6.2 Organisation of HDE course

In response to a question in the entry questionnaire on how they would like the HDE course to be organised, students appeared to prefer that demonstrations by lecturers (43%), small group work (38%), observation in schools (37%) and micro-teaching (28%) be used in the course. However, it is noteworthy that 19% of the sample felt that they did not want to observe what was happening in schools. Most of the students (65%) did not want the lecturers to dictate notes and preferred small group to large group teaching. However, 29% felt that they would like large group teaching to happen at times and a similar percentage felt that small group teaching should only take place ‘sometimes’. Although almost a third were in favour of micro-teaching, the large percentage that did not respond to this question (38%) probably indicated that entry level students did not know what micro-teaching was. Similarly, it is possible that many of those that did not reply to the question on observation in school, also did not know exactly what this entailed.

Table 17: Responses to question: “How would you like the HDE course to be organised?” (entry questionnaire) (N = 178)