There are three important functions served by teaching excellence awards in an institution of higher education. First, they give due recognition to teachers who excel in their profession. Second, they serve as an indication of the importance accorded to teaching within the institution. Third, they send clear signals to the teaching community about what the institution regards as high quality teaching by identifying the results that the teaching practices in the institution aims to strive for.

Of these, the third function is probably the most important. To accomplish this aim:

1. Teaching awards at NUS will be based on a value system and selection criteria that are explicitly articulated, and communicated to the entire teaching community.

2. Every teaching award given will be accompanied by a citation on the qualities and teaching practices that made the award winner an excellent or outstanding teacher.

There are several reasons for emphasizing (a) and (b). First, they express a commitment to an institutional value system that sends signals about what the institution regards as high quality teaching. Second, the teaching practices which are rewarded by the label “excellent” under one set of criteria may not be the ones which receive the same reward under a different set of criteria, and hence the meaningful selection of those who truly deserve the awards calls for (a) and (b). Third, in the absence of (a) and (b), teaching awards risk the danger of being perceived as the recognition of a teacher’s popularity or the result of ad hoc decisions, neither of which may necessarily reflect teaching excellence. The adoption of (a) and (b) will greatly reduce such problems and lend greater credibility to the awards.

Teaching and Learning

As an institution of higher learning, we are committed to the view of teaching as the activity of bringing about learning (facilitating learning). Learning can take place without teaching, but the teacher’s activity cannot be regarded as teaching unless it results in learning. Hence the quality of teaching depends on the quality of the learning outcomes facilitated by the teacher.

We are also committed to the view that the learning outcomes we value highly include not only knowledge and its application, but also independent learning, critical thinking, independent inquiry, and articulateness. As for methodology, we advocate the exploration of a wide spectrum of concepts and approaches that will help in achieving the learning outcomes: student-centered teaching, interactive teaching, active learning, collaborative learning, problem-centered and problem-based learning, case study approach, inquiry-based learning, constructivist learning, small group teaching, open book examinations, and so on. Finally, we also have a commitment to the use of modern technology for educational purposes, and innovative experimentation with the technology guided by pedagogical sensitivity.

Teaching Appraisal

Teaching Excellence

The traditional approach to teacher appraisal limits itself to the teacher’s ability to provide instruction. Such appraisals consider the quality of lecturing (style of delivery, knowledge content, organization, exposition, etc.), other forms of imparting knowledge (teaching materials, selection of readings, videotapes, and so on), and personal qualities (scholarship, dedication, approachability, rapport with students, and ability to inspire students and arouse their interest, and so on.) While these considerations are indeed important, even more important is the effectiveness of the teacher’s methodology in facilitating learning. The value of the other parameters is dependent on, and limited to, the degree of their contribution to effective learning.

Still more important in teacher appraisal is the value of what students learn as a result of the teacher’s activities. An excellent teacher is not merely one who excels at communication, has a high command of the subject, has a passion for teaching, cares for students, is sensitive to student needs, and so on. Nor is excellence guaranteed by the teaching methodologies used by the teacher. At the heart of teaching excellence lies the teacher’s ability to inculcate and strengthen intellectual qualities such as independent learning, thinking, and inquiry; critical thinking, creative problem solving, intellectual curiosity, intellectual skepticism, informed judgment, and articulateness.

OEA/ATEA identifies teachers who qualify as educators by facilitating learning that is of value even outside the boundaries of specific disciplines and professions. Such teachers should help learners to acquire not only the discipline/profession specific knowledge and abilities, but also the ideas, mental capacities, mindset, and habits of thought that we expect every university educated individual to have, regardless of their areas of concentration.

