Bulletin Special Supplement Jun 1965

knowledge about various teaching methods and about their effectiveness in the respective Colleges. Together, having regard to th e differing traditions of the three Colleges, they provide a very wide range of experience. L1. 3 A review of this knowledge and experience and an illuminating accoun t of its application and of many o f the associated problems were provided ill the Report (dated 4th September, 1964) made to the Vice-Chancellor by T he Teaching Methods Committee. Th is Committee was appointed by D r . L i in March 1964, w i t h the Pro-Vice-Chancellor, President C . T. Yu ng as Chairma n and a membership drawn f r om all the Colleges, to prepare a Report that it was hoped would serve as a basis for further discussions w i th us. For this Report and for the full discussions that we have had w i th members of the Committee we are indeed greteful; without them we should have wished t o pursue many enquiries that could not have been completed in the time at our disposal. As it was, we were greatly assisted by the Committee's summarised results of the questionnaires that had evoked careful and thoughtfu l responses in the Colleges. L1.4 The Committee on Teaching Methods did much more than collec t information about experience and present practice; it asked some fundamental questions about teaching at university level. I n its report there are many constructive suggestions for increasing the value to the students in the Colleges of their courses and the teaching and for increasing the extent to which they avail themselves of the opportunities both formal and informal that are open to them to promote their education and development in the widest sense. We refer below to many of thes e points and though we may not agree w i th som e of the proposals the Committee put forward, we could not fail to be impressed by the Committee's work and by the breadth of their review which covered all aspects of undergraduate study. L1.5 The University is at an important and difficult stage of its development. Each of the Colleges has its ow n traditions and has worked out its own methods — a n d is naturally anxious to retain these; and yet each must in some measure shift neare r to the others so that there may in due course be many common courses — not for the sake of uniformity but so that all students in a subject may benefit for th e learning and scholarship of experts in the Colleges. Absence of any common ground or of some similarity of approach w i ll make it exceptionally and unnecessarily difficult to bring students f r om the three Colleges together in a u n i v e r s i t y course. These difficulties w i ll arise more particularly when two of the most valuable teaching methods are associated in a course — the lecture and small-group teaching. The lecturer himself will not be able to take all the seminars or tutorials in the Colleges — possibly not even in one Colleg e — that derive f r om or are related to the series of lectures that he is giving. Unless there is agreement about the ground to be covered and some co-ordination of 'attack', the value of the small-group teaching will be only fractional. L1. 6 It is partly w i th these considerations in mind that we have included a section on Boards of Studies. Provision for these was made in the Constitution of the University and there is important work for them to undertake. The Senate has freedom to define their areas of responsibility (Statute 11 A ( s ) ) and one of their principal functions in the immediate future w i ll be to provide an opportunity for bringin g together teachers of the same subject in the three Colleges and for discussing syllabuses and examinations. L1.7 A student coming to spend some years in a university may have any one of several purposes in m i nd — (a) to prepare for a career that he has already decided upon and for which he is therefore seeking factual knowledge and training and skill in using i t; ( b) to prepare for some career that he has not yet selected but for which he think s the mental training of a university course will be useful; ( c) to continue study at a higher level than is generally possible outside a university in a subject or group of subjects that interests h im and in which he has already shown some ability; and many students will b e influenced consciously or subconsciously by mor e than one of these as well as by other factors. I n every case however, one of the most valuable things the student can gain is the capacity to use his mind, to order and review facts, to make logical deductions, to examine arguments and to formulate and express his thoughts and ideas. It might be possible to gain these qualities by reading or hearing other men's expositions of their subjects; but this can never be so effective as for the student himself t o have to do these things and w i th guidance and correction to learn to do them well. Learning to do this may well be more difficult for students in whose cultura l background great stress is laid on memorising; but this, we believe makes this side of teaching more particularly important in the Chinese University and we have therefore given specia l emphasis to it in what follows. Se c t i on 2: De f i n i t i o ns L2.1 T he question of terminology is a constant problem i n the field of teaching methods; we wish therefore to define at this point a small numbe r of uniform expressions which are made use of in this report; these definitions, even if they are not subsequently useful to colleagues, will reduce ambiguity in the following pages. 25