- What are the options for long-term professional development? Knowing how to teach is important. Knowing how to improve teaching and approach our own professional development are more important in the long run. As the old Chinese saying goes, give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed for a lifetime. To help you have a long-term plan, I had some conversations with experienced colleagues and I invite you to hear their experiences and opinions. - When I started out I did the safe thing, which was I was a teaching assistant when I did my PhD work, so I pulled out the lecture notes from the courses I was a teaching assistant and then try to focus on the parts that I'm more interested in or the parts that I felt that I had more expertise. That in some way was an easy thing to do, right, because you knew the lecture, you knew the materials and assignments for the students, but later on as I had more experience in watching a lot of young colleagues making that transition from graduate students to being maybe full-time lecturers or instructors or assistant professors, I find that the really outstanding ones, based not only on the student evaluation scores, but also on their teaching assistant spontaneously telling me how great this new colleague was in teaching, what I found was they capitalise on their youth so instead of pulling out notes from much older professors and trying to modify it, they actually try to think as a young person in their twenties or whatever. They're much closer to the students in terms of what they're interested in, what kind of YouTube videos would be interesting, what kind of topics are interesting to the students. They were much better in thinking about how students see the world. So I think the younger instructors, the outstanding ones tend to try to find topics that are not just like trying to make a point of some moral issues, but rather to try to think from a student's point of views what are the issues that they worry about, that they care about, and so on. So then they also got to eventually the goal of getting them to think big about something that would help improve the human conditions, what would make us good citizens, but then their starting point is really from something the students are really interested in and care about. And I think that's a strength I think young teachers really need to capitalise on. The others that I think the younger generations now in terms of new teaching colleagues, they are much more savvy in terms of social media. So try to take advantage of that to use that skill to get the students to really feel that you understand them and you're not so old-fashioned and so on and so forth. And then try to get the students to first like you, then they'll be more interested in hearing what you have to say. What are the principles, what are the important lessons in life or in the discipline? A colleague of mine that maybe later on also will be speaking on this programme, one of her really beautiful research findings was that if the students like the teacher they work extra hard in that course. So I think it's a sense of, I really like this teacher, the teacher really cares about me and my learning, so I would work really hard. So getting students to like you is very important. I mean, I'm not trying to suggest as some parents say, oh, I'm my child's best friend, or I try to be the best friend of my children. I'm not suggesting that because it's a different role, a teacher versus a student. I don't think you want to try to become their best friend, but you want them to like you, to really admire you and so then you have a chance in inspiring them to work really hard, to think deeply rather than just doing the assignment. - I was modelling my own practise on previous teachers. My own earlier teachers when I was a student, and I was good at it in the sense that the students were very happy with course design and delivery, they rated me very highly as a teacher according to the usual indicators, and so I was considered to be a good teacher. And I even thought I was a good teacher, but then eventually I came to the view that perhaps maybe I'm not. Maybe if we really ask what kind of learning is taking place maybe it's not quite what I would like it to be. And this came about because I decided to ask the students some questions about their learning, to ask them how they went about learning. And in engaging in this little study or survey of student learning practises, I came to learn, to discover that they weren't learning deeply and that they weren't learning in ways that would remain with them after the assessment. Many of them admitted that they forgot most of it shortly after the assessment. And this was greatly disappointing to me because if all that I'm doing is providing some sort of learning activity, a learning experience that only serves assessment purposes, and that's all, so we can say you get an A and you get a B and that's all, then it's really a very disappointing sort of realisation. So, when I came to this realisation then I thought, then I have to redesign my whole pedagogy. It's not achieving its purpose at all. And this was an interesting challenge, because what would I do? After all, what I had been doing was what all of my colleagues were doing. We were following the standard legal pedagogy. The standard legal practise in teaching and learning in law schools throughout the common law world for more than a century. If that isn't producing productive learning, then what am I to do? And then when I thought about it and I talked to students about why they didn't have to learn deeply in order to succeed I found out that in fact our assessment is wrong. Our assessment is, of course students naturally will work hard to be good at the assessment. If the assessment isn't designed well, then they will be learning the wrong things. So it came to me, I must redesign the assessment so that when students try to become, when they work hard to try to become good at doing the assessments they will be working hard to become good at learning the right things and in the right way. I want them to become independent learners. I want them to become proactive learners and I can only do that by asking them to work independently and to learn proactively, and I must also assess that work so that they will be motivated to do it. So I just threw out all of my assessments. The whole method of assessment I discarded in place of the use of authentic materials. And by using authentic materials such as news reports, students would now be required to think hard about events that actually occur, that are occurring periodically in the community. - I mean, I enjoy it. You know, is the number one thing. And I've been teaching for a long time and I've tried not to teach the same year every year. You're always trying to work out how you can improve on things and make it better, so that sometimes comes from your own perspective, but then also you've gotta get feedback from others' perspectives so sometimes that means asking colleagues or asking students or recent graduates about how you're doing and what's going on in your course and what works and what doesn't as well as looking at the feedback that comes through the various channels that we have that allows us to see how we can improve the course that we're doing. And then you end up going to other courses. You know, you might go to, there might be something on at the main campus, there might be something on CETL, and that gives you an idea and you go, oh yeah, wouldn't that be great if I were able to fit that in with what I'm doing. There's a gap there that would really help out quite nicely. So there's those things that give you the idea and then maybe you come up with something innovative as well that you want to try out. And then also you've got, I've been involved in our teaching learning quality