more on accreditation

I spent some time recently in an interesting discussion around the question of whether tertiary teachers should be required to complete some form of national accreditation. Now, many – but by no means all! – institutions do already have something like this available for their staff, albeit that take-up is essentially voluntary. What would happen to these in-house programs, we wondered, in the event of such a national qualification becoming the norm? Would the individual organisations stop running their own systems? – a pity, in many ways, as these are likely tailored to the needs of their own staff and students. There’s also the issue of portability: whether the putative national qualification would be portable, between institutions and between countries. If this could be guaranteed, then why would teachers bother with the in-house model? This would be a negative result overall, as it would then remove any need for an individual institution to develop and maintain its own programs for its own staff.

We also wondered what form accreditation – accreditation, not a qualification - should take. Teaching excellence is not a static thing: the best teachers are always reviewing, reflecting on, revising and enhancing their practice. A qualification based on examinations are not going to adequately measure these attributes. Far better, we thought, to go with portfoliosmeasured by portfolio of work. This would be a living document as the individual’s practice should be constantly self-reviewed & enhanced, a process reflected in the portfolio.

Part of the discussion hinged on just how you define ‘excellence’. We were all Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award winners, so you’d think we’d know, wouldn’t you? But we’re all excellent at different things, so a definition proved hard to pin down. Can we define ‘excellence’ a la John Hattie’s work on secondary teaching? Possibly. Well, maybe not ‘define’, but we could certainly give examples of excellence from the portfolios of previous TTEA awardees.  could then act as basis of any form of professional development. In fact, you could argue that those awardees show something called ‘positive deviance‘ – and in this instance ‘deviance’ is something to aspire to!

So maybe accreditation would be based on a portfolio – a ‘living’ document – demonstrating someone’s ongoing professional & personal development, & built around a clearly explained concept of ‘excellence’ as it applies to facilitating students’ learning (& helping others to do the same)? Something to be think about, anyway.

what’s the academy *for*?

There’s a trend – a trend that is worthwhile & not before time – to recognise excellence among tertiary teachers. (Where ‘tertiary’ = beyond the compulsory education sector, which is so much wider than ‘just’  universities.) In New Zealand we have the national Tertiary Teaching Excellence Awards, which recognise & encourage excellence. These awards are funded by the Tertiary Education Commission and managed and administered by Ako Aotearoa, and winners become members of the Ako Aotearoa Academy.

Anyway, I was talking with a group of colleagues on Friday, & one of the topics of conversation was, what’s the Academy for? What does it do?

Well, if you follow that last link, & then peruse the various sections & links on the Academy page, you’ll find it does quite a lot, both for its members & also to foster excellence in learning & teaching across the tertiary education sector: workshops, teaching tools & narratives, the annual symposium for academy members (which is a most excellent event), and a range of member contributions.

All this truly is wonderful stuff – and yet, there’s something that worries me. Because, outside the sector, both Ako Aotearoa & the Academy have, well, quite a low profile. I believe there is a risk – especially in the current economic climate – of the Academy in particular being seen as something of an echo-chamber for the teaching elite, with the associated question: why, in tight financial times, should it continue to be funded? Having a lowish profile is Not Good in these circumstances, because it means that there are few people outside the Academy & Ako Aotearoa who would argue for its continued existence, or mourn its disappearance.

Which would be a pity. Because, having a body of expert teachers actively sharing that expertise means that, over time (& alongside other Ako activities), knowledge that contributes to enhanced teaching practices will spread. Because, when that happens, so too will learning and learners’ experiences be enhanced, so that society can be ever more sure that those learners are prepared for what the 21st century can throw at them. Because, we have so much to contribute (the current debate on what constitutes excellence in secondary school teaching springs to mind).

It’s just that somehow, at the moment, we’re just not very good at getting that across.

engaging students effectively in science, technology and engineering

This is another little something that I originally wrote for the Bioblog. It’s a look at a new report published by Ako Aotearoa, the organisation charged with promoting and enhancing tertiary teaching excellence here in New Zealand.

My eye was caught by that title to a paper just out on the Ako Aotearoa website (click here for the summary document & here for the full report). The sub-title is The pathway from secondary to university education, a topic that is dear to my heart.

Tim Parkinson & his co-authors were keen to get a handle on just how university students make the transition from secondary school to university, and how they become/remain engaged with science during that process. The project’s underlying aims were to:

• improve student engagement in the study of science at university;
• improve the transition from the school learning environment to that of university;
• identify and promolgate pedagogical ‘best practice’ for science education in the first year at university.

(I know this is nit-picking, but surely the aim was to provide information that will help universities enhance student engagement and transition, using a range of ‘best practice’ options identified during the project. They weren’t looking at whether particular interventions actually had that result.)