The discipline specific aspects of knowledge and abilities that a teacher should facilitate can be identified only by those who specialize in the discipline in question. What we can identify at the University level are those aspects of learning that a teacher as an educator should aim at in an institution of higher learning. As a starting point, we may list some of these learning outcomes as follows:

Knowledge

1. familiarity with a body of knowledge that we expect all university graduates to have, irrespective of their area of specialization;
2. familiarity with the core evidence/arguments for (or against) the concepts and statements that one takes as “knowledge”;

Abilities, and Mental Capacities

3. the ability to apply familiar information to various problems and situations that one is likely to face in various domains of life, to formulate informed opinions and make informed decisions on the basis of what is regarded as knowledge (e.g. the ability gather relevant information on a medical choice that affects one’s life, and critically evaluate the options one is faced with to arrive at a decision);
4. the ability to seek evidence/arguments that support or refute the concepts or statements in what is claimed or regarded as “knowledge”;
5. the ability to learn on one's own independently of teachers and educational institutions;
6. the ability to engage in critical thinking, to make an assessment of the truth, significance, or value of claims, proposals and actions using the criteria of evaluation appropriate to the domain in question;
7. the ability to discover and construct knowledge on one's own (allowing one to engage in independent research) which includes the ability to identify interesting problems/questions, the ability to find solutions/answers, the ability to test the credibility of these solutions and answers using the appropriate criteria of critical evaluation, the ability to look for alternative solutions and answers, and so on;
8. the ability to articulate opinions, ideas, proposals, and arguments clearly and precisely;

Mindset and Habits of Thought

9. a sense of the uncertainty and fallibility of human knowledge (including established knowledge), as well as the degrees of certainty of different concepts and statements in what is regarded as “knowledge”;
10. willingness and readiness to doubt and question established and controversial views including those which are generally taken as “knowledge”.
11. a deep enjoyment of learning, resulting in the desire to learn more.

Note that learning outcomes B, D-K are essential pre-requisites to independent life-long learning. Hence, implicit the above characterization is the recognition that the highest form of learning is independent life-long learning.

We may find it necessary to supplement A-K with additional items, but for the present we can take them to be the specification of the core learning outcomes of the education offered in an institution of higher education that aims to facilitate high quality of learning. If so, we may flesh out the condition on outstanding educators as follows:

Needless to say, it would be unreasonable to expect any one module or one teacher to accomplish all the above. “Quality of teaching” is multidimensional, in the sense that it involves a number of parameters of strengths. The strengths of different outstanding modules or teachers may lie along any subset of these parameters. However, in order to qualify as an outstanding educator, a teacher must facilitate a significant subset of A-K. As a rough approximation, we may require that an outstanding educator must provide evidence for facilitating, say, at least six of the eleven learning outcomes in A-K.

In other words, what we are looking for in an “educator” is the “value added” component of A-K. To take an example, learning that the benzene molecule has six atoms of carbon and six atoms of hydrogen, and a ring structure with alternating double bonds and single bonds is of value only within confines of the discipline of chemistry. However, an understanding of the evidence for this hypothesis which allows one to see why we can’t explain the equal number of hydrogen and carbon atoms in benzene by assuming that carbon has multiple valences including a valence of one, provides the basis for a mode of critical thinking that can be transferred outside the boundaries of chemistry to other domains of academic and everyday life. The facilitation of this higher plane is what distinguishes an educator from a mere teacher.

Given these considerations, we may formulate the selection criteria for teaching awards as follows:

Sources of information

If teaching is facilitating learning, teaching appraisals cannot rely exclusively on the teacher's classroom activities. They should cover the entire spectrum of pedagogy, including the quality of the curriculum/syllabus design, teaching materials, learning exercises, feedback to students, and assessment tasks. They should consider the widest range of information available for making a reliable assessment, including student feedback, peer review, and the teaching portfolio. Module folders in the portfolio should include the aims and objectives of the module, the syllabus, readings, exercises, and the questions for continuous and final assessment.

Awards

The OEA carries a cash award as well as a teaching grant which is intended to enable the awardee to engage in activities that will support and enhance his role as an educator and contribute to teaching/learning at NUS, e.g.

• developing courseware/new instructional materials
• engage in classroom/action research
• taking education courses
• attending education conferences
• undertaking an attachment to some Teaching/Learning Centre abroad that is strong in an area that the person is interested in, e.g. distance delivery, PBL, etc.