A toast to university instructors

by Fung Lan Yong

Daily Express Sabah, January 25, 2015, page 18

University instructors include lecturers, senior lecturers, assistant professors, associate professors, and full professors whose principal focus is to help students achieve their full academic and psychosocial potential by treating them as unique individuals who are an integral part of society.  Believing that tertiary education should emphasise both the students and their own community, many university instructors strive to impart the knowledge and skills that students can fully integrate into their own lives.  Progressive and pragmatic, they also encourage students to learn by doing and to develop innovative problem solving and critical thinking skills.  To know more about their educational philosophy, roles, and contributions, the writer interviewed several university instructors and the following paragraphs describe what they often do to help tertiary students successfully pursue their academic and professional endeavours.

 

Teaching philosophy

Upholding that the fundamental purpose of tertiary education is to encourage students to realise their fullest potential and serve their own society, many university instructors strive to help students develop an internal locus of control concerning their learning, themselves, and their future.  Perceiving students as future agents of social change and reconstruction, many university instructors encourage them to not only acquire pragmatic knowledge and skills, but also to develop the efficacy for innovation and change.    

  

As proponents of experiential and problem-based learning, many university instructors believe that tertiary education should strike a balance between knowledge transmission and students’ interests and prior experiences.  Therefore, they constantly utilise relevant resources and materials that can reinforce students’ minds for effective learning, bearing in mind that most students’ prior knowledge was derived from their own sociocultural environment.

 

Further, many university instructors believe that teaching and learning should have structure and order based on students’ real-life experiences.  Whilst they are unable to determine students’ previous experiences, they can still exert some control over the design of the current situation.   Hence, many university instructors always strive to understand students’ previous experiences in order to create academic situations that are more conducive to learning.  Moreover, gaining greater insight into students’ prior experiences enables them to create a classroom environment that encourages students to apply, synthesise, and evaluate information in order to confront real-life challenges.

 

Additionally, many university instructors regard teaching and learning as psychosocial and interactive processes, contending that the classroom itself can be a psychosocial setting for them to instil innovation and change.  They believe that students will perform better if they are allowed not only to experience and interact with the curriculum, but also to have the opportunity to actively participate in their own learning.   To achieve this, they treat each student as a unique individual who is different from another in terms of psychological predisposition and prior experiences.  Hence, even when they are presenting standard course materials and using specific teaching methods, they bear in mind that each student tends to exhibit a different quality of experience.  In brief, they try to ensure that teaching and learning allow room for individual differences in terms of ability levels, achievement motivation, and learning styles.

 

Teaching innovation and expertise

University instructors have several opportunities to demonstrate their teaching innovation and expertise in various areas.  Many of them have developed special training programs approved by the Ministry of Human Resources, earning them the opportunity to fulfil the ‘Train the Trainer’ assessment requirements.

 

Besides proposing special programs, many university instructors have to develop the syllabi of new courses.  As conveners, they have to source for relevant materials and order reference books after receiving the course outlines.  They are also responsible for the mid-semester exams, projects, and final exams of the new courses.  For example, to meet the intended learning outcomes of a new course, many university instructors have to develop at least four separate assessments, including their guidelines and marking rubrics. For accreditation purposes, they also have to manage the elaborate course mapping required by the Malaysian Quality Assurance (MQA) and Malaysia Ministry of Education (MOE).

 

Many university instructors focus heavily on teaching performance and delivery.  For example, they strive to demonstrate appropriate, innovative, and sustainable use of delivery media to promote optimal matching between teaching objectives and student objectives.  Further, they often adapt relevant printed and electronic articles in order to develop reliable and valid assessments for their courses. They also constantly update their PowerPoint slides to make their teaching more relevant and engaging besides posting course syllabi, content, practice exercises, guidelines, and important announcements in a campus management system (CMS).

 

Besides effective use of delivery media, many university instructors have to supervise the coursework and research projects of graduate students, including Masters and PhD.  As facilitator, supervisor, mentor, or chair, they usually devote a lot of time guiding the students to adequately fulfil all the research requirements of their major.

 

To enhance students’ achievement motivation, many university instructors adopt various teaching techniques to keep students alert, for instance, some emphasize jigsaw reading, note-taking, and effective time management to motivate students to concentrate on their studies.  Jigsaw reading is effective in fostering positive peer relationships, social adjustment, tact, and cooperation, while note-taking is useful for transferring novel information into long-term memory.  Effective time management, on the other hand, enables students to meet deadlines and schedule their time wisely.

  

 

Student-focused teaching

As lecturer, facilitator, and mentor, many university instructors strive to keep students engaged by taking their backgrounds, priorities, and learning styles into consideration.  For example, some usually require students to present an autobiography to share their experiences, personal goals, preferences, and concerns on the first day of classes.  Others prefer to do research on various psychosocial factors that influence teaching and learning and try to incorporate the findings into their teaching. 

