Bella Ross

Formative observation of teaching: focusing peer assistance on teachers’ developmental goals

Abstract Peer observation of teaching can provide valuable insights into effective educational practices. By adopting a developmental focus, peer observation can also provide insights into how practices might be enhanced and, importantly, how enhancements in practices might be aligned to teachers’ development goals. However, a review of peer observation of teaching undertaken at Australian universities demonstrates that observation instruments and protocols typically do not explicitly afford alignment of peers’ observations with teachers’ developmental goals. Analysis of observers’ uses of popular peer observation instruments through the deployment of the Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme through multiple institutions across Australia has informed the development and trial of a novel observation instrument and protocol design that is aligned with observer use characteristics, and provides a focus on development goals. This study will be of interest to teachers and academic developers researching and implementing goal-oriented curricular and pedagogical development through peer observation.

Assessing distributed leadership for learning and teaching quality: a multi-institutional study

ABSTRACT Distributed leadership has been explored internationally as a leadership model that will promote and advance excellence in learning and teaching in higher education. This paper presents an assessment of how effectively distributed leadership was enabled at five Australian institutions implementing a collaborative teaching quality development scheme called the Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme. The Scheme brings together expertise from teams of academics, coordinators, and institutional learning and teaching portfolio holders to the shared goal of enhancing learning and teaching quality. A distributed leadership benchmarking tool was used to assess the Scheme’s effectiveness, and we found that (i) the Scheme is highly consistent with the distributed leadership benchmarks, and that (ii) the benchmarking tool is easily used in assessing the alignment (or otherwise) of teaching and learning quality initiatives with distributed leadership benchmarks. This paper will be of interest to those seeking to assess implementations of distributed leadership to improve teaching quality and leadership capacity.

The Alignment of Prosody and Clausal Structure in Dalabon

Comparisons of prosodically defined units and grammatical structure in typologically diverse languages may reveal insights into how language is processed. This paper presents examples of intonation units comprising two or more verbs in Dalabon, a polysynthetic head-marking language from Australia. The prosody, semantics and grammar of these multi-verb intonational units is examined and it is shown that intonation is used as a delimitative device to signal the higher-level groupings of grammatical constituents in the discourse. What is interesting in these findings is that, despite the multiple grammatical constructions available to signal subordination in Dalabon, grammatical subordination is infrequently used. Instead, Dalabon speakers make use of intonation to group two or more verbs, in order to represent the close temporal relationship of events. The close examination of multi-verb intonational units presented in this paper may reveal more about the interaction between intonation and syntactic organization in a polysynthetic, head-marking language such as Dalabon.

An Experience with a Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme

We present a narrative around the use of a peer assisted teaching program to establish its utility in improving teaching and learning outcomes. The program is a structured and collegial approach where academics work together to reinvigorate their teaching practice through reflection and peer-assisted situated learning. The scheme involves colleagues collaborating to analyse existing course and teaching quality data, develop focussed development goals for curriculum and pedagogy, plan and execute strategies to achieve these goals, and monitor their effects and success during a teaching semester. The experience presented in this paper involved a paired peer relationship between two Information and Communication Technology (ICT) lecturers (colleagues) who taught disparate courses and who had separate goals. Despite the apparent dichotomy in the courses taught and the course outcomes, their experience with a small set of goals provided useful information about employing such a scheme, especially its effectiveness despite choosing simple goals. The partners were also inspired to use the scheme again and with a stronger sense of how they might prepare their goals and pursue better implementation thereof. The authors hope the experience will encourage others to adopt such a program or other similar peer assisted teaching schemes to improve teaching and learning outcomes, encourage collegial collaboration within departments, and foster engagement with learning and teaching scholarship.

Five years of taps on shoulders to PATS on backs in ICT

A concern for Information and Communication Technology [1] and Engineering disciplines in many Australian universities is the need to improve a high percentage of courses that students perceive as needing critical attention. Typically, courses in the Physical Sciences disciplines score low on student evaluations and repeatedly have the highest student dropout rates. This paper reports the results of a study investigating five years of changes in course evaluation results in one of Australias Go8 universities that applied the Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme (PATS). PATS was initially trialed in the Faculty of Information Technology (FIT) at Monash University to improve teaching quality and student satisfaction through building peer assistance capacity. The focus of this study will be on student satisfaction, rather than education quality. PATS has evolved over this period through action research and has been supported by the Australian Governments Office for Learning and Teaching. Multiple changes have been made to the PATS process since its inception, and the quantitative improvements to courses taking part in PATS are reported. The paper concludes by showing that the course areas addressed by the PATS participants are indeed the areas of most concern to students.