I first came across the concept of internationalisation in a teaching sense when applying for an IATL academic fellowship. I sought extra funding for the development of a new undergraduate experiment that I am working on and part of the application form asked me to demonstrate how my project would meet the goals of the IATL to promote internationalisation. I was confused, as I was not sure what that meant. More than that, I didn't see how teaching activities could possibly be designed to foster internationalisation. I was advised to mention the Warwick-Monash Alliance: the chemistry department has several links with Monash University in Australia and there are many occasions when there are staff exchanges, i.e. there teaching staff from Monash spending time at Warwick and vice-versa. The development of this new undergraduate experiment could, therefore, possibly be extended to the curriculum of chemistry degrees in Monash University.

However, even then I did not fully understand the concept of internationalisation in a higher education context. I was also not aware of its importance or why the university as an institution would put so much effort into it, so far as to make it part of its teaching strategy. I thus identified a lack in my knowledge and an opportunity for professional development. 

With that in mind, I signed up for the "Internationalisation and the Student Experience: Upping Our Game!" workshop. For me, the statement that summarises the key point I took away from this workshop is "just because you have a big international community on campus does not mean you have an international university". This is something I had never really thought about, perhaps because I didn't go through it myself, but the data presented at this workshop clearly shows that there are students who, despite attending a foreign university, do not feel part of its community. Moreover, international students feel their courses are very "British" in the sense that case studies and examples used during lectures tend to be UK based and there isn't much diversity. This brings me straight back to the discussion we had during the last APP PGR course regarding "white curricula". All of a sudden I think some more pieces of the puzzle got together and I realised that teaching in an international university means teaching in a World wide context, truly bringing knowledge and examples from all around the world to enrich the teaching and learning experience. It was clear to me, then, how teaching can be an essential tool in the work towards a truly international campus; in fact, it goes hand in hand with the issue of fostering an inclusive learning environment.

The concept of internationalisation involves many other aspects of student experience and employability. Specifically, fostering an academic community where members of different nationalities and cultures successfully and productively interact with each other results in students who are able to work in multi-cultural teams, which is a skill sought by many employers. After the workshop I am now aware that there are teams working with students to help them deal with cultural shocks, learn from them and use the multi-cultural experience to enrich their set of skills and hence enhance their employability. I think this is a very progressive approach to this facet of the student experience and ultimately it aids the formation of a generation of people who truly embrace diversity and I think this is something that goes beyond teaching and learning. I think this is an incredible initiative and I am very proud to be part of an institution that supports it. As a teacher, I will work on being more inclusive and paying attention to any "culture segregation" that may be happening in my classes, try to make sure people interact and work with people from different cultures and nationalities and make sure that they are truly working together effectively. That being said it just reminds me just how much small scale teaching is important - the type of teaching where mentors can follow progress and evaluate student interactions more closely and be more aware of their individual needs. I will seek to draw from the vast knowledge of the team that delivered the workshop to include aspects of this internationalisation training in my teaching.

Finally, I wanted to leave a note about the fantastic informative leaflet that was handed out during the workshop. One simple, yet eye catching, A4 page that very clearly summarised key data and got me thinking and questioning my own assumptions about internationalisation even before the workshop started. Amazing job! 

In order to gain some experience in teaching in a lecture context - which is something I don't get to do very often - I asked my supervisor if he would allow me to give a lecture on one of his modules , which he kindly did. After the APP PGR course I had many ideas I wanted to try to engage students during lectures and I was very excited to have this opportunity. I designed my lecture such that it would relate my research to the content of the module in an effort to give students some context and some idea of just how important what they are learning really is. I titled it "Photoprotection: How do sunscreens do it? A kinetics story."

While preparing this lecture I was curious how the students would react and what they would think of its effectiveness. I was also very aware of the importance of feedback - now more than ever after some of the reflection during and after the APP PGR courses - and hence ensuring I got feedback for this lecture was very important to me. Instead of using pre-made feedback forms provided by the department, I decided to use my own (as seen below or attached), as there were specific questions I had for the students. Therefore I designed my feedback form so that it would be targeted to obtain the information that was most important to me.  

