This is how I teach
This month we spoke with Dr John Willison, Senior Lecturer in the School of Education, in the Faculty of Arts, Business, Law and Economics. John is the Director of the Bachelor of Teaching (Secondary), coordinates two undergraduate degree courses, and supervises the research of Master and PhD students. Here John explains how learning autonomy is ultimately what enables school teachers to remain current and effective throughout their career.
How would you describe your approach to teaching/your teaching philosophy?
I think a lot about learning autonomy, about the extent to which students have or take control of their learning over time. My approach to this is providing structure and guidance (low learning autonomy) and then increasing scope for student decisions (higher learning autonomy). This is often followed by a return to lower autonomy when students need that, for example, when the content, context or skills needed are new, or the standards of rigour or sophistication increase. Learning autonomy is therefore more ‘tidal’, rather than linear, moving back and forth between low and high, depending on the needs of students. Over time, this tidal approach to learning autonomy leads to a richer knowledge base, skill set and attitude of responsibility for their learning journeys. This is like Vygotsky’s ‘Model, Scaffold, Fade’, where teacher and student together have a strong role and relationship in developing student learning autonomy.
What do you like most about teaching in your discipline?
My undergraduate students are preservice schoolteachers who will teach numerous subject areas in humanities, social sciences, mathematics, music and the sciences. So, the range of things I model, scaffold and fade-out are to nurture their emulation, improvisation and initiation of how they teach their own secondary school students. During both the undergraduate second year course (Responsive Teaching Practice) and fourth year course (Education Research Skills) that I coordinate, students spend time in Schools for Professional Experience Placements; assessments are designed for students to capture that experience, reflect, analyse and recommend future improvements. It is exciting to read about their experiences and their developing understanding of the course and the whole degree in the context of their actual teaching experiences.
I love enabling Master of Teaching students to complete research projects of a semester timeframe in schools. With ethics and Department of Education approval in advance, the Masters students move through determining how to generate data to answer the research question, collecting observation data in schools, analysing the data with reference to a conceptual framework, and writing up their research as a draft journal article.
It is also amazing supervising brilliant PhD students from around the globe. Their research is fascinating and is building a deep understanding in the field of the learning sciences.John Willison
How does your teaching help prepare students for their future?
That’s where learning autonomy is so important. As preservice teachers, they will be graduates who have to keep up with the shifting socio/cultural/technological elements of schooling, and much of staying current requires they develop their own attitudes and skills towards lifelong learning. These attitudes and skills are not well developed in one or two courses alone, but across the whole degree program. In the School of Education, we rely heavily on colleagues from many disciplines, because our undergraduate Bachelor of Teaching is only offered as a double degree in concert with a Bachelor of Arts, Mathematical and Computer Science, Music or Science. All those teaching into the double degree play an important part in preparing our students to be effective teachers in such a fluid educational landscape. In addition, our Professional Experience Team is absolutely crucial to our preservice teachers being ready to teach. Preservice teacher learning autonomy is ultimately what enables them to remain current and effective teachers throughout their career, long past their graduation.
What is your favourite way to use technology to enhance learning?
In 2023 I quickly introduced Artificial Intelligence (AI) components in lectures, tutorials and assessment, but reduced the amount of time on AI this year, because students are becoming more savvy and there is such an array of AI platforms to choose from. Now my focus is how my preservice teaching students will facilitate secondary student use of AI. So, a large part of the focus is to help my students recognise the weaknesses of AI, so they may target secondary student skills to address these weaknesses.
Which approach to educating students about academic integrity have you found to have the most impact
In light of AI, I think a crucial component of academic integrity is the relationship with students, where they feel there is someone who cares and so are a little less inclined to overtly cheat. As a significant part of that, I have found students highly value rubric feedback on assessment tasks that is supported by audio explanations of why they were so scored on each criterion. Audio feedback has a certain warmth that is more personal and less machine-like. Of course, many students would not listen to that feedback unless they were required to, so I typically provide a structure in which they respond to feedback from one assessment in a subsequent assessment. Students don’t get audio feedback on the second assignment (so its quicker to mark), but in an appendix they explain how they responded to the feedback to improve the latter assignment. This explanation is marked, provides me with a lot of insight when reading it, and makes assessment more like a conversation.