Dear Content Contributor,
We want to thank our esteemed contributors for the various comments and feedbacks received so far. However, we believe that there is the need for inclusion of teaching courses in the curriculum of all postgraduate courses in our Universities and other higher educational institutions, in order to equip them with adequate teaching methodology/pedagogy that will prepare them for effective teaching as most countries are now tending towards knowledge-based economy.
Derek Bok, a former President of the Harvard University, validates our experience with an unprepared new faculty by placing the responsibility for lack of pedagogical skills firmly on the back of graduate schools: Quoted from his paper; “The most glaring defect of our graduate progammes, however, is how little they do to prepare their students to teach”. Our environment is not an exception to this fact. Now that there are serious interests of postgraduates students in wanting to come back to take-up teaching/lecturing job in our various Universities. This could pose a serious problem if there are teaching deficiencies in our educational institutions.
The book; “Achieving Excellence in Teaching: A Self-Help Guide Book by (Charlie Sweet et al, 2014) shows that there is an urgent need for the individual lecturer to measure his/her teaching effectiveness based on the techniques listed in the attachments. Although, many faculty members started their first full-time teaching job in the University without taking an education course, never attended a teaching conference/ workshop, and never enrolled in a true student-teacher observation programme. These deficiencies may have created serious gaps within the teaching and learning system in our institutions.
While, many lecturers are not trained to teach, they are very versatile in their various disciplines. At the end, it is the student that loses out. For one reason or another, they could also lack the passion to impart knowledge and the students suffer for this. So, how do faculty members become better teachers? Too often, through ‘trial and error’ as well as modeling their graduate professors. What makes a highly effective teacher? Simply put, it entail: Time, effort, lots of both and deliberate practice (consciously executing the appropriate skill points at a high level with the goal of constant improvement)
Your primary goal as an excellent teacher is to produce deep learning students. To achieve this, you need to constantly evaluate your teaching skills on these evaluation scales as proposed by (Charlie Sweet et al, 2014), as follows:
RATE: Teaching Paradigms and Authority
Kindly download self evaluation scale for each measurement.
