Crossing boundaries: Reflections by a former academic developer
Guest post by Tracy Zou, Chinese University of Hong Kong
I recently transitioned from an academic developer position, located in a central teaching and learning unit, to the Faculty of Education where I took on the exciting responsibility of teaching in the classroom. The transition brings both excitement and anxiety. I am excited as I can apply what I have pitched over the past six years in my own classroom; I am nervous because I don’t know whether those teaching strategies will work or not. These two lines of argument, like an angel and a devil, keep repeating in my mind.
After nearly eight weeks of teaching from September to November 2021, I do have quite a lot of reflections on what worked and what did not. I have been assigned three new courses in the Postgraduate Diploma in Education Programme, the largest class with 70 students and the smallest with 45. At the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), we resumed face-to-face teaching so I fortunately did not need to manage the highly complex hybrid mode. I would like to share with you some of my reflections about what worked, what did not, and what I find always to be true.
What worked?
Many of the strategies to engage students worked very well. These include connecting the course materials to students’ prior experiences and knowledge, giving students sufficient opportunities to discuss and share, and having some group work. Since I am now teaching entire courses, rather than the one-off workshops I did as an academic developer, I could more easily connect the new materials not only with students’ prior knowledge but also with discussions and debates from the previous class. One of my classes started with a question posted to students: “what happened in your first day of teaching?”, which prompted active contributions from many students and insightful discussions connecting the stories to theories. These then sparked some new thoughts that helped me prepare for the next session.
The feedback strategies, e.g. dialogic feedback and timely feedback, also worked very well. I provide personalised feedback to students’ work every week, which helps them make small improvements every time. As a result, I observe their work getting better week by week. My students, in turn, seem to appreciate this approach, judging be the emails I receive.
What did not work?
An important lesson learned is that anything related to assessment (or more precisely, graded assessment) needs to be extremely carefully thought through. I guess every teacher knows the importance of assessment (Biggs, 2003). However, I had not really understood how difficult it can be until I experienced it as a faculty member. When designing an assessment, what I focused on was whether it aligned with the intended learning outcomes and whether it could evaluate my students’ performance and hopefully encourage them to learn new things. However, when students read the assignment, their focus would probably be on how to achieve the best result. Fairness is therefore a top concern.
In my courses, I designed the presentation topics and invited student groups to indicate priorities. I thought I would be able to allocate each group their preferred topics, or at least within their first three priorities. However, it turned out that this stirred many discussions regarding the perceived difficulty of the topics and the fairness of the allocation process. I sincerely believe every topic had a similar level of difficulty, although there are perhaps different types of challenges involved in addressing the topic. In this first semester, I did not have the opportunity to attempt staff-student co-creation of topics, something I pitched as highly meaningful as an academic developer, but now I would not underestimate any potential challenges with this approach.
What is always true?
One thing I found to be always true is that a teacher’s passion and caring for students always comes through. I said to myself: All my students are teachers or teachers-to-be. Only if they feel comfortable with what they are doing, can they (hopefully) pass on the positive attitudes to their students. I had the same attitude when I was an academic developer with faculty members as audience, and I could tell that my workshop participants appreciated my caring disposition. In my current teaching, I try my best to take into consideration students’ practical situations and difficulties in my course design and feedback provision. Although I did not explicitly tell my students that their well-being is my first priority, one student told me, “I enrolled in your courses for the next semester because I could feel you prioritise students in your class.” This comment made my day.
Recommendations for academic developers
Based on my experiences both as an academic development provider and receiver, I would like to propose some recommendations for academic developers:
1. No matter what strategies or pedagogies you are promoting, think about how it will materialise in the timeframe of a semester with a group of students. When I was an academic developer, I did not think this through carefully as I probably focused too much on the specific strategy or pedagogy itself. Now I understand I am not designing a few assessment topics, but a sufficient number of topics for the whole class. Now my feedback is not just affecting the current session or the next, but will have an effect on the final reflective paper. In addition, the course design needs to be confirmed a few weeks before the semester starts, so the thinking on pedagogy would need to be done much earlier. I would place much more emphasis on these time and structural issues if I were an academic developer again.
2. The classic saying on theory and practice integration is still important, but there is much more on the practical side that needs to be considered. When I was an academic developer, I did often consider how a strategy or a pedagogy could be implemented with different groups of students in various disciplines in different years of study. However, I was not always able to imagine a full “simulation” of how this would play out. More importantly, I hadn’t really imagined the amount of inquiries and follow-up emails a teacher needs to handle when implementing something new with the students.
3. Promote the pedagogy of care. I consider myself new in terms of classroom teaching. For many new teachers like me, it is probably risky to adopt a pedagogy that is different from the norm (i.e. practices by other teachers in the same programme). We often have the pressure to first get our syllabus established and tested when teaching new courses. However, it is not risky, in my view, to practice the pedagogy of care at any stage of one’s career, and it could always help some students, if not all. Referring to what Associate Professor Maha Bali (2020) wrote on the pedagogy of care, I fully agree that we should make a habit out of showing care in the course philosophy and design and towards our students.
References
Bali, M. (2020). Pedagogy of care: Covid-19 edition. https://blog.mahabali.me/educational-technology-2/pedagogy-of-care-covid-19-edition/
Biggs, J.B. (2003). Teaching for quality learning at university. Buckingham: The Open University Press.
Dr. Tracy Zou is Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Administration and Policy in the Faculty of Education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Before joining CUHK, she worked as an academic developer for six years in the Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include teachers’ professional development, internationalisation of the curriculum, and teaching and research nexus. She is currently teaching three courses in the Postgraduate Diploma in Education Programme hosted by the Faculty of Education at CUHK. You can find her on Twitter @ZouTracy.
This post is part of the “Around the world” series on faculty development. Watch this space in the coming months for more inspiration on professional development approaches in Higher Education from around the globe.
