Ms Margaret Liddle, Assistant Professor in Law in the School of Accounting and Finance (AF), who joined PolyU in September 1992, is honoured for her excellent performance and achievements in Teaching. Many would find it 'challenging' to handle mass lectures given to large classes of 200 to 300 students but Ms Liddle has no problem handling them. In actual fact, she has consistently obtained high SFQ scores for the classes that she teaches, even for the mass lectures that she regularly delivers.
Ms Liddle's teaching goals are to impart knowledge and build up the confidence of students. As she teaches future professionals she always impresses upon her students from the very first class that "professionalism" is more than just gaining an academic qualification, it is a state of mind found in the bearing, attitude, self-discipline and motivation of the individual.
During her lectures, Ms Liddle would present information on complex legal issues concisely and comprehensibly. She would concretise abstractions with illustrations drawn both from daily life and from her extensive experience as a legal practitioner. Ms Liddle employs her own teaching pedagogical strategy and teaching approach: problem based learning in conjunction with the case method. She enlivens dry mid-nineteenth century English cases by transposing them to contemporary Hong Kong.
In tutorials, Ms Liddle uses structured real-life problems that have multiple solutions. The solutions do not emerge until the students have made a significant effort to understand the problem and explore different concepts, rules and principles that lead to one of a variety of acceptable solutions.
Students have found Ms Liddle to be a warm, caring and approachable person who has an intuitive grasp of their problems. She also spends a great deal of time and energy in mentoring weak students.
Ms Liddle had worked closely over many years with the Educational Development Centre (EDC), completing two Learning and Teaching Development Grant projects to the highest standard. She has presented papers on group work method, problem-based learning and role play as a learning and assessment method, in a number of international conferences. Her expanded papers in these areas have been published in refereed journals.
