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Bryn, this is a good opening statement. I have added comments at the end of each section, but as a summary I recommend the following revisions for your final submission:
- Provide a brief overview of who you are as an educator, your role, what teaching you have done, what led you to this point in your career.
- Ensure you write in a personal voice throughout (i.e. first person singular more than plural - I vs we).
- Add any training or courses you have attended to the developing existing practice section.
- In the developing practice further section, add briefly how you might go about addressing the two points you raised, e.g. how might the PG Cert (modules) help with these aspects of your development?
- Proofread to correct typos.

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In what ways do you want to develop your teaching practice further? 

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In what ways do you want to develop your teaching practice further? 

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Our students are generally ‘happy’ and enjoy the course. I actually don’t think we need a wholesale re-organisation of our teaching. However, our student-cohort are expert surface-learning, exam-crammers. They have developed and honed this skill through three years at medical school. Then we say to them ‘you cannot surface learn this year, and you have to start doing self-directed earning’. I simply think that most of them don’t change their practice. I don’t think many of them engage with the formative feedback (my fault as well as theirs) and I don’t think many of them engage with self-directed learning even when they are told what they should do to help their assessments.

I think there are two things that need urgent attention. One is how to give effect group-based formative feedback. The other is how to convince the students to engage with the self-directed learning that we advise. I don’t currently know how to do either of those things. Therefore engaging students as adult-learners and as self-reflective students is a priority for me, and I hope that it is something I can develop during the PgCert course

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How do you know that your teaching approaches are effective and that students are learning?

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How do you know that your teaching approaches are effective and that students are learning?

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I suspect that our approaches are not very effective and that the students are struggling to learn. I suspect this because despite changing the teaching to align with the assessments, I haven not seen a meaningful improvement in standards. I have only just come to this realisation after assessing ICA1 for the third consecutive year. This troubles me. A lot. I could blame the students for just not being good enough. They are not good at writing essays, reading scientific papers, thinking critically, or communicating effectively. However, I also have to acknowledge that they have not really practiced any of those skills before (or at least since GCSEs). More importantly, they need to develop all of these skills in the first three weeks of our course (ICA1 occurs in week four). That gives us very little time to each them these skills, or for them to learn them.

Unfortunately, I simply don’t have enough time to give feedback on a formative assessment for each student and for each ICA. Therefore, we have asked them to do a presentation as a tutor group and receive feedback on that. I think they found this very boring, and I don’t think they learned much from it. It was ineffective.

Another problem I have encountered is an anxiety-driven need mor more and more instructions for completing an ICA. How long should the introduction be, should we have sub-heading, do references in the text count towards the word count, how many times should be point out confounding factors…. We provide answers/guidance to most of these questions to the point that they usually receive a word document containing pages of answered questions. However, I think many of the students then don’t get the basics right… targeting the work to a specific audience, getting a paragraph structure correct, building an coherent argument on a topic. I need to find a way of telling them that it is the basics that count the most. I don’t know how to do that effectively.

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How have you developed your existing teaching practice?

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How have you developed your existing teaching practice?

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Three years ago the course scrapped exams and replaced them with in course assessments. I had a fairly peripheral role on the course at the time but we essentially didn’t change anything. I just removed the exams and inserted coursework deadlines. This didn’t work. Student feedback was terrible and frankly, the course just didn’t make any sense. I was delivering lectures with content that could be ‘crammed’ for exams that didn’t exist any more. The following year, I took over as module-lead and decided to re-align the content with the assessments. I produced quite a lot of new content and introduced much more specific training for the ICAs. Feedback improved a lot but there were still many things to improve. This year was even better, and I suspect that things will gradually continue to improve through a trial and error system.

I think our teaching methods are still generally quite old-fashioned. There are a number of reasons for this. First, I’m a bit tech-phobic. Second, it is much quicker and easier to write a lecture than it is to design a TBL session, and e-module, or flip a classroom. Third:- Assessments really are the main thing our students care about. Therefore, provided they get the ICA support they want, I don’t think they really care whether they get an ‘interactive lecture’ or a TBL session. Fourth:- Our course is the most popular BSc pathway because the contact hours are quite lite. Therefore, I think what the students want, in order of importance, is:- ICA support, limited  contact hours, friendly and approachable lecturers, inspirational scientific talks, engaging sessions, teaching materials. As such, although we do have some modern teaching tech on our course, we have focused more on cohort building (we run a weekly pub-style quiz in their tutor groups, which they love), cool science talks, and fairly dry ICA-prep sessions. There is, of course, the more important open question of what the students need. I have not received any formal teaching training, so I am looking forward to learning some best practice.

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What do you believe are the roles of teachers and students in higher education? 

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What do you believe are the roles of teachers and students in higher education? 

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I think teachers facilitate learning, and are also responsible for assessment. The role of students (at least on the intercalated BSc in Endocrinology) is to obtain a mark of 70% or greater. Let’s reflect on that a little more.

First, some background. On my course, we are at the point where assessment is driving learning. My students complete three in course assessments (ICAs), one at the end of each three-week ‘teaching-block’. These consist of:-

1)      A critical review of a scientific paper

2)      A grant proposal, presented as a PPT, on their own original idea

3)      Writing a scientific paper using a data-set that we provide them

These assessments have been set ‘centrally’, but I have quite a lot of scope to set the details. They are designed to asses understanding of a topic, and scientific thinking skills. However, all three are ultimately communication tasks.

I must say, I feel my role as teacher on this course is to make sure that the students feel ‘well supported’ for their ICAs. Indeed, the teaching is increasingly geared towards that metric. I think there is an expectation amongst our particular student-cohort that they will get a first-class mark. If they don’t, then it must be because they were not adequately supported. As such, the main feedback at the Staff-Student Liaison Group is that the students want more ICA-support. My Head of Department is somewhat financially motivated to provide this as the students have a choice of BSc pathways and popular pathways (ones with the best feedback, and highest proportion of first-class marks) are the most profitable. I sat down with my pathway director after teaching block1 this year and discussed with him the fact that we basically gave so much ICA support that we forgot to teach the students any actual Endocrinology. Does that matter? Perhaps not much. We have taught them to think critically and challenge accepted norms. We have also taught them the concept of self-directed learning (which is new to many of them and perhaps especially important for medica students that are used to being ‘spoon-fed’ information). We have taught them communication skills, and team-working skills. Does content matter at all any more?

I consider assessment very important because I think that as a medical school we do need to identify the very best students. We are in a fortunate position really because our assessments are never about ‘failing’ (our students are all pre-selected to be very good or excellent). Rather, they are about assessing whether a student has reached the highest level, or not quite. My main problem with our assessments (which speaks to that ‘socio’ theory of learning) is that they are basically all about communicating difficult scientific things in an effective way. This likely favours students that think like me and, dare I say, students that went to private schools. I try very hard to design assessments to remove these biases, but it is really not easy.

Coming back to the role of students on our course. I think the only thing we ask them is to come in with an ‘open mind’. I suppose that is not really very informative for them and we should be more precise about what we expect of them in higher education.

Should it be this way? What should the role of students and teachers be in higher education? I’m not really sure.

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Bryn Owen (00331362)

Opening Teaching Statement

Rather than provide a generic reflection on higher education teaching and learning, I have decided to focus this statement on my experience. I run a module for the 4th year undergraduate medical students. The role is important to me but comprises only a fraction of my time, the majority of which is devoted to running a research group. As such, this is really my first teaching role. I have grown in to it over the last six years from giving one lecture, to being a module lead and a de-facto year deputy director.