this is what i believe ...
SELECT beliefs, musings FROM teaching_fellows WHERE university = 'Leeds' AND name = 'tony';
I've been asked this question before, and I still find it rather difficult to think about a "philosophy" of "teaching". It's surely the learning of something that's the problem. My role is to facilitate that learning; maybe that's what "teaching" is?
I find it difficult to believe that anyone has ever learned anything very much solely from being taught; here I must mean "taught" in the classical sense of attending lectures, attending tutorials and labs and completing coursework assignments. I still consider lectures a rather quaint activity, and I remain surprised at how popular and widespread they are. Yes, I do go and present lectures, but I'm probably guilty of doing that because I seem them on the timetable and figure I ought to.
It may well be possible to get the basic gist of what something is all about from "being taught", but that sounds so terribly passive. Learning should be an active thing, where a learner gets seriously stuck into something. This leads me neatly to the idea of a "teacher" (horrible word) as a motivator. I see my role as very much motivational. My job is to support the learners. I have to motivate them and convince them that they can expect to achieve success in what they are doing. I have to watch for those who are struggling, and I have to encourage them before it's too late. I have to try to understand what it is like to learn as a student who is part of a degree course in a mass Higher Education System. I have to understand the pressures students face outside University and I have to be sympathetic to these; I might even have to be prepared to bend some institutional rules if it seems the right thing to do.
So, my role is very much more of a motivator (supporter? coach?) rather than something that fits the traditional view of a teacher.
But, I confess that I do still give lectures. I'm not at all convinced that these quaint gatherings represent a useful activity from the point of view of conveying information, but the students seem to demand them. If there are no lectures, they complain that there should be. They don't seem to have any firm ideas about what should be discussed in the lectures, though. This also surprises me. Perhaps the lecture is some sort of comfort blanket?
When I first wrote this document, I was focusing on teaching programming. At the time I wondered if I would have written a rather different document had I been thinking about teaching databases. Would I?
Having just looked through the previous document, and made many changes, I now think that there probably is not that much difference. I can give a lecture on, say, normalisation, but a student is not going to understand that until they do it. And they probably won't appreciate the importance of it until they meet a badly normalised database and have to work with it.
Perhaps the difference in databases is that there is some content that is "bookwork" (I want a better word for that). The internals of a DBMS, or two-phase locking, are things that need to be understood if you're going to work effectively with databases, but there isn't that practical element to them. I can just about see the point of a lecture on those, but then the students could always just go and read a book.
So, the summary of my philosophy would still be that my job is to support and motivate those who are learning. My job is not to teach them.
artefact
I'll stick with the same artefact as I used for the programming portfolio. It shows, I think, how I came to realise that teaching was not all about presenting lectures in new and innovative ways, but was about engaging and enthusing students. The date, of course, also hints at when this happened ...
Tony Jenkins, Teaching Programming: A Journey from Teacher to Motivator, Proceedings of LTSN-ICS Conference, London, 2001. [PDF]
university of leeds | school of computing | disciplinary commons | tony jenkins
