A Message for all Post-Secondary Educators through the Perspective of a 24-Year-Old Post-Secondary Instructor

Introduction

This article serves one purpose, and that is to provide a perspective for a better quality of education for students in post-secondary institutions. Being a recent graduated undergraduate and first-time instructor at the University of Calgary, teaching 250 students across two lecture sections for a computer science course targeted for first-time programmers, and being nominated by those students for a Student Union Teaching Excellence award for my teaching, I would like to share my approach to teaching, and why it is our responsibility, if we choose to be educators, to deliver a well-rounded learning experience for our students.

Teaching Style

What started off as a semester online, and eventually transitioned into in-person lectures, there were a few common themes for what made an intellectual and enjoyable lecture experience for the majority of the students.

Firstly, the most important attribute an instructor can bring to every lecture is a positive attitude. Yes, this sounds cliché, but it is undeniably important. As humans, we seek energies that make us feel excited and curious. Similarly, for students, it is no different. Being the leader of a classroom, students look to their instructors to guide them and develop a sense of trust. This cannot be achieved without a consistent positive attitude. Of course, us instructors are also humans too. We may have days when we feel lethargic, bothered, or even sad. In situations like this, it is important to be honest with the students and to let them know beforehand. For example, before the start of a few of my lectures, I would state that “It was an extremely tiring night before, so I apologize in advance if I make silly mistakes. Please point them out for me if you spot a mistake!” A simple message like that not only communicates to students your current state of mind but also allows the students to understand you because of your honesty.?

Secondly, deliver the lecture content you want to share in a way that is unique to you. Do not read every single bullet point straight from your slides. Students do not appreciate this which will ultimately lead to consistently poor quality lectures. For me, I provided a set of notes for the students (which will be further discussed below) but complimented my notes with real-life application scenarios verbally. For example, if I’m teaching about classes and objects, I explain it through a real-life application such as how Instagram would make use of classes and objects. Furthermore, I also tried to add comedy to my lectures. Yes, you read that right. I would do this through my written lecture notes, or by complementing my notes verbally. So, if I talk about how classes and objects are used in Instagram, I would show how a user’s input would relate to it, where the user is my cat Rumi. Don’t be afraid to test out what works with students and what doesn’t. Be adaptable to altering your teaching style to deliver the best experience for your students.

Thirdly, don’t just ask for students to ask questions, but also direct meaningful questions to students. As your teaching, to keep students engaged, ask questions at the end of every section. In my experience, this led the majority of students to think about the section that was just taught immediately and clear up any confusion they may be facing. Having one student answer the question you ask, either confirms or clarifies the concept for the whole class.

Lastly, incorporate breaks into your lectures. Given that my lectures were scheduled for 75 minutes, giving a 5-minute break in the middle of every lecture to the students helped them feel more re-energized and engaged. Furthermore, it allowed me to re-energize to deliver the last half of the lecture in an effective way. Remember, most students are juggling 4-5 courses and are usually on low sleep. Providing a little break is not only appreciated by your students but also communicates that you recognize the hard work they are doing, which leads to a respectful student-instructor dynamic. This also impacts the pace of the lecture, which students seem to appreciate. This is a comment provided by a student in my lecture section through my bi-weekly feedback forms (which is discussed in a section below) “Honestly, I love the engaging part of the lectures, doing coding/answering questions alongside the learning part. It's not too fast-paced which gives me time to really understand what's going on compared to other classes where I have to re-read stuff afterwards as there's no time to really understand stuff during the lecture. I don't really have much in the way of criticisms, I just enjoy this class so thank you!”

Quality of Lecture Notes

Regardless of where we are in our educational journeys, learning course content has always been delivered through the notes of the course instructor. In my experience, and most likely yours as well, there have been many courses where the quality of notes is subpar, if not overwhelming. The number of times I’ve heard the phrase (from my time as a student) “I’ll just use Google to learn this concept” was concerning, and this was my main motivation to try to create high-quality lecture notes.

Firstly, create your lecture notes with the intention that students will refer to these for assignments and exams. As students, we know we will revisit these notes for evaluated portions of the course. As instructors, I feel we create our notes with the intention of just communicating the expected content. This may make our jobs easier, but it makes a student's job very hard. While some students may have a good approach to organizing and learning the notes during the crunch time, most cannot. I believe as educators we should be considerate of all learning styles, and therefore we should create an approach to creating notes that are adaptable for as many students as possible.

Secondly, to create lecture notes that are of high quality, educators should create notes that are concise and visually appealing. Conciseness is vital for the quality of lecture notes. It allows students to process the points being delivered in a timely manner and allows the majority of students to leave the lecture understanding the content that was presented. Another comment from my bi-weekly feedback highlights this point, stating “It was really awesome, you are such an amazing teacher! I don’t think would have done as well as I have if you were not teaching! You did such a great job at keeping the notes clear, concise, and interesting! Thank you for such an amazing semester, I would definitely take this course again if I could!”. By creating concise notes, we indirectly present our notes in a minimalist, visually appealing format. This is extremely important to do. As humans, we often do not invite a cluttered environment as it leads to feeling overwhelmed, which can then lead to feeling anxious. Personally, being in a room that is messy makes me feel this way. I would much prefer a room that is clean and organized. This applies to lecture notes as well. No set of lecture notes should make a student feel overwhelmed or anxious. It should make them feel like they have learnt something and be proud of that. We as educators should strive to create this sort of environment through our lecture notes.