Overall, it was very interesting to go through the feedback and realise how different each student is and how each individual personality reacts differently to the same teaching experience. In general, it transpired that I had achieved my main goal: to show how my research applied to the content of the module. 54% of the students who filled in the feedback form strongly agreed that "it was clear from this lecture how the module's content applies to real research"; only 3% disagreed. It was also good to see that most students either agreed or strongly agreed that the lecture was interesting and/or relevant. The fact that 6% of them didn't find it interesting was a bit disheartening, but perhaps more worrying were the 3% that didn't think it was relevant. While perhaps it is impossible to have everyone feeling interested in a certain topic, I feel I should have been able to convey the relevance of what I was talking about. I made sure to include terms and concepts taken straight from their lecture notes, and even related it to one of their laboratory experiments, but perhaps it wasn't enough; or they didn't think the research on sunscreens was particularly relevant to them.

In terms of the practicalities of the delivery style, things were also very positive. Most students felt the slides were "clear and easy to follow", and that the lecture was "well structured, presented and pitched at the correct level". Because it relates to the topic of the content of the lecture being accessible to students, it is interesting to mention here one of the answers I got on the "open-ended" part of the feedback form. One of the students left a comment along the lines of "you expected me to remember the content of my lectures, which I don't - or at least, not yet". This struck me in a very particular way and opened my eyes to a reality I was already aware of, but perhaps I wasn't prepared for just how blatant and normalised it is: students do not believe they should aim for consistent, continuous learning throughout the term. Supposedly, they save all their learning for those last minute weeks just before the exam, where they learn to then forget. Is this proof of a complete failure of the exam system? It is, in my opinion, certainly an indication of its unsuitability to both deliver and assess knowledge and learning. This is, of course a very complex problem. To address it, I will always work towards sending the message that it is the learning and the journey that really matter rather than the exam at the end of term. How you change mentalities so drastically during a single teaching session is a difficult question (perhaps you simply don't), but I believe it will have a lot to do with engaging students beyond the classroom: sparking their own interest in the subject, showing them how it is relevant in the World context, fostering discussion... Finding ways to want them to answer their own questions and enjoy exploring the subject. This is, in fact, one of the reasons I thought of connecting my research to their course material, since I thought this would be a way of contextualising their learning outcomes and perhaps motivate them to want to know more about it. In my happiest hopes I would perhaps have had a handful of students staying after the lecture or contacting me later on to know more about the subject, but I believe I am not quite that inspiring just yet!

Last, but not least, I also had some questions regarding how engaging they found the lecture. Given that I used NearPod - an interactive polling tool that I particularly liked using - during the session, I was hoping that the levels of engagement would be quite good. However, during the session I had problems with the number of people that could login (as I discussed in another entry) and hence I was then worried that that might have affected the students' experience, and hence feedback. I was not wrong: this was the aspect in which I got worse feedback as the students who couldn't participate in the NearPod activities left unforgiving comments about it. A lot of students (29%) stayed "neutral" when asked if the interactive tools were engaging, 20% either said they weren't. When asked if they felt engaged throughout the session, 31% answered with "neutral" and 9% disagreed. That still means 51% of the students who answered the questions in the feedback form found NearPod engaging, while 60% still felt engaged during the session. I am confident these numbers would have been better had I not ran into trouble with the limitations of a demonstration version of NearPod.

Still on the topic of engagement, I had included animated/funny gifs in my slides in an attempt to make it relaxed and relatable. I think this worked well with most students as I received several comments praising the upbeat mood of the lecture. However, a couple of other students felt it was patronising and that it made the lecture feel unprofessional, which they did not appreciate. I was quite surprised by this as it never occurred to me that delivering a lecture in a formal tone would be important to students. I must admit that I am most comfortable giving talks in an informal manner (I get too nervous otherwise) and so this adjustment may be difficult for me. Even though most people were perfectly fine with my delivery style, I believe that all feedback must be taken into account and so perhaps I will try to find a finer balance between a formal and informal tone. I feel - and this feedback I received shows exactly that - there will always be things which I will do as a teacher that may well work for the majority of students, but it is unlikely they will ever work for every single one of them, and I will do my best to keep this in mind. Being aware of the challenges that being aware of students' individual needs presents, I am also very conscious of how important it is.