In order to know how to make these changes, you really need to know what’s currently happening – and also how lecturers & students percieve what’s happening in their classrooms. We already know (eg Buntting, 2006) that there’s a mismatch between lecturer & student perceptions about prior knowledge, in biology at least, so I think it’s a fairly safe bet that the same mismatch exists around perceptions of teaching quality and engagement. The research team looked at all this using a combination of questionnaires & focus groups, working with secondary school science students (N=421), university students in their first year of a science degree (N=630), school science teachers (N-33) and uni science lecturers (N=69). Each of the four groups in the study answered the same questions, although the wording differed a bit depending on the group. For example,

Teacher questionnaire: I give students the opportunity to influence the way that they are taught. Student questionnaire: I am given the opportunity to influence the way I am taught.

(Parkinson et al, 2011; answers were scored on a 5-point Likert scale.)

As you might expect, it turns out that lecturers’ style, personality & enthusiasm had a big impact on students’ engagement with science at university, and on their ability to move smoothly from secondary school to higher-level study. But the lecturers’ abiltiy to present information in contexts that students see as relevant to their own specific interests is also important – not least because this would allow students to fit that information into their own internalised understanding of & knowledge about science (their ‘schema’). In addition

learning science in a contemporary context… stimulates engagement, and students enjoy learning when it is connected with a sense of discovery.

And there were definitely notable differences in perceptions related to teaching and learning. For example, the team commented that

… school and university students thought less highly of the abilities of their teacher in [the area of teacher qualities ie things like presentation skills, quality of feedback] than did the teachers and lecturers themselves. For example, university and school learners perceived their lecturers’ qualities to be of a moderate standard, whereas lecturers themselves reported that their own lecturing qualities were of a high standard.

Something that I found intriguing was that none of the groups felt that self-directed learning was a significant facet of classroom activity – its reported frequency fell around ‘sometimes’ and ‘rarely’. Our graduate profile document indicates that we expect students to be independent learners by the time they complete their degree – developing the necessary skills must surely begin in first year! Surely there’s a need – noted by the researchers in their summary, to make sure that we reward such things as critical thinking and other higher-order learning skills (which of course has an impact on how we assess our students’ learning).

It is tricky for uni staff though, for our students come into class with a wide range of previous learning experiences, depending on what subjects and which standards they’ve studied at school. This means that we’re a bit between a rock & a hard place, needing to extend able students with a lot of existing content knowledge without losing those who might not have the same skills or learning experiences. Parkinson & his colleagues suggest that universities – certainly university staff engaged in first-year teaching – need to become much more aware of the learning outcomes gained by students in their NCEA studies. This would mean that those lecturers would be able to

build on the diversity of knowledge that results from the standards-based NCEA high school education.

It occurs to me that doing this would send a powerful message to students – that their lecturers really do care about helping manage the transition from school to uni and are personally interested in their learning outcomes. (I don’t mean to suggest that we aren’t, only that students may not perceive things that way!) And that can have a big impact on how students perceive and approach their studies.

C.Buntting (2006) Educational issues in tertiary introductory biology. PhD thesis, University of Waikato.

T.J.Parkinson, H.Hughes, D.H.Gardner, G.T.Suddaby, M.Gilling & B.R.MacIntyre (2011) Engaging students effectively in science, technology and engineering (full report) Ako Aotearoa ISBN 978-0-473-18900-6 (online)

changing the culture of science education at research universities

This is a cross-post of something I’ve just written for my ‘other’ blog :)

 That’s the attention-grabbing title of a new paper in Science magazine’s ‘education forum’ section (Anderson et al. 2011). Most readers will know that science education is a subject dear to my heart, & a topic that Marcus & I write on from time to time (here & here, for example). The authors are all professors at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute & are supported by that institution to create ‘new programs that more effectively engage students in learning science’ (ibid), so I was keen to see what they had to say on the topic of raising the profile and status of teaching at the tertiary level.

In the opinion of Anderson & his colleagues (& it’s an opinion that I share)

Science education should not only provide broad content knowledge but also develop analytical thinking skills, offer understanding of the scientific research process, inspire curiosity, and be accessible to a diverse range of students.

 Now, you might think, ‘well, obviously!’, and certainly all my colleagues would agree that these are good aims, but the devil’s in the detail. All institutions have what are called ‘graduate profiles’, & ideally when new curricula are being developed, or existing ones reviewed, their relevance to that graduate profile should be at the forefront of everyone’s minds. The difficulty, though, is that most university lecturers aren’t trained teachers but have generally ‘picked it up on the job’. They’re not familiar with the science education literature &, with all the pressures on them to generate external funding and maximise their research profile, it’s going to be hard to take the time to find and read relevant material. Heck, at the moment I struggle to find time, and that’s in my research area!

Anderson et al argue that turning this around requires a culture shift at the level of the institutions themselves, suggesting that these institutions need to “more broadly and effectively recognise, reward, and support the efforts of researchers who are also excellent teachers.” They list 7 initiatives that would move things along towards this end.

Educate faculty about research in learning. There’s a wealth of literature out there on ways to enhance teaching and student learning. (I’m reading some of it myself at the moment.) But the key thing here is time. Without time for researchers in any given discipline to sit down & get a a feel for the education literature (without feeling guilty about not spending that time reading in their ‘own’ field, applying for research grants, supporting research students, or teaching…), & to play around with some of the ideas therein, this will be a long, slow process. Maybe a grassroots approach might be better, more engaging? At my institution we’ve got ‘teaching advocates’ (Marcus is one) who organise informal lunchtime sessions for people to sit down & discuss particular teaching approaches, or maybe just throw ideas around. These are good ways of getting discussions going & supporting people in what they’re doing in the classroom.