Finally, do not be afraid to use other resources to present your notes that aren’t slide-based. For my lecture notes, I made use of Notion. This was a calculated approach, which I tested for the first few lectures and then asked if students would be okay with me continuing using Notion for lecture notes, which was met with a positive response. While this worked for me, it may not work for other instructors as they may not believe it is the best way to present their lecture notes. That is totally fine, but do not be afraid of testing new technologies out there that can work well for presenting lecture contents. Along with Notion, Miro is another great option. Of course, make sure to see if your students are responding positively to your choice, and adapt as needed.

Assignments and Participation Exercises

Assignments are the most common approach to testing a student’s knowledge. However, a lot of assignments are not interesting, and it leads to students completing the assignment with the goal of doing well from a grading perspective but not a retaining information perspective once the assignment is complete. I believe it is our responsibility as educators to create meaningful assignments, that maximize the potential of a student’s knowledge of the concept.

Firstly, spend quality time developing your assignments. I found it extremely beneficial to create assignments that tested the concepts, but also connected them to a current popular application. For example, one assignment made use of discord bots that solved the quadratic equation. Yes, it is extremely simple to program in the quadratic equation, but at first glance that can seem boring. Adding the element of having the students program a discord bot that can solve the quadratic equation not only applies the concepts taught but also present it in a way where students can visualize how the skills they are learning can be applied to many different applications. One of my happiest moments as an instructor came from a student after they submitted this assignment and stated that they used this assignment as inspiration to create a discord bot that can play Wordle. Another student used another assignment as inspiration to create a chess bot. If we aim to create assignments with quality, it not only keeps students engaged with the course but also promotes them to explore their creativity with the skills they’ve learned through the assignments.?

Secondly, allow your students to make mistakes, and encourage it. Students are afraid of making mistakes in university due to one reason: it will impact their grades. We believe that grades can dictate our future, and so making mistakes has become something that is unacceptable in university. I believe that should not be the case. Influential entrepreneurs, athletes and companies all promote the idea of making mistakes. For example, the very popular quote by Michael Jordan states “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game's winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that's why I succeed.” Why is the idea of making mistakes so widely invited by successful people, but suppressed in educational courses? Of course, there is a grading structure to a course that is made up of the cumulative grade of assignments, exams and other graded components. To not completely break the norm of a regular university grading structure, I believe it's important to incorporate a grading component purely based on their approach to thinking. For my course, I included a graded component labelled as Participation Exercises worth 10% of the overall mark. Each weekend, there would be a question related to the topics we’ve learned during the week, and the students would answer the question based on what they believe is the correct answer. However, they would not be marked on correctness. It doesn’t matter if a student correctly answered the question or not, they would get the mark regardless because they were able to show their ability to think. In the following week, I would go through the correct answer to the participation exercise, so students who may have made a mistake can understand where they went wrong and learn from their mistakes. This way, they can increase their chances of getting the correct answer for graded components that are focused on correctness, such as exams.??

Lastly, allow extensions. Today, we live in a society filled with commitments. We sometimes forget that education is one aspect of a student’s life, not the only aspect. Keeping this in mind, be open to allowing extensions on a class or person-to-person basis. The best way to know is to ask. Be consistent in asking what students’ schedules are looking like. Again, remember they are not just doing your course, but another 4-5 courses. By allowing extensions, there is more room for students to hand in deliverables with quality and reduces the chances of cheating. When I was a teaching assistant, before my position as an instructor, there were multiple cases per assignment of cheating between students. When a deadline is near, and there is no chance for an extension, students take the risk of cheating to not jeopardize their mark. But when they get caught, not only do they receive a zero on their mark, but they also jeopardize their degree. For this semester, by allowing extensions, I’ve only noticed one instance of cheating, to which I talked to that person, and since hasn’t cheated. As educators, we should care about the quality of the work submitted by students. We also should make it a priority to care about our students by asking about their schedules and being understanding of their situation(s).?

Bi-weekly Feedback

At the University of Calgary (I am not sure about other institutions), there is this document given to students to provide feedback to their instructors on how they performed for the semester. This is done only once a semester and done at the end of the semester as well. I strongly believe this should not be the case. By providing end-of-semester feedback, instructors have no idea if their current teaching style is effective for students or not throughout the semester. Furthermore, students do not have the opportunity to voice their opinion in a proper evaluation until it’s too late.

To counteract this, I believe it is important as instructors to implement their own feedback system that is more frequent. For example, I created a bi-weekly feedback Google Form with three questions: 2 were questions based on teaching style and lecture notes with choices from 1 to 5, and one was a short answer text to provide any general feedback such as what could be better or what has been good. By doing this, it allowed the students to feel that their concerns with the course were being heard and that there is an effort being placed to incorporate their feedback throughout the semester. This is not only important for students, but for instructors as well, since they can understand their students, thus (hopefully) allowing them to adapt and grow as an instructor geared toward creating an enjoyable and memorable experience for students. We’ve established that it’s important to make mistakes and learn from them. Let us do that too as instructors.

Conclusion

The purpose of this article was to provide a perspective for a better quality of education for students in post-secondary institutions through my experience as an instructor. As my time is coming to an end as an instructor and taking on a new journey as a Software Developer at Attabotics, I felt that sharing this could provide a step in the right direction to improving education for students in post-secondary institutions. Yes, there will be some points that other instructors may disagree with, but if there is anything that does seem effective, I would hope other instructors take the initiative to implement it in their course(s).

If there is anything a fellow instructor could take away from this article, I hope it would be this:

As educators, it is our responsibility to deliver the highest quality teaching experience for the students we teach to the best of our abilities.

Contact

For anyone who may be interested in how I create my notes and bi-weekly feedback forms or want to chat more on this topic, you can contact me at [email protected]