Empowering Professional Teaching in Engineering. John Heywood

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Empowering Professional Teaching in Engineering - John Heywood


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Heywood, J. (1984). Considering the Curriculum authors]Heywood, J. during Student Teaching. London, Kogan Page. 2

      JOURNEY 2

       “Oh that we the gift of God to see ourselves as others see us,” Learning from Beginning Teachers 2

      I confess that the quotation is the only line of the poetry by Robert Burns that I know. At least I was told he wrote it, and I was also told that it was about a lice on the back of the neck of a Lady in her “Sunday best,” who was, as one might expect, attending church.

      I have nothing against that, but I want to suggest that from listening, yes- just by listening, we may learn a great deal about ourselves, the way we present knowledge, and the way we interact with students. It is much easier to do these days because we have the technology that makes omni-directional-recording easy.

      Listening is an important skill and helps us to focus on the issue we want to study, as for example, how we respond to questions in class. It won’t, of course, necessarily tell us if we are selective in the choices we make about whose question we will take, unless we do a more detailed analysis.

      After a few audio sessions we can begin to make and analyze video recordings and cope with the much greater “noise” that is generated.

      One of the other ways my colleagues used to train beginning teachers—called “microteaching”—was to bring in half-a-dozen students from a local school, ask the student to teach them for ten-minutes or so while making a video recording of their teaching. The recording is then played back to the student with comments from the tutor. This procedure can be changed so that a group of beginning teachers review their teaching together, and comment on each other’s presentations. It is quite a useful method for introducing beginning teachers to the art of teaching. But, it is only the beginning of self-accountability.

      Farah and Neelam did their very best to make me presentable in the first of these minilectures. I had to do a lot of re-learning.

      A quite different approach was advocated by the Stanford educator Elliot Eisner (see below).

      One of the difficulties that student graduate teachers have in trying to understand classroom performance is to get behind (understand, if you prefer) what the students are thinking. In evaluating their classes the emphasis is often with what happens to them rather than what happens to their students as a result of their instruction. This is not at all surprising. At the same time it is a reminder that what happens to teachers in classrooms is all too easily forgotten by politicians and administrators when they criticize them. The teacher is as important as the student in the learning process, but the teacher has to be aware of the perceptual processes at work.

      The relationship between teacher’s and their students is deep and personal and can be encouraging or hurtful in both directions. That said, teachers do need to understand what is happening in their classrooms both to themselves and to their students.


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