and, for the most parts, clearly showing evidence of thought and editing.

The class in question did very well but, regrettably, they should have anyway because they were all self-selected high achievers in a small class. There is no quantitative strength in a numerical discussion here (I have measurement elements in place but there is no significance in the results, yet). The qualitative approach is far more interesting, because the student feedback clearly shows participating, engaged and self-aware students who can communicate verbally and in writing. The hardest prac in the course was the most popular, because of the challenge, but it was an achievable challenge. We set the bar higher, the students climbed higher. Most, if not all of them, now realise the reason that we talk about design and testing so much, and how you can use one or both to reduce your development time by reducing your bug load in later phases. That’s not bad at all for the end of their first 12 months and only their second computing course after a rapid-fire grounding in OOP in C++ in a previous semester.

I look forward to running this course again next year with 130 students from a broad range. Let’s see what happens.