In summary, I thought the feedback was overall very positive and I was pleased with the outcome of my first lecturing experience. There is certainly room for improvement, and there is a big difference between delivering one isolated lecture and a full module, but I think this was a good first step. In future I would really like to have the opportunity to deliver a more continuous form teaching, i.e. something where I could follow the progress of the students and adapt to their responses to my lectures as the module goes on. I feel this would allow me to continuously adapt to the students' responses to my teaching style (hence, more opportunities for development), as well as providing a better gauge of the effectiveness of my teaching.

As a student I always enjoyed interactive classes/lectures where I got to use interactive polling systems and/or other types of teaching technology. Therefore, as a teacher, I am keen to include these in my sessions both as a way of engaging students and gauging their knowledge and learning. As such, I decided to use such a tool, namely NearPod, in my first opportunity to give a lecture to first year chemistry students. Nearpod was especially attractive to me because it allowed students not only to answer multiple choice questions but also to give open ended answers and even draw their answers. I was very interested in the potential of the drawing tool as it would allow for students to draw (even if only roughly) trends, graphs, and so on – something they will likely have to do in an exam. My NearPod session was, therefore, as varied as the demo version would allow and I was excited to see how it would work with students.

The feedback I got was, overall, very positive, with students saying they liked the interactive aspect of it and that they felt engaged throughout. In general, students said they felt most engaged with the lecture when using NearPod, so I believe that I succeeded in using it in a relevant and effective way, so that it kept the pace going, kept students engaged but also that it fulfilled its teaching and learning purpose.

Not everything went according to plan, however. Despite having tested it several time before the session – to make sure logging in was working and to get acquainted with the “presenter view” and how to set the pace of the quiz – I did not pay enough attention to the limitations of the demo version. It would allow only 50 participants to log in, and so when faced with 80+ students trying to log in to my NearPod session I very quickly received a warning that I had maxed out. Worse yet, I had no back up plan, so several of the students in the room simply could not participate in what was a very heavy part of the lecture. When everyone else was answering questions on NearPod I tried to get some of the other students to answer out loud, but this resulted in the perhaps expected blank faces starring back at me. This had a major impact in the feedback I received: there were clearly two opposites of the “lecture satisfaction spectrum” and the justification for negative feedback was, often, “I couldn’t log in to NearPod”. This experience has taught me to not trust in demo versions of software (or double-check next time for their limitations) and, perhaps more importantly, to not rely so heavily on technology in the sense that if it doesn’t work I should still be able to effectively deliver my session. In other words, pay more attention and always (always) have a backup plan. I think I sometimes I trust in my improvisation talents a little too much!

I also received feedback that suggested that I show the group’s answers for each question, instead of only giving them the right answer. This type of feedback makes me think that students, like teachers, also benefit from gauging the room’s knowledge and understanding of the topic. I wonder if knowing where they sit within the group’s average gives them pointers on where to improve, or even if it fosters a certain level of competitiveness that keeps them motivated. I have reservations about making teaching about competition, but in light of the feedback I received I may well re-think the role of competition in student motivation, especially in cases like this (where answers are anonymous and students are comparing themselves to an overall, rather than individual, performance indicator).

Overall, I would say that my experience with NearPod was successful. I will certainly consider using it again at the earliest opportunity, putting to practice the things I learnt from this session.

Despite my conscious effort to provide good feedback, students can sometimes demand more of me. I find it important to keep open communication channels with students so that they have a point of contact to ask any questions, and so they often do. Here I want to reflect on a specific occasion where my feedback was not sufficient and my marking was challenged by a student: how I dealt with it and what I learnt from it.

The student in question had very high marks (a clear 1st) in their assessment and was clearly a highly motivated, driven individual with a very good academic performance. When marking their work, I took one mark for a verbose assignment; specifically, there was unnecessary repetition of calculations, paraphrasing of mathematical concepts (a "narration" of their maths, even), over-labelling/describing of tables, etc. This comes from an understanding that presenting data and communicating conclusions in a concise manner is very important for any student wanting to become a scientist. The student in question disagreed with my marking and, thinking back to our e-mail exchange, I think I automatically went into "defensive mode" and rushed to fully justify my decision, providing more thorough feedback on what I meant when I said the work should have been "more concise" and guidance on how to improve on this.

