Associate ProfessorIain Doherty

I have designed, developed and taught into postgraduate certificate courses in teaching and learning in each of my three University positions. I have done this because of my love of teaching and because I believe that teaching practice helps to inform my role in leading teams who are working with academics on the design and development of their courses and units. As an example, I have taught the foundational unit in the Graduate Certificate Higher Education (Learning and Teaching) across four trimesters, which is a course that all new academics must take if they do not have a teaching qualification. In terms of impact, I taught over 150 students across the four trimesters with excellent eVALUate scores strongly suggesting that my teaching had a significant impact.

I follow Piaget and Vygotsky with a cognitivist and social constructivist teaching philosophy that presages active, authentic, real-world learning and assessments tasks. Students are located within a community of inquiry having a cognitive and affective presence, a social presence in relation to one another, and where there is a teacher presence that has multiple dimensions in facilitating students to construct knowledge and develop skills. The use of technologies needs to be constructively aligned to contribute to teaching and student learning and / or to support the design of robust assessments. I design my teaching with a student-centred focus and knowing the importance of feedback for learning, I dedicate myself beyond time allocations to providing comprehensive and constructive feedback to scaffold students in their learning and success.