Possible future directions and areas of focus for your personal / professional development as an educator

I’ve learned many significant points through ‘Tertiary Teaching and Learning’ unit to improve my teaching. But this is just a kick-off of long way forward to develop myself as a teacher. Planning is a dynamic subject which is affected by politics, economy, social change, and technology (Fischer, 2012). There are many practices all over the world. First of all, I would like to keep synthesizing the academic theories and state-of-the-art practices to the component of my teaching as linked with my teaching briefs. The examples introduced in my class should be always updated to follow the dynamic feature of planning. This requires classic readings but also technology such as YouTube, radio, and Skype to listen to the ‘real’ voice of planners from all over the world. Also, as a course convener of Master of Urban and Regional Planning, I am responsible for designing the course structure. I am considering to re-design the course to let students to learn as much effectively as possible to achieve their study goal, but also nurture them as excellent planner. We have accreditation from Planning Institution of Australia but there is room for improvement. As part of this improvement, we are thinking to expose students to more international practices as Australian examples have limitations for students to obtain high-standard knowledge and experience in this field. We will start new unit next year which is called ‘international planning workshop’. We take students to international host institutions every year under one theme each (for example, transit-oriented development for 2013). Students learn and work with the students from host institutions but also industry/governments there to experience real planning. I also discuss with the two students representatives to understand their needs and what should be improved in our teaching. In this way, we can bridge the potential gaps on ‘what the teacher does’, ‘how student learn’, and ‘expected learning outcomes’.

Secondly, I would like to review of my colleague’s teaching activity at times. I reviewed my colleague’s activity as assignment 1 and learned significant points that gave answers to my questions: how could I put students in the practical/professional situation and let them critically explore how they should address the issues of their task?, how could I give students the feedback of their work effectively?, and how could I let students to refer to the readings and reflect on their learning and assignments? I immediately applied what my colleagues do in my teaching and received positive feedback to students.

Finally, I would like to share teaching experiences with my colleagues more often. There are many excellent teachers who are trying to improve their teaching all the time. But we don’t discuss and share our experience so often. When the connection, engagement, and safety are in place, sustainable conversations about learning and teaching are possible (McCormack and Kennelly, 2011). Fortunately our discipline already has these factors. As I think there is no way to miss the opportunities to learn from other teacher’s experience, I would like to keep sharing experiences at staff meetings, morning/afternoon teas where we frankly discuss.

My personal beliefs about the ways in which students learn and relevant guiding principles in teaching, support for your beliefs about learning, teaching and assessment from the scholarly higher education

Urban planning is a highly practical discipline as my peer-reviewer Richard Hu says. In this context, classical learning style doesn’t help students to develop their skills to be professionals. Because as a planner they are required to play various roles in practice: as analyst, designer, advocate, manager, mediator, educator, and facilitator (Fischler, 2012). My personal beliefs about the ways in which students learn are; students synthesize planning theory and practice, by putting themselves as planner in hypothetical situation in the process of learning. Students critically analyse and evaluate the existing practices to identify how the planners have coped with the issues and challenges and what are the past failures that they shouldn’t repeat. I agree with Schonwetter et al. (2002) that mentions ‘Effective teaching results from a synergy among learning principles, personal characteristics, and discipline and institutional cultures’. In my discipline this ‘synergy’ really helps students to achieve leaning outcomes. Therefore the ‘Deep approach’ (Biggs and Tang, 2007) is applied in my classes. I include ‘visit to local councils’, ‘visit to urban development site’, ‘role-playing’ in my class to help develop skills as planner. I refer to ‘the important thing is that relating all teaching methods to particular goals for student learning’ (Ramsden, 2003), and ‘Informed by intellectual curiosity, methodological rigor, and good judgement, comprehensive approach to urban development enables planners to attend to a wide array of factors and to synthesize a large number of elements into meaningful, creative schemes ( Fischer, 2012). Assignment in my class is to demonstrate their knowledge and its application to practice. For example, the second assignment of my unit ‘Planning theory and process 2’ was group presentation which students were to work together in teams of up to 5 people to present a critique of a local urban plan to provide advice to the local council meeting.

My students exploring new town centre development

Why teaching is important to me?

I realised the importance of teaching and how much I liked and missed teaching after spending 2.5 years with research organisation. I possessed an academic position in Japan (urban and transport planning) and moved to Australia to join the federal research organisation four years ago. I was happy when I started my job in Australia as a research scientist, but realised that something was wrong - I missed teaching. Siemiatycki (2012) describes that planning academics are assuming ever larger roles as participants in practice, as public scholars, as advisor or consultants, as community-based researchers, or as activists. I would add ‘teacher’ on top of this. It never occurred to me to question myself why teaching is important to me when I was teaching in an university in Japan, where the teaching style/norms and students attitudes are different from Australia. It is common that one-third of students at class are asleep, reading comics, and texting in Japan, where conventional and passive teaching is dominant. There is also a clear hierarchy between teachers and students. So it is rare that students argue or make comments. No feedback like USS is given at the end of semester. What is expected for students are, to listen to teachers and to make note. With this teaching style, not many teachers care how their teaching assists/not assists students’ learning and stimulate their intellectual curiosity.  Because ‘how students learn’ is not regarded as ‘significant’ in this teaching norms. But I realised this teaching style isn’t meaningful in my field- urban and regional planning which is very practical. Therefore my answer to the question ‘why teaching is important to me’ is; because teaching is to nurture urban planners who build our living environment in the future and I am honoured to be responsible for contributing to this. I believe in my field of urban planning, teachers have much responsibility in nurturing future planners because their work directly affect people’s quality of life. The second reason is because teaching is also learning. I believe that teaching brings me a lot of opportunities to train myself, through discussion and being inspired by student’s innocent idea which will lead crystallising research ideas and application to planning practice. The third reason is that teaching is fun. I enjoy teaching. If I don’t enjoy teaching, student would notice this and they wouldn’t enjoy either. If they enjoy learning, that would bring better motivation to them.

My students learning about public private partnership in infrastructure planning.