Tag: student

Some challenges for the University teacher

This site is about being a teacher in a university and practicing SMART teaching. It is aimed at helping the person responsible for orchestrating the student learning experience (in-class, out of class, around class) in times when the rhetoric is about changing the way teaching happens whilst at the same time better meeting our ‘customer’s’ expectations.

We are urged to do less ‘lecturing’ and get students to work together more, be more active participants in classroom sessions during which they collaborate and, if we are really lucky, create new knowledge and outputs. And alongside all of that, we are also pressured into using technology more to help achieve the change.

And as if that’s not enough alongside stuff, alongside that last that, we have to worry about assessing students, giving them good feedback, getting them to engage with that feedback and helping them to think, reflect, improve, develop their skills, become more employable, deliver world peace, solve poverty and hopefully not degenerate into too much populism.

Phew!! Tall order or what?

Partnership with Students

Partnership is key to the effectiveness of what happens in a university classroom. Partnership between teachers and students. The students need to understand why a teacher might choose to use a particular curriculum delivery approach, whether the approach uses technology extensively or not.

Without that partnership and understanding of the role played by both sides, it is highly likely that either the teacher or at least some of the students will be disappointed. That partnership component is especially important when a teacher uses techniques that are different to those the students experience regularly.

Using technology in different ways in a classroom (e.g. to get students to participate with their own internet enabled devices) is one common situation where things can go wrong, if the students have not been prepared for what is going to happen and why its going to happen that way.