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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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