control committee. I'm the chairman of that, so I get a lot of feedback from, I get documents that tells me a lot of feedback from students and I can see what's happening. That also gives me a different student perspective. It may be a higher level of the curriculum with regards to things that we need to look at with regards to getting ideas for what needs to be improved, problematizing what that is and then working out a solution. And then from that we've written one or two teaching development grants to help out with solving, some also attempting to solve some of those solutions and we have. And then I suppose over a period of time I have been making a vested interest in going out to attend international dental education conferences. And again, when you go there in this environment, you see what the latest trends are, you see what they're doing in Europe or in other parts of the world. You see what's happening, 'cause that's very important to get that international perspective, 'cause in Hong Kong maybe sometimes we just get a local perspective or regional perspective, but going overseas allows you to see how different ideas, different innovations, that you can consider whether you apply them into what you're doing. And then of course you've got the opportunity for a collaboration. You know, we're realising that more and more that's an important thing that we should be thinking about and working out how we can improve our own course by acquiring expertise from somewhere else. And then they share in our expertise in reverse as well. I would say don't do it the way that I did it, which is without organisation. So I wasn't organised, I wasn't thinking that this was important. We didn't know about at the time, so when I suddenly thought of applying for things and grants or whatever it had to be, I was having to pull all these things together. And so it's one of those things you have to make a concerted effort from the beginning to work out how you make a particular document, whether it's a Google doc or something like a list on an app on your phone that you can access on your desktop that allows you to easily put things into. And so you'll have a document that you'll be able to put things in. So whether it's course innovation or ideas, if you've had feedback from particular staff members who've been observing your teaching, comments and things from students that they've made, evidence that shows that you've had an impact. You also want to be considering whether you have been able, been collaborating with colleagues on anything that happens to be. So somehow you're gonna have to work out your own framework that you're gonna wanting to be developing over time and as you career progresses it might be looking at your own course, and then after a period of time it might be your course and somebody else's course that you're collaborating with, and then you might be looking at some scholarship things with regards to writing about the outcomes, the grants that you might be writing, the presentations that you might be making that relate to educational things. Maybe there's knowledge to exchange that you do within the university or outside. So it's definitely coming up with something that you're putting it into as you're going along rather than as an afterthought. And then of course we have to say that a great place to get ideas about how to structure this is through CETL, the courses that they have in regards to developing a teaching portfolio and applying for awards and things like that. - I think key to starting off as a new academic is learning how to lead yourself. So I think that's the first step. So in terms of, are you well organised? Are your time management skills good? Do you feel that you're on top of your game? I think once you're in that position, then you can start thinking about leading your students, because at the end of the day, you're trying to inspire your students to follow an academic pathway and so what are the different component parts there. So I think being enthusiastic about what you're doing to get them engaged, then making sure that you're supporting them in their development, then hopefully will lead you on to think how might you do this with other staff or more junior staff as they come in and you've become more au fait with the rules of the game and what the career entails so that you can bring on other staff so it might be that you become a programme director, you've got to then inspire other staff to really get excited about curriculum development, about how they might change their modules to be even more exciting for students, embedding things like internationalisation and employability into that module, you've got to inspire your staff, then, to want to do that and I think if you've been successful with your students, many of those principles are the same then as you're moving forward. But then of course at the end of the day you're wanting your staff to take on more responsibilities so you distribute that leadership as well and you're bringing their careers on. And so it goes on until you've got leadership at all levels. So I think that's kind of the aim of the game. So by the time one becomes a pro-vice-chancellor, teaching and learning, you've got a number of people who are all signed up and really committed to that vision of bringing about the best possible student learning outcomes and feeling sufficiently motivated to put a lot of effort into undertaking that task. Female academics, I think, is a tricky one when looking at academia, and I know a lot has to be done, but there's there's still a long way to go, and I think all you have to do is look at senior management roles and how few numbers of females are in those positions. And of course I think the biggest issue is the fact that females are the ones who might leave to have a family and of course once they leave to have a family often they're having to take some time out of their research for one thing, and some of the teaching responsibilities that they might have wished to been engaged in and suddenly they're having to have that time out and kind of catching up when you get back is not always that simple, but I think that we've got much more family friendly policies by and large across the globe. Although, as I said, there is still a way to go. I think the pressure I felt, certainly, as a junior academic was that the only way to get on was to not have a family and I just thought, well, I'm sorry, but that's not an option I'm prepared to take. So it's how you actually juggle the two and carry on and I think the key thing is be true to yourself but also don't let other's views of what it is to be a female get in the way of you just demonstrating your worth. - You will find these aspects more and more important as you progress in your teaching career. In fact, for everything my guests mentioned in this interview, you could find research evidence backing them up. For example, reflective practise. It means observing what you do, evaluating what you do reflecting on what you do, and improving what you do. It is a process of learning from experience towards gaining new insights of practise. When you go to module four, you will get to know the experiential learning cycle as one of the guests had mentioned, many of the principles that work for students' learning would work on us, too. Reflective practise is an important means of professional development and life-long learning. For another example, teaching portfolio. It captures the evidence of a teacher's teaching career and teaching effectiveness. From now and then you will need them in critical moments for professional development, performance review, promotion or tenure, or for job application. Listening to the experienced teachers learning from how they excel in their teaching career you would be able to approach your professional development more strategically.
