Offering Graduate Courses for Educational Leaders: Refining Teaching Modes And Approaches Towards Best Practices

Written by Westbrook, D. (June 2006).

This paper is based on the researcher’s experiences as a graduate student, a senior academic teaching and auditing graduate classes. He has engaged in teaching and research at 31 universities. In his over 35 years of experience, he has developed some of the most effective graduate courses, attracting students from 30 overseas countries. Courses are offered both on-campus and off-campus. These courses received high student evaluation ratings and appreciations, ranging from 4.0 to 4.9 on a 5 point scale. In 1989, the researcher commenced teaching in a faculty with academics, solely dedicated to graduate level teaching. But by 2005, due to keen competition for graduate students and the need to pay full-fees, he has become the only academic having full-time work, at graduate level, at a School of Education comprising over 80 full-time and part-time academics.