Teaching@ECU: The Little Red Book 2011
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The Little Red Book
Welcome to Teaching @ ECU: The Little Red Book. Leading Learning is at the heart of everything we do at ECU. Through our teaching we lead the learning of students, whilst our research aims to lead learning in the community through the advancement of knowledge. We also have to be exemplars to our students of investing in our own continuous professional learning. As a University we aim to be recognised nationally and internationally for our teaching and learning excellence. As an ECU staff member, you make a vital contribution to our student outcomes. How you teach, interact with, and support students, impacts directly on our success as a university.
We regard the quality of our academic staff and their teaching as one of our main strengths. University teaching is a creative activity that fosters students’ intellectual and personal growth and promotes student engagement with their discipline and with the community that they increasingly serve. Teaching at university requires a high level of expertise in your subject area (discipline), an understanding of how students learn, together with a high level of communication and interpersonal skills. Effective university educators are critically reflective practitioners, reflecting on their own teaching and on the quality of their students’ learning in a way that engenders continuous improvement.
The aim of The Little Red Book is to assist you, whether you are a new or experienced academic staff member, to become more knowledgeable and effective in the teaching environment at ECU. It covers a diverse range of topics and is a valuable resource for enabling you to develop and refine your teaching to support students’ learning. It is available as a PDF download or can be read in an interactive format on the Centre for Learning and Development (CLD) website. It is designed to act as a reference point, not necessarily to be read cover to cover, and will be updated every year. The web-version of this book on the CLD website is particularly useful since you can use the search function and navigation tabs to find the exact bits that you want to read at any time. It is also linked interactively to a vast array of web pages and further resources that complement the purpose of this booklet.
The figure below, The Little Red Book – the big picture, encapsulates the key areas in which an academic staff member will become intimately familiar with during their ECU career. It has been designed to show the big picture of the ECU teaching, learning and assessment environment. The Little Red Book – the big picture is broken up into three streams: Teaching and Learning; Academic Roles; and Research and Creativity.
The Little Red Book – the big picture (click on the image to view in more detail)
The Little Red Book publication will focus on the Teaching and Learning stream within The Little Red Book – the big picture figure. Refer to the figure below, The Little Red Book – the big picture – Teaching and Learning stream. You will notice that within this stream, there are a number of topic areas. The colours of each topic area correspond to the coloured bars located to the right of each page throughout this publication. They have been designed for academic staff to use as a guide for when navigating through each chapter.
The Little Red Book – the big picture – Teaching and Learning stream
Here is a quick overview of what you can find in this guide. The first section, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, gets to the very heart of the teaching and learning process, providing valuable guidance on effective teaching and learning based on the latest research in the field of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).
The second section, Teaching and learning responsibilities, outlines the responsibilities and administrative duties associated with teaching at ECU. These include staff responsibilities for the safety and welfare of students, unit administration, assessment and the issue of academic misconduct and plagiarism.
The third section, Resources, services and systems, contains an alphabetical listing and brief explanation of the tools, technologies and people that are available to support academic staff in their teaching roles, together with links to websites for accessing additional information.
The fourth section, Strategic context, explains the Big Picture of the University and how it informs decisions at all levels. The current strategic priorities for the university are outlined, our focus on continuous quality improvement is explored and polices and guidelines relevant to teaching and learning at ECU are covered.
The fifth section, Our university, explores the environment within which we operate at ECU. It starts with an explanation of where our name comes from, through to the structure of the University to an overview of students and staff at ECU. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the key external parties that shape the internal environment at our University.
You can use the menu at the left to navigate your way through The Little Red Book site.
We hope you enjoy reading!
Centre for Learning and Development
Use the left-hand menu to navigate to different sections of this site. Alternatively, progress to the next section Scholarship of teaching and learning.