This is how I teach

Established in 2016, the Adelaide Education Academy (AEA) aims to promote, support and recognise teaching excellence across the University of Adelaide. The sixty-nine full, and four affiliate, members come to the Academy from across the five facilities, and bring with them with a broad range of specialisms and life experiences.

For this months ‘This is how I teach’ we spoke to three newly-appointed members of the AEA - Dr Alistair Standish, Lecturer for the Masters of Biotechnology program within the School of Biological Sciences; Kerrie Stockley, Simulation Coordinator at Adelaide Health Simulation and Dr David Hunter, Senior Lecturer in Ethics and Professionalism with the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences.

What do you like most about teaching in your discipline?

Alistair:  With the field of Biotechnology evolving and changing at a rapid rate, we must continually update our courses to keep them up to date. I love that not only am I teaching in my discipline, I am also learning each and every day. This keeps me on my toes, so that I can keep up with latest developments, and understanding. This keeps my enthusiasm high too, which helps keep students interested and excited about their learning also.

Kerrie: I really enjoy teaching, and I am very fortunate to be a teaching academic with Adelaide Health Simulation. The best part about my teaching is assisting learners from Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences in developing psychomotor skills, and leadership and clinical decision making skills. 

David:  Teaching philosophy (which ethics is a part of) is interesting because so often it involves teaching what we don’t know, rather than what we do. In other words we teach students to question their own certainty about topics, and to have some intellectual humility. I particularly like that point when students click, and you can see their eyes light up as they understand that the issue being discussed is more complex than they initially thought and they start to look more deeply at the issue.

How would you describe your approach to teaching/your teaching philosophy?

Alistair:  My core teaching philosophy is that every student has the right to learn. Every student is different; they learn differently, they excel in different areas and at different assessments, and my job is to get the best out of them, and enable every student to improve and prosper during their time here. This means that I constantly have to use my entire toolbox of teaching techniques, and modify how I do things on the fly, so that I can get the best out of all students.

Kerrie:  My approach to teaching is creating a safe and supportive environment so students are comfortable to adopt an experiential learning style. This allows me to actively and purposefully engage with students in simulation.

The benefits of this style of learning for students is it affords the learner to reflect and actively produce their own understanding of the situation while enhancing their knowledge and skills.

David:  Ultimately my approach to teaching is to aim to equip my students to consider ethical issues themselves – since they will encounter them in their future careers. To do this I aim to develop their ethical and critical thinking skills, along with their emotional maturity and ethical awareness/sensitivity. So in essence I aim to make myself irrelevant as a teacher. To do this I use a strongly case & discussion oriented approach – I aim to use realistic cases, if I can I draw them from experiences of previous students in the same course, so that the new students can see that these are the kinds of problems that they will be presented with in later years, and that they need to engage with this material. Ideally this culminates with a session while the students are in placement, discussing cases based on the ethical, cultural, professional and legal issues that they themselves have encountered in practice and how these may be best understood and handled.

What are you most proud of from your teaching in 2020?

Alistair:  I am most proud of the efforts that we went in to provide as much support as we could to our students during 2020. Obviously, this was a difficult year for all, but particularly so for international students, far from home and family support. Monitoring student progress and attendance, or sending a simple email to see how they are going is all critical to help them know that we are here to help if they require it. As a Mental Health First Aider, I am able to provide initial help to students and/or to send them on for additional support that they may need.

Kerrie:  My approach to teaching is creating a safe and supportive environment so students are comfortable to adopt an experiential learning style. This allows me to actively and purposefully engage with students in simulation.
The benefits of this style of learning for students is it affords the learner to reflect and actively produce their own understanding of the situation while enhancing their knowledge and skills.

David:  2020 was a challenging year which required a lot of adaption, especially because it was my first year at Adelaide. I think I was most proud of introducing an online tutorial session which ran a week later than the regular class – this enabled our students still stuck overseas to take the module, and also for those who were uncomfortable resuming face to face classes to be supported. It also meant that students in the face to face tutorials could not attend the face to face sessions if they became ill, and not miss out on content because it ran one week behind.

What is your favourite way to use technology to enhance learning?

Alistair:  Technology is an amazing way to engage and get students interacting at a higher level than they would normally. I have integrated this in multiple ways, such as with competition quizzes in workshops and lectures, or quick polls to see how student understanding is going such that I can modify my teaching appropriately. I have found that students less likely to speak up in the class are more likely to interact via technology, particularly if this is anonymous. This helps me to reach (and teach) all students.

Kerrie:  Many of us incorporated zoom as a key technology in student learning during 2020 which was a useful teaching tool. However my favourite technology has been a combination of the Adelaide Health Simulation newly installed 360 Immersion room combined with zoom and the Mentimeter app. Using the three technologies combined I was able to create interactive and real time clinical skill scenarios for students.

David:  Because ethical development takes place primarily in small group discursive environments I am a big fan of the flipped classroom approach, and using technology to provide high quality recorded and written supplementary information and pre-engagement material, so that the face to face discussion time that is available is as valuable as possible. As such I record short videos as a replacement for what would have been lectures previously, and also provide extensive online notes, with built in activities. This ensures that the students have had an opportunity to engage with thinking about the topic and the arguments that are commonplace in the relevant area, so that the face to face small group sessions can look at these arguments, often through the lens of a relevant real world case study.  

Reach out and connect with an AEA member within your faculty today.