Diagnosing your teaching style

Abstract

In the higher education context within which computing educators now teach, an increasing range of forces are conspiring against innovative teaching practice. Pressures of academic workload, pressures from consumerist students and regular course evaluations, pressures from increasingly managerial policies and practices, from so-called 'quality assurance systems', pressures to continually expand research output, all lead towards stifling conformity and a natural conservatism in teaching practice. The increasing focus on consistency in a mass production model of teaching militates heavily against innovation. This paper presents an instrument used by the author to diagnose the student perceptions of the pedagogy of his course, by mapping it against Reeve's fourteen dimensions of an interactive learning system [12]. The outcomes demonstrated significant differences in style between this course and the overall programme within which it was situated. It enabled the author to gain insight into how the course differed and issues about it that had discomfited students. This enabled constructive dialogue with the students and an explicit discussion of the underlying collaborative mode of pedagogy. The tool is presented here for others to adopt in order to diagnose or make explicit to students the style of their own courses, and hopefully encourage innovative teaching practice.