WHAT. Henry Ellington presents his seven golden rules for becoming an excellent teacher when working at tertiary level. WHY. Tertiary-level teachers are having to change their way of work to provide ongoing evidence of their competence

HOW

"Education is what is left after the facts have been forgotten" - B. F. Skinner.

The role of teachers beyond secondary school is changing. Traditionally, our main role was to teach, that is, to impart knowledge to students via lectures and similar face-to-face activities.

Now, it is to help students to learn, something that requires a fairly radical change in how tertiary teachers work. We are also having to cope with the impact of technology on higher education.

̽»¨ÊÓƵ

Tertiary-level teachers are also expected to work to much higher standards than in the past - standards that seem certain to be increasingly strongly "monitored" by the Quality Assurance Agency and the Institute for Learning and Teaching.

Indeed, once the latter becomes fully operational, we can expect that holding an ILT-recognised teaching qualification will rapidly become the norm for university and college lecturers.

̽»¨ÊÓƵ

Since 1989, I have been running a highly successful postgraduate certificate course in tertiary-level teaching for the academic staff of my own institution - Aberdeen's Robert Gordon University.

The course covers all the main aspects of tertiary-level teaching in some detail, but its essence can be encapsulated in comparatively few basic principles - my seven golden rules for becoming an excellent teacher.

Golden Rule One

Find out how your students learn Although comparatively little is known about the nature of the learning process, we know quite a lot about how students approach learning.

Some, for example, prefer to tackle a given task by starting at the beginning and working systematically through the material one section at a time.

Others prefer to work in a more holistic way, treating the material as a complete, integrated system rather than a collection of separate parts.

There are important distinctions between surface learners and deep learners, between activists and theorists and between pragmatists and reflectors.

Other students are what we call strategic learners - only taking the trouble to carry out a given task if they see something in it for themselves, for example, helping them to gain a higher mark or grade.

If you want to become an excellent teacher, find out about these different approaches to learning - and try to find out how your students prefer to learn. You will then have a much better chance of meeting their needs.

̽»¨ÊÓƵ

Golden Rule Two

Set appropriate learning targets The key starting point of any successful teaching programme is to set appropriate learning targets for the students.

Such targets should clearly be relevant to the aims of the course or programme and should also cover all the essential knowledge and skills that you expect your students to acquire.

In particular, they should cover all the process skills that are so important for success in later life - decision-making, problem-solving, communication, interpersonal and the like. If you agree with B. F. Skinner that true education is what remains after the facts are forgotten, the development of such skills becomes doubly important.

The targets that you set your students should also become progressively more demanding through their course, while remaining realistic and achievable. Useful guidelines on how to do this have recently been developed by the QAA.

You should let your students know what is expected of them, preferably before they embark on the course, course unit or activity to which the targets relate.

Golden Rule Three

Use appropriate teaching/learning methods Excellent teachers will always choose teaching/learning methods to match their learning targets - not, as is so often the case, the other way round.

̽»¨ÊÓƵ

When doing so, remember that different teaching/learning methods are best suited to achieving different types of student outcomes. The lecture, for example, is most suitable for presenting basic facts and principles - and not really suitable for helping students to develop high-order skills such as analysis, evaluation and problem-solving, or communication and interpersonal skills. To develop such skills effectively, you need to use more active teaching/learning methods such as projects, case-studies and role-plays.

If you want to become an excellent teacher, make yourself thoroughly familiar with the full range of teaching/learning methods available - including all the various forms of individualised learning and group learning - and try to choose the most appropriate method (or mix of methods) for achieving any given set of learning outcomes.

Golden Rule Four

Use appropriate assessment methods It is widely accepted that the most important thing that teachers do for their students is assess their performance. Students can, after all, miss lectures and other scheduled classes and still pass their course - but they cannot opt out of the assessment process.

Thus, it is important that teachers should carry out this assessment professionally and effectively. They should also try to make it as useful to the students as possible. Good assessment should be a key part of the learning process; indeed, assessment methods and teaching/learning methods are now very often the same thing (projects, for example).

As with teaching/learning methods, different assessment methods are best suited to assessing different types of student learning outcomes. Thus, you should again make yourself thoroughly familiar with the full range of student assessment methods available, and try to choose the most appropriate strategy in any given situation, for example, multiple-choice or short-answer tests for assessing basic knowledge and understanding, and essays, assignments or projects for assessing higher-order or multi-faceted skills.

Golden Rule Five

Monitor and evaluate your teaching If you want to be an excellent teacher, you should constantly monitor and evaluate your own performance. Only by doing this can you tell whether you are being effective.

You can do so in three basic ways:

* By reflecting deeply and critically on your own performance as a facilitator of student learning

* Through feedback from your students: for example, via informal discussions, class questionnaires and the results of assessment;

* Through feedback from your colleagues: for example, by asking someone whose opinion you value to sit in on one of your classes.

Try all of these techniques; experience shows that they work.

Golden Rule Six

Always try to improve your performance Excellent teachers are never satisfied with their performance and are always striving to do even better. One practical way of doing this is to adopt a detailed set of standards to which you wish to aspire, for example, those produced by the Staff and Educational Development Association or (more recently) by the ILT.

You can then measure your performance against these standards on an on-going basis - by, for example, giving yourself a mark out of ten for each.

Another thing that all excellent teachers do is reflect critically on every teaching session that they conduct with a view to thinking of specific ways in which it might have been improved - and thus can be improved next time round.

Golden Rule Seven

Keep yourself up-to-date My seventh and final piece of advice to aspiring excellent teachers is to try to keep abreast of the latest developments - and to put these into practice in your own teaching.

The key to this process is a commitment to continuing professional development - reading books and articles (being a regular reader of The THES is a good start), attending conferences and seminars, and generally taking an interest in what is happening to your profession.

Needless to say, it is absolutely vital to keep up to date with the latest developments in communications and information technology if you want to be an excellent teacher. New delivery systems such as multimedia and the web are revolutionising tertiary education. Use these to your advantage; if you do not, you will soon be left behind by those who do.

̽»¨ÊÓƵ

Henry Ellington is head of the Centre for Learning and Assessment at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen.