Hands-on learning with Associate Professor Amber Willems-Jones

Meet Associate Professor Amber Willems-Jones from the School of Biomedical Sciences who has a passion for supporting her students to be active in their learning.

Recently appointed Associate Professor, Amber Willems-Jones is a well-respected and dedicated education focused academic in the School of Biomedical Sciences who has received several esteemed teaching awards, including the 2023 David White Award for Teaching Excellence and the 2022 Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences (MDHS) Excellence Learning and Teaching Award for Sustained Excellence.

Amber has had eight University and MDHS Learning and Teaching Initiative (LTI) grants funded to support various research projects and innovations to enhance her teaching, including a grant in progress in 2025 to amplify the impact of LTI grants through enhanced dissemination of educational innovations.

Amber is a strong proponent of the cognitive constructivist approach to student learning, where students actively take part in building their own knowledge and understanding. Her classes promote active participation, and Amber has incorporated teaching activities to challenge her students’ critical thinking skills.

“Many of my tutorials are designed to promote active participation. I am also a proponent of ensuring constructive alignment, and I enhance my own teaching practice by linking teaching methods, learning outcomes and assessments to achieve purposeful learning”.

An example of this is a three-lesson learning module Amber developed with the support of a LTI grant. In the module, students participate in a virtual ‘choose your own adventure’ digital experiment where they integrate theory with practical experiments and examine their understanding of experimental design and analysis. The module provides simulated results to verify experimental success and mimics a real-world experience in troubleshooting, helping students develop inquiry-based research skills and confidence to apply knowledge to experimental design.

Amber has been using this module each semester since 2019 to consolidate student knowledge and has received great feedback from students about how helpful it is to learn in context and how much the module ties subject matter together.

The practical nature of the laboratory-based Techniques in Molecular Science subject Amber coordinates, helps with engaging students, as they often forge connections quickly in this collaborative environment through working in pairs or small groups. Amber’s genuine enthusiasm for her subject matter, biochemistry and molecular biology, helps her connection with students and is one of the things she finds her students enjoy most. It also helps that all Amber’s subjects are well-organised, well-structured and diverse in content which students find beneficial.

Another area of focus for Amber is self-regulated learning, where students understand and control, or adapt to their own learning environments to achieve their learning goals. To facilitate this in teaching Amber includes a self-assessment and self-reflection task (associated with a written assessment) to promote self-regulated learning and help foster students’ academic judgement. When students actively and authentically engage in this self-reflection exercise, they display (on average) improved outcomes in their following assignments.

Amber also encourages the use of tools to support skill development, including the Assessment Literacy Tool (also known as the Assessment Literacy Module), which is a tool developed by the School of Psychological Sciences designed to aid students’ progression of their academic judgement and assessment literacy skills. This is an e-module embedded into Canvas that allows students to evaluate sample assignments as an assessor and is available to all University teaching staff.

Being involved in a variety of educational opportunities is something Amber strongly encourages all early career educators to do.

“Be open to as many opportunities as possible and get involved in activities external to your primary subject and discipline. It’s also important to learn about pedagogical frameworks early on in your academic career to help you develop and frame your own teaching philosophy”.

In 2024 Amber participated in a bespoke leadership program ‘Leading Educational Quality and Innovation Program’ developed by the Centre for the Study of Higher Education (CSHE). This experience resulted in several research collaborations, successful applications for LTI grants, and a successful application for the Advance HE Senior Fellowship program, alongside valuable peer mentoring and academic reflection opportunities.

Amber has progressed her career through experience in research and teaching. After she completed her Bachelor of Science (Honours), followed by her PhD at the University of Melbourne she worked for a number of years as a molecular biologist for KConFab at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. She later returned to the University and is now an Associate Professor coordinating the second-year subject ‘Techniques in Molecular Science’ and co-coordinating the first-year subject ‘Exploring Biomedicine’.

Ambers recent promotion to Level D Associate Professor is a milestone of which she is especially proud as an acknowledgement of her passion, talent and hard work. While Amber reflects that she often prioritised her students, especially early in her teaching career, she is working on improving her work-life balance, and encourages others to find ways to do the same.