However, in hindsight I think there was an underlying issue that I failed to both recognise and address in this occasion: assessment criteria/what is expected of students. Both in their initial and response e-mails, where the student insisted they did not agree with how they were marked, there were several statements that now jump to the attention of my more attentive and more “trained” eye (teaching wise), such as:

• "I was taught to show my workings and calculations."
• "If I am expected to show my workings and show my understanding of the topic, there could not have been any more concise as it is."
• "I am confused about what markers are looking for."
• “If you had a point on mark scheme that said if the student did not show his workings concise with an example of what should be concise, then I will agree with your comments 100 percent.”
• “I don't understand why these things are marked down rather than commented.”
• “(…) the style and conciseness are not generally assessed for first-year students since we don't have detailed guidelines for it and examples on what we are expected.”

Reading these e-mails back now that I have explored and thought more about student assessment and feedback, I can certainly identify these statements as clear indicator that students are not clear on what is expected of them. More importantly, I think there might be a more widespread problem in the sense that consistency across markers, modules and subject areas (organic, inorganic, physical, analytical chemistry) might be lacking. That is, while I personally know what I am looking for in the work I mark – and consider things like presentation and conciseness as relevant – other markers may not be marking these aspects in the same way. Similarly, while an organic chemistry academic might be looking for a more descriptive laboratory report, for example, a physical chemistry academic might be looking for more graphs, tables and equations/calculations. While I recognise that some parts of marking will always have to be left to the marker’s discretion, I wonder if there may currently be too much margin for ambiguity and/or inconsistency.

In any case, my personal plan of action regarding this is simple: next time I mark anything I will seek to be clear and what is expected of students. Because I teach only occasionally, and generally I am not involved in the designing of modules or experiments, I do not necessarily know what the department has decided are the learning outcomes and assessment criteria in a broader sense, that is anything not explicitly mentioned in marking schemes, such as presentation, conciseness, clarity, data quality, and other aspects that are usually left at the markers discretion. I should not (and will not) assume what I personally expect a student to be able to achieve is what they have been formally told is expected of them. I will make it a priority to be familiar with the assessment criteria students are provided with, so that I can adjust my marking  accordingly and avoid student confusion regarding what is expected of them.

This experience has highlighted to me the importance of assessment criteria, both in terms of learning outcomes for a specific module/activity but also in terms of more "umbrella" skills, i.e. the so called "soft" skills (presentation, critical thinking, data analysis, written communication, etc.) that they may be expected to develop by completing an university - and, in this case, a science - degree.  

I understand "reciprocal teaching" as the concept of fostering long-lasting learning by allowing the students themselves to teach each other. Einstein used to say (so the Internet tells me) that "if you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself". I certainly encountered this throughout my journey in education: I always felt more confident that I understood something once I managed to explain it to someone else. 

I chose to write an entry on this topic because it relates to one of the moments in the APP PGR workshops that most stuck with me. We were exploring quiz teaching tools - either ResponseWare or NearPod - by answering several questions about fruits and vegetables. For example: are cucumbers a fruit or a vegetable? While some of the questions were easy to answer, we soon reached a question that divided the room. This fuelled some debate regarding the definition of "fruit", "vegetable" and even "seed". It was an interesting discussion in which I learnt a lot from my peers and then, later on, when cucumbers came up on the screen I was mind blown to find myself (correctly) reasoning that cucumbers are, technically, a fruit! It was a very clear example of how using polling technologies for teaching and letting the group discuss when a difficult question comes along is a very valuable tool. Not only did the "student-teachers" reinforced their knowledge, I had now acquired new knowledge myself, as I am sure others like me did as well. All of this without Sara (the course leader) having to give us a botany lesson!

This experience resonated with me because I had seen it happen before, only I hadn't realised its potential at the time. During one of my lab teaching sessions, when I failed to explain something to a student (and I was feeling pretty terrible for it) another student stepped in and successfully explained it to her colleague. This was yet another occasion when my students have surprise me, for she effortlessly delivered a piece of information I was struggling with by simply presenting it from a different perspective. Every mind thinks differently and I am glad that someone who thinks differently from me was there to convey this concept, but I confess at the time I felt I failed my student. However, having learnt more about and experienced reciprocal teaching myself, I think I will embrace these moments from now on. I feel reciprocal teaching enhances learning and student engagement for all involved. Like Dr. Russ Kitson told me "never underestimate students' ability to teach other; they may be able to see things from their peers' perspectives more easily". Yet another reminder that I should always listen to my students and give them all the opportunity to participate actively in both the learning and teaching processes.