What makes great teaching?

In preparation for my module on facilitating groups next term, I have been doing a bit of digging around to try and find out what makes a great lecturer. I think the basics of how to train are fairly well documented, but I'm trying to go a bit further and identify the factors that distinguish between a good and a great session.

This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study which asked a bunch of award-winning academics to talk about their sessions. The authors identified five themes:

1. First and foremost, the academics talked about connections. The connections described were either between the students and the teacher, or between the student and the topic. The relationship between the teacher and students was helped by lots of interaction and something they call audience-performer effect which is what happens when the teacher actually changes their behaviour in response to the students' reactions. Connections between the student and the topic were the result of the teacher's efforts to make the topic relevant to the students.
2. The second theme was excitement and interest. The teachers were aware of the students' interest either in what they were saying or in an activity the students were asked to do. Teachers often used anecdotes and humour to get the students engaged.
3. The third common theme was the flow of the session, which was illustrated by clear links between topics, activities and sessions. The academics also talked about the pace of the session and being aware of the energy in the room.
4. The fourth one was to do with clarity. The academics interviewed felt that it was crucial that the students really understood the messages, and seemed very aware of the students' levels of understaning.
5. Finally, the academics talked about the relationship between control and spontaneity in the sessions, keeping to a clear structure when needed, but also being able to go off on a tangent when it serves to keep the students engaged.

I really enjoyed reading this paper as it seemed to strike a chord with my experiences as a student.

Pollio, H. R., & Lee Humphreys, W. (1996). What award-winning lecturers say about their teaching: It's all about connection. College Teaching, 44(3), 101-106.

Girls, boys and computer science

I'm really interested in how we make career decisions. It's clearlu hugely complex, and I don't think we really understand how it works, and what factors are the most influential.

I've come across this paper by Rommes and colleagues who did a really interesting study on adolescent girls in The Netherlands. The authors were exploring something called self to prototype matching theory. This theory suggests that we make our career decisions (in part) by comparing our selves to a prototype of a typical person who might do a particular job. The best match is the one we plump for.

Matching theories are very out of fashion in the world of career reseach these days, for a range of reasons, but mostly because all the evidence seems to suggest that we just don't make career decisions that way. But I think this one is different. 

Traditional matching theories advise us to systematically compare our career interests, values and skills to the kinds of things we might expect to do in a particular job. Self to prototype matching involves an assessment of the type of person they imagine to work in that role, rather than the job itself. According to this idea, decisions are made on all kinds of features of the prototype including their appearance and their interests.

The traditional matching approach would suggest that someone who was interested in computers would choose a job where they could work with computers. The self to prototype matching approach, in contrast, might lead to someone who was interested in computers to decide against a job with computers because they didn’t want to be seen as the kind of person who works with computers

So, this paper explored this exact thing, and their findings indicate that the girls in their study chose not to pursue a career in computer science because they thought that girls working in computer science were not sexually attractive to boys.

What was particularly curious about this study was that how the girls said they made their decisions didn't seem to tally with how they actually made their decisions. 

The two reasons cited by the girls were 1) they had no interest in computers and 2) they were more keen on people than things. This particular group of girls were all really enjoying the computer module which they had chosen to do, and had a really clear idea that computer scientists work in teams and deal with clients. But for some reason they reported, and seemed to believe that they were making sound career choices on the basis of their career interests.

The authors suggest that the girls felt the need (either consciously or more likely unconsciously) to find a reason which seemed acceptable within the modern liberal individualistic culture of the The Netherlands. Being explicit about rejecting computer science because they feared it would make them look unattractive to boys would not go down well within their culture, so they came up with something which sounded more credible (not choosing to work with computers because they weren't interested in them) despite this flying in the face of the reality.

For me the two key things here are that career choices are about identity (who do you want to be?) and not just the job itself (what do you want to do?) , and that asking people how they make their decisions is not always a reliable guide for how they actually do.

Rommes, E., Overbeek, G., Scholte, R., Engels, R., & De Kemp, R. (2007). ‘I'M NOT INTERESTED IN COMPUTERS’: Gender-based occupational choices of adolescents. Information, Community and Society, 10(3), 299-319.