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Leaving the most important teaching to chance
Something is bothering me about teaching at university: we are leaving the most important teaching to chance.
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Mr Johnson's Rainbow
I love reading and writing, and the way that people use words to express ideas fascinates me. So it is no surprise that when I was in Year 12, I studied the highest level of English available. My English teacher was called Mr Johnson and I hated him. (It wasn't really, Mr Johnson – I've changed his name to write this.) The reason I hated him is expressed in this poem I wrote at the time:
A public health approach to improving teaching and learning
Making a big difference to student learning is a tricky business. Here at my university, there are a certain number of (wonderful) teaching staff who are champions of innovation, always making big changes to the way they do things and jumping onto any innovation as soon as it comes around. Yet the students not in those classes don't see much benefit from it. Indeed, those staff who are not champions of innovation may do nothing for fear of having to adopt all at once All The Things they see the champions doing. A student who seeks regular support for their learning may make spectacular gains, but there are literally thousands of other students who don't seek such support on a regular basis, and thousands of students who don't really need spectacular gains but just a little bit extra. I have started to think that perhaps the best way to make a big difference is to find some way of encouraging a large number of small differences.
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The unexpected fear of statistics
Statistics is the cause of a lot of fear. There are thousands of students studying psychology, sociology, economics, biology, medicine, animal science and education who thought they would be free of mathematics and suddenly discover they have to deal with statistics. In the case of psychology it is absolutely everywhere: both in whole courses about statistics, but also embedded in almost every other course they do. For most of these students, their fear of statistics carries over from their existing fear of mathematics, and so as sad as it is that they are afraid, it's not wholly unexpected.
