
Four aspects of teaching are identified: Aims/content; Teaching Methods; Assessment Methods; Evaluation.
Each is to be studied from the perspective of a particular set of views about student learning and the nature of scholarship which are introduced in Sections A and B.
Each is also, subsequently, to be the subject of reflective practice based in the teacher's own work.
Rationale for this model in terms of scholarship
Imagine that you were to undertake a research investigation into some aspect of an area within your field that totally fascinates you. Consider four crucial decisions you must make:
- What will be the precise focus - the particular goal, the intention of it all?;
- What will be the preferred method for the investigation?;
- What will count as success, and how will you know it when you see it?;
- Assuming you need to eventually report to someone, how will you evaluate your work in order to convince an outsider it has been worthwhile, even if it were to show up nothing, or the outcomes failed to support your hypothesis (which often happens in research) ?
Now imagine that you are to undertake teaching a group of students a topic within an area of your field that totally fascinates you. Consider four crucial decisions you must make:
- What will the aims of the teaching be (with reference to the content of this field)?
- Which teaching method or approach would you be best advised to use to achieve
these aims?- How will you know whether your students have been successful? That is, how will you
assess what they have gained from their study?- How will you evaluate your work as teacher, to prove to an outsider it has been done well even if students don't all get brilliant results (which often happens in teaching) ?
- The parallelism in the two cases ought to be obvious and require no further comment. What is not so obvious, however, is an additional similarity between the two: the nature of the "glue" that holds the whole thing together, or the inner source of the integrity that binds each system
In research, decisions about focus, method, success and evaluation are always going to be made (other things being equal) in terms of whether your choice is likely to best satisfy your intrinsic (and insatiable) curiosity towards the subject - as befits a scholar, who is before anything else, curious.
In teaching, decisions about aims and content, teaching method, assessment and evaluation are going to be made (other things being equal) in terms of whether your choice will best satisfy the desires, the hopes, the yearnings you have towards your students and their learning - again, as befits a scholar, who is - before anything else when teaching - concerned that students learn well.
That is why "Student Learning" is placed as the "glue" that holds everything else together in the model we use for "Scholarly Teaching". It will be referred to many times in the course of study.
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