ANZAM Advice to applicants from previous winners

2005 WINNER - Peter McLean

Peter McLean, winner of the 2005 Pearson Education ANZAM Management Educator of the year Award

Dear ANZAM member

Congratulations on your nomination for the 2006 Pearson Education ANZAM Management Educator of the Year Award!

The fact that you have been nominated suggests that you are already an exceptional facilitator of student learning and are successfully using a range of educational initiatives that you could share with the wider university community in Australia and New Zealand. So I encourage you to reflect on your teaching practice - what works for your students and why – and submit your application so that the rest of us can benefit from your experience.

Dr Lea Waters, the 2004 Winner of this award, has written an excellent set of guidelines on how to write about your teaching practices. Rather than replicate the same material, I’d simply like to direct your attention to Lea’s comments, especially her first tip about giving yourself plenty of time to prepare the application. Sure, you could probably write the application in a couple of sessions, but an incubation period between drafts probably helps to refine the content and recall specific examples to demonstrate how your educational methods meet the selection criteria.

I particularly liked Lea’s idea of talking to a colleague about your teaching practices. It wasn’t until I talked to a colleague in our university’s Centre for Educational Development and Interactive Resources (CEDIR) that I realized that I had a story to tell. If you write a draft response to the 5 selection criteria and then ask a colleague to discuss it with you, you may be surprised at what fresh insights arise from the discussion. We all have tacit knowledge about what makes an effective educator from our experiences in the classroom, but articulating that knowledge to a colleague helps solidify those insights. After all, the interaction between tacit and explicit knowledge is part of the knowledge creation process (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995).

To help you with the actual writing of your application, I thought I might provide some thoughts on each of the 5 selection criteria around which you could organize your responses. This award is a highly competitive process, so it is not good enough to assert that you meet the criteria; your application will be more effective if you provide evidence to demonstrate how you meet the selection criteria.

1. Interest and enthusiasm for teaching and for promoting student learning

Under this criterion, you could include some comments on a couple of the following ideas:

• A précis of your teaching platform, or your teaching philosophy
• Demonstrate how you approach the nexus of teaching and learning and how you understand the processes of adult learning
• Provide details of what techniques you use to engage students in the subject area in which you are teaching, and how you make it relevant to their frames of reference
• Give examples of new ideas you have tried and reflect on the outcomes
• Provide comments from students or others on how they perceive your teaching contributions (most universities have regular teacher evaluation surveys with sections where students can make open comments about teacher strengths and weaknesses)
• Provide evidence of any practices through which you provide assistance to students beyond the call of duty
• Any evidence you can provide that demonstrates your own love of learning; students like to see that their educators are ‘fellow-travellers’ (Gabriel, 2000:136) on the learning journey

2. Ability to organise course material and to present it cogently and imaginatively

Under this criterion, you could include evidence such as the following:

• For a new subject, you could document your rationale as the subject progressed through the phases of identification of the need for the subject, design of the subject, implementation issues and subject evaluation (Delahaye, 2005)
• For an existing subject, you could document how you assessed the effectiveness of the subject in its current format, and what modifications you made to the subject in order to make the structure more logically consistent
• What techniques do you use throughout the lecture period to enhance learning? For example, how do you use social learning theory (Bandura, 1977) in large groups? What do you do to encourage active learning?
• What technologies do you use in your lecture spaces?
• Include an example or two of your visual aids to demonstrate your thoughtful use of multiple sense learning and slide composition
• How do you assess the current knowledge of students before the learning episode (so that they are not bored covering material they already know)
• Include comments from student surveys commenting on the structure of your subject, or the effectiveness of your delivery methods

3. Command of subject matter, including the incorporation in teaching of recent developments in the field of study

Under this criterion, you may wish to include some of the following:

• Evidence that you are competent in your subject matter, such as your academic qualifications or your membership in an appropriate professional body, or your professional experience in this area
• A list of your publications in the topic area or examples of your research in this field; what empirical research have you done in the topic area?
• Details of how you keep abreast of recent developments in the field of study, such as industry contacts, formal or informal networks, guest lecturers who bring industry experience into the classroom
• Examples of how you update your subject outline regularly to include recent debates and publications in the discipline area
• Peer reviews or references from those considered leading authorities in the field
• Examples of how you structure your subject to enable students to interact with practitioners in the field, and any work experience opportunities you provide for your students

4. Provision of appropriate student assessment, including the provision of worthwhile feedback to students on their learning

Under this criterion, you could provide evidence of:

• How you plan the assessment processes to provide both formative and summative learning (Biggs, 2003)
• How you modify and fine tune assessment tasks from session to session and why
• How your assessment tasks directly relate to the stated student learning outcomes in the subject outline
• Examples of your marking criteria and how you communicate these criteria to the students before they complete their assessment tasks
• Examples of the types of feedback you give to students, for example comments on assignments, meetings with student teams, peer feedback, developmental versus evaluative feedback
• How you avoid the problems of plagiarism in assessment tasks
• How you ensure assessment is fair and consistent, especially when employing tutors
• How you use student performance on assessment tasks to improve your teaching practice

5. Professional and systematic approach to teaching development

This criterion provides you with an opportunity to articulate your approach to management education. What phases do you see in your own learning and development cycle? Under this criterion, you could include:

• Methods you use to evaluate your teaching practice; what ways do you reflect on effectiveness in addition to teacher evaluation surveys?
• How you ensure that you are developing professionally
• Provide evidence of teaching and learning courses you have undertaken either as part of staff development at your university or externally
• Demonstrate how you respond to student evaluations of your teaching
• Examples of difficulties have you encountered in dealing with students and how have you resolved these problems
• Examples of peer reviews or team teaching initiatives where teaching strategies have been improved through collaborative efforts

Concluding Remarks

Since you want your application to stand out from the large number of entries received each year, you would benefit from a final edit to ensure your work is presented as professionally as you would for a journal article submission.

Use the checklist provided on the Pearson Education webpage to make sure everything is collated in order, and be judicious in what you attach as appendices. Judges don’t want to have to wade through large volumes of extra material to find the one or two innovations in, for example, your subject outline. Include just the pertinent page or two, just one or two examples of slides, just a page or so of student comments. However, do make sure to provide results from at least three or four student surveys because judges probably do pay particular attention to these results because these scores can substantiate some of the assertions you have made in your submission.

I wish you great success with your submissions and look forward to seeing you at the ANZAM Conference in Yeppoon in December 2006.

Best wishes

Peter McLean

2005 Pearson Education ANZAM Management Educator of the Year Award Winner.

I’d like to gratefully acknowledge the help of Dr Christine Brown, Centre for Educational Development and Interactive Resources, University of Wollongong, in compiling these notes.

References

Bandura, A. (1977). Social Learning Theory. New York: Prentice Hall.

Biggs, J. (2003). Teaching for Quality Learning at University: What the student does. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press.

Gabriel, Y. (2000). Storytelling in Organizations: Facts, fictions, and fantasies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Delahaye, B. (2005). Human Resource Development: Adult learning and knowledge management. Milton, Qld: Wiley.

Nonaka, I. and Takeuchi, H. (1995). The Knowledge-Creating Company. Oxford: Oxford University Press.