 

To encourage active student engagement, many university instructors maintain a record of good availability for student consultation and assistance.  They rarely take sick leave and often use part of their annual leave to reflect on their own teaching, source for new materials, or do research.  Some university instructors even bring their own food to work, which means that students can see them not only during lunch hours, but also after office hours! 

 

To augment learning and teaching, many university instructors take student appraisal seriously and have constantly modified their teaching style based on student feedback.  For instance, some university instructors try to limit lecturer-talk by having jigsaw reading activities and small-group discussions in class.   Others encourage students to read and write more frequently to make learning more exploratory.  Additionally, many university instructors use appropriate and current examples that students can relate to, especially significant events that have occurred in their own community to make the lessons more engaging and realistic.   Overall, many university instructors strive to be empathetic individuals who teach according to the syllabi by providing vivid examples and clear instructions.            

 

Besides using student feedback to improve their teaching, many university instructors strive to ensure that all learning objectives, assessment tasks, and feedback on skills development are fully aligned.   On the first day, they usually distribute the course outlines that serve to remind students to perform every assessment task accordingly.  Besides uploading them onto the campus management system, they also distribute all the guidelines and marking schemes to students to keep them on track.  Finally, to ensure content reliability and validity, many university instructors have all the assessment tasks moderated and subsequently, co-marked or cross-marked.

 

To appropriately assess students’ intended learning outcomes, many university instructors set criterion-referenced assessment tasks, for example, they include only items that are directly related to the learning outcomes and ensure that the difficulty level of each item reflects the learning tasks.  Stressing that the primary goal of an assessment task is to measure the specific knowledge and skills that each student can demonstrate, many university instructors use assessments mainly to determine the specific learning tasks that students are able to perform, indicate the percentage of tasks students perform correctly, or determine whether students attain a certain proficiency level.

 

Finally, many university instructors practise a few things to minimise plagiarism.  For instance, they encourage students to improve their paraphrasing skills, practise effective note-taking, and use a referencing system accurately.  Most importantly, they encourage students to use their own expressions as well as using correct citations at all times.    

 

In support of the professional learning model

In support of the professional learning model, many university instructors strive to integrate appropriate authentic learning experiences into their teaching.  For example, some require undergraduate students to have an oral presentation on their prototype or project, which gives them an opportunity to face a real-life audience.  Others require sophomore or senior students to produce a research report, which includes writing a proposal, administering a questionnaire or interviewing an expert or consumer, analysing the results, tabulating the findings, and making some appropriate recommendations.  They also stress that collecting data via a questionnaire or interview will allow students to build meaningful relationships with future employers, customers, and others who will be their potential stakeholders.  Additionally, they supervise their students closely as they go through all the research steps to ensure that the latter not only acquire problem-solving skills, but also develop the key generic skills to face complex, real-world challenges.  In brief, they encourage students to assume the role of a researcher, problem-solver, and critical thinker. 

 

Further, many university instructors believe that students can only experience authentic learning through active learning approaches; therefore, they encourage students to form small collaborative learning teams to do a project or create a prototype by analysing, synthesising, and evaluating information.  Further, they require students to perform tasks that reflect real-world phenomena by acting as a coordinator, resource investigator, shaper, or specialist.  They postulate that active learning will yield transcendental or community-related experiences as students not only interact with lecturers and peers according to fixed times and venues, but also with different individuals in a variety of sociocultural settings.     

      

Teaching quality assurance and improvement

All university instructors have to follow quality assurance policies and procedures.  For instance, they have to update all the course outlines and conduct the first course panel meeting at least one week before the semester starts.  Additionally, they have to ensure that all the assessments are ready for moderation at least one week before administration.  For each course, many university instructors have at least three panel meetings with the teaching team for co-marking, cross-marking, and unit reviewing purposes.   They also have to print out all the student feedback on their teaching for reflection and future action. 

 

As course conveners, many university instructors have to show effective management of teaching teams and part-time staff.  For example, they have to keep the team informed with regards to the course outlines, assessment tasks, and course panel documentation via email or telephone contact.  Many also request team members to contribute assessment items for various tasks, including the project paper, mid-semester exam, and final exam.  As conveners, they strive to be accommodating, accepting, and empathetic to promote a sense of belonging amongst colleagues.

 

Finally, many university instructors have to prepare a research and scholarship portfolio that aims to provide relevant evidence of their research and creative activities.  They strive to contribute to the development of their discipline by publishing in refereed journals and presenting at international conferences.  Many also write grants or serve as editors or blind reviewers of professional journals.  Since their research and scholarship portfolio helps promote their university as a research-oriented institution of higher learning, many university instructors strive to be listed in such research banks as ‘ReseachGate,’ ‘ProQuest,’ and ‘Google Scholar’ that enable them to strengthen connections, establish closer ties within the academic community, and stay informed about community perceptions of their university as a higher learning institution of choice.

Fung Lan Yong:
fungyong58@gmail.com