To recognise teaching staff who inspire students and fellow colleagues, the University established the President's Awards for Excellence in Inspirational Teaching in 2022. In this story, we will look at the examples set by three awardees from the latest edition of the Awards.
Professional Teaching
Dr Sara Li Tze-kwan
Dr Li joined the University in 2019 upon completing her post-doctoral fellowship. As a psychologist, she has always been fascinated by the science of learning in cognitive and educational psychology, especially the learner-centred psychological principles suggested by the American Psychological Association. As soon as she took up teaching, she set her mind on designing student-centred curricula backed by multimodal teaching and learning strategies.
Dr Li understands “student-centred learning” as a teaching approach that integrates students' needs. In the discipline of psychology, which contains a lot of theories, a common need of students is to understand how theories apply. She addresses this need by incorporating application experiences into her lessons. Her course plans typically feature interactive lectures using gamification tools like Mentimeter, Quizizz and Kahoot to engage students and keep track of their progress, followed by applied-oriented tutorials of corresponding topics. For example, in a tutorial for the course “Psychology of Language” going over language processing and reading, she took students to the computer laboratory for online psychological experiments. “I asked them to view a short video that presents text in different speeds and evaluate their own reading speeds. This way, they learnt about the basic elements of conducting research while experiencing how cognitive theory plays out in themselves,” she explains.
Beyond the classroom, Dr Li has been making a great effort in seeking service-learning, practicum and internship opportunities for students, especially since becoming the programme leader of the Bachelor of Social Sciences with Honours in Psychology and Mental Health programme. Moreover, due to the academic nature of the psychology discipline, she is particularly keen on mentoring students in research. During her undergraduate years, she identified her research direction in music psychology early thanks to a good professor who was also a passionate musician. Today, she inspires her students by recruiting them as student research assistants. “Students actually expressed to me that they wanted such opportunities,” says she. “Some students who had assisted in my research projects wished to work as research assistants after graduation. Several who had never thought of going to graduate school discovered their potential and sought to go into research.”
In a research project that explores how music training affects adults' cognitive abilities, Dr Li involved students by recruiting them to join her participant groups instead — 30 learnt to play the melodica for ten weeks, while another 30 played computer games during the same period, both groups compared against a control group with no assigned task. Her initial idea was to give students a taste of what academia does. But the response was far beyond her expectation, which in turn inspired her to consider participants' learning experience more in her next projects.
Dr Li is happy to see an increasing number of her students continuing with postgraduate studies, some in excellent overseas universities. She is also encouraged by students' positive feedback in her lessons. “You know your approach works when students move to the front rows of the lecture hall in the latter part of the semester,” she makes a contented remark.
Early-career Teaching
Observing a general inadequacy of paediatric training in traditional physiotherapy curricula, Ms Chan left clinical practice to join HKMU with the mission of inspiring future physiotherapists to help children with special needs. “There's a lack of new entrants to the paediatric stream of physiotherapy. After all, not everyone feels comfortable about handling parents and kids.” According to Ms Chan, while musculoskeletal and sports rehabilitation have always been the mainstream, paediatric physiotherapy was only taught as an elective subject in the past. Coupled with limitations of traditional undergraduate physiotherapy programmes, many serving paediatric physiotherapists had no prior experience in serving children.
When she designed the paediatric curriculum for the year-long course “Clinical Neurology and Developmental Disabilities”, she decided to arrange early exposure activities for students before the actual content on paediatric physiotherapy was covered. These included attachment to her own therapy sessions with children. “At the beginning, my teaching load was still manageable. I negotiated with Heep Hong Society, where I worked at previously, to take over cases from its Lam Woo Foundation Child Development Centre on campus, so that I could have my own cases for students to observe,” says Ms Chan. As she focused on teaching later on, she continued to tap into her professional network to arrange for students to visit and volunteer at paediatric physiotherapy sessions outside. Such opportunities were available throughout the year. “They enabled students to observe the approaches of different physiotherapists and familiarise themselves with various settings, like special schools and preschool centres,” she explains. Towards the end of the course, students were required to complete a fieldwork project analysing a real clinical case making use of the knowledge and skills they had learnt.
