Teaching Observation #1

My first Teaching Observation was nerve racking. Thank god I ask Liz to come in the middle of the session because I couldn't articulate a word of English for about 10 minutes.

I have never been observed and I suppose that made me very self conscious. The fortnight before the actual observation I started working again on the material I was going to produce (a Keynote presentation), how I was going to structure the information and the task, how I was going to deal with the diversity of needs (proposal writing, AHRB funding application writing, MA students etc...).

But it went very well. When Liz came in I was in full swing, explaining what ring fenced awards were. The AHRb session is my hobbyhorse as I have been to an substantial amount of their conferences and I know their criteria inside out. However, it can be a very dry subject and that worried me. Particularly because 2 of the students are not eligible to apply as they currently have other bursaries.

Liz made me feel confortable within 3 seconds when she told me about a traffic jam. It made me realise that, after all, we are people, no presentations, workshops and data. This is very important and perhaps I should try to be less ominous with the students and talk about palpable things when they are nervous before a presentation.

I was particularly happy with my choice of task as it involved role play (I always find role play engages students). I asked them to be either supervisors or the AHRb and assess research degree proposals and funding applications. I wanted them to come up with a decision, sort of like a committee.

It did induce debate, as I wanted. It also woke up Chris who fell outraged by a funding decision made by the AHRB (all my examples are real cases, with real awards and rejection, although anonymised). Vassilis was as controversial as always. He disn't like what I thought was the best proposal. He has very fixed ideas of what research is and should be. Malcolm and I will have a tutorial with him and I am interested in seeing what research questions he comes up with. He did raise a few issues though and it was interesting to see how his group (comprised by Teresa and him) couldn't reconcile their opinions and decided to split up in a friendly way.