To allow students to immerse in the roles of therapist and child, Ms Chan worked with another experienced practitioner to set up a paediatric corner in the Neurological Physiotherapy Laboratory, the first simulated paediatric developmental training facility ever developed for a physiotherapy programme in Hong Kong. Students can experience, for example, moving like a baby on the mat while feeling the muscles engaged, or setting an obstacle course and trying it out on their partners. “There was a time when a fitball fell onto the head of the student playing a patient. That was a realistic scenario. The students learnt from a mistake,” she recounts.
Considering herself a novice in teaching, Ms Chan is highly conscientious about raising her teaching quality. In addition to attending professional development workshops, she had invited her programme leader to peer review her teaching before a peer review system was formally introduced in her School. She also initiated an experience-sharing session with frontline junior paediatric physiotherapists to keep track of the day-to-day problems they encounter.
Ms Chan's students were most impressed by the individual e-portfolios she prepared for them at the end of the year. Hoping to encourage them and help them work on their weaknesses, she compiled a full record of everyone's course assignments, including the scores and her comments, together with the volunteer services they had participated in, and sent it back to each of them before the final exam. She was pleasantly surprised by the positive response she received, with many students showing their appreciation for her efforts throughout the year. But for her, the greatest reward comes from her mission fulfilled. “After the initial field visits, some students told me the kids were cute and deserved our help. They would like to join similar volunteering activities again. At the end of the year, several of them even expressed an interest to go into the paediatric field,” says the satisfied teacher.
The first full-length course Mr Wu was given, after being promoted from the post of lecturer to senior lecturer, was “Clinical Nursing (General Health Care) (I)” for the Higher Diploma in Nursing Studies programme, which he is still teaching. “It was a big course spanning the whole academic year, and I had high expectations on how students would turn out,” says he. The first actions he took were to review students' qualitative feedback from the previous three years and talk to several students from the last year. Gathering that previous students had found it difficult to link theory and practice, he redeveloped the course materials and introduced a few student-centred strategies. A major revolution he implemented was the introduction of a clinical virtual simulation system known as Body Interact to the tutorial classes. The system comes with a virtual patient programmed with different kinds of medical conditions. He asked students to play the role of nurses tending a “patient” with conditions discussed in the previous lecture, and decide the nursing interventions to take according to their real-time response. “Clinical reasoning cannot be earned by studying; it can only be developed through practice,” says Mr Wu. “Body Interact allows students to experience how important it is to make timely judgements. Failing to do so could result in the death of the 'patient'.”
A remarkable jump in the overall course score was observed after the introduction of Body Interact. The students found it so helpful that they requested individual accounts for self-practice. Mr Wu put forward their request to the School and shared his experience with relevant committees. Not only did the School grant the request, but it also supported the incorporation of Body Interact in similar courses at both Bachelor's and Higher Diploma levels. He went on to work with colleagues and technicians to adapt the system, which originated in Europe, for the Hong Kong context. He also took his experience to other universities in Asia and the International Conference on Technology in Education.
Still early in his teaching career, Mr Wu derives his teaching strategies from a combination of positive and negative experiences he had as a student. In addition to passing on good legacies from his former teachers, he makes a point to avoid practices that used to turn him off, like packing presentation slides with text. His lecture slides are mainly composed of photos and multimedia resources that help students visualise theories, including TV drama excerpts with problematic medical scenes. Redeveloping the course materials meant that he had to catch up with the class schedule weekly in his first year of taking over the course, but he was satisfied by the increase in attendance rate by the second semester. “In the last lesson, I read my class a letter I had written for them. At the end of my reading, everybody clapped. It was all worth it,” he says.
To his Higher Diploma students, who tend to find themselves inferior, he spurs them on, saying, “I teach you as I would Bachelor's degree students. Patients won't distinguish between Registered and Enrolled Nurses. To them, you are all nurses.”