Create awards and named rofessorships that provide research support for outstanding teachers. Well, we certainly have awards: in-Faculty & cross-campus at this institution & all others I can think of, plus the national Ako Aotearoa awards. And it’s jolly nice to get one, too! But a question that I’d rather like to look into is, what is the wider impact of these awards? They’re nice for the awardee (in a time when the purse-strings are tight, it’s nice to know that you’ll be able to go to a couple of relevant, conferences without having to think too hard about how to fund it!), but do they change the attitudes & perceptions of others on-campus? Do they have a lasting impact on institutional culture?

Require excellence in teaching for promotion. The authors argue, & I agree, that this needs to be a broad-brush approach, not restricted to looking at data from end-semester course appraisals. They say, “[we] must identify the full range of teaching skills and strategies that might be used, describe best practices in the evaluation of teaching effectiveness (particularly approaches that encourage rather than stifle diversity), and define how these might be used and prioritised during the promotion process.” And as part of this we need to encourage people to try new things. There’s a real worry, & risk, that trying something new in the interests of improving your teaching will backfire: if for whatever reason the students don’t like what you’re doing, those end-semester scores may well decline as a result. Which is why these shouldn’t be the only way of measuring teaching quality and effectiveness. (This, of course, requires that the people involved in determing promotion rounds need to be aware of the existence & value of other means of assessing teaching quality.)

Create teaching discussion groups. the teaching advocate meetings run by Marcus & his counterparts, & the institution’s ‘teaching network’ meetings, are developing a nucleus of such groups. Maybe members of these groups might be interested in working on peer assessment of teaching? You can learn an awful lot from watching other experienced practitioners in action – I know I do. It can be a bit nerve-wracking, having another teacher sit in on your classes, but the discussions afterwards can be really rewarding. (In that regard, something like panopto is an excellent tool to aid reflection on your own teaching, if you’d rather someone else didn’t sit in & give you feedback.)

Create cross-disciplinary programs in college-level learning. Or maybe even just cross-disciplinary discussions. When I taught at high school, everyone was involved in staff meetings, so you had plenty of opportunity to talk with people teaching in other subjects. You tend to lose that sort of collegiality in large tertiary institutions, because every Faculty, & sometimes every department, will have its own tearooms & meeting spots. And that’s a pity, really, because unless you go out of your way to meet your counterparts in other parts of the organisation (or even just go to one of their in-house seminars), you can be closed off from some really interesting discussions about research & practice. (But yes, it is hard to find the time. Time, again; that really does seem central to all this.)

Provide ongoing support for effective science teaching. This can potentially be expensive up-front, but has long-term benefits in terms of student engagement & outcomes. Expensive, because students learn science best when they’re engaged in doing science – & this means lab & field work, as often as not.  But how else are students to learn what it is to ‘do’ science, & to become really engaged in that doing?

And finally, Anderson & his colleagues recomment engag[ing] chairs, deans, and presidents (in NZ, a ‘president’ would be a vice-chancellor), because institutional leadership is crucial in bringing about such changes. These leaders – & in fact, all involved in teaching & learning, need to

foster a culture in which teaching and research are no longer seen as being in competition, but as mutually beneficial activities that support two equally important enterprises, generation of new knowledge and education of our students.

Anderson WA, Banerjee U, Drennan CL, Elgin SC, Epstein IR, Handelsman J, Hatfull GF, Losick R, O’Dowd DK, Olivera BM, Strobel SA, Walker GC, & Warner IM (2011). Science education. Changing the culture of science education at research universities. Science (New York, N.Y.), 331 (6014), 152-3 PMID: 21233371

reflecting on my philosophy of teaching

This is a follow-on from Fabiana’s ‘congratulations’ post. When you’re nominated for an Ako Aotearoa award, you have to put together a teaching portfolio that reflects on & provides evidence for your philosophy of teaching & learning – at 8000 words this is rather extensive! If you’re chosen for an award, Ako Aotearoa asks for a ‘cut-down’ version to go in a publication that’s sent out to the various tertiary institutions in New Zealand. I asked if I could use that briefer essay here as well & they were OK with that, so here goes. I realise that it’s a very personal reflection & that others may – probably do! – have different perspectives on the things I’ve touched on. Please do share your own ideas :)

I followed a rather indirect path into teaching. In fact, the first career I consciously remember thinking about was medicine. That lasted until I realised that it was a lot harder to put someone back together the right way than to open them up in the first place! So I turned to science, and in fact headed off to university with the intention of following my mother’s example and becoming a secondary school science teacher. All that changed when I was invited into Honours, and for a while it looked like I was headed for a research scientist’s career. But after my PhD I ended up applying for the job of ‘assistant biology teacher’ at Palmerston North Girls’ High. And that was it: I was hooked on the interaction with students and the buzz you get when something ‘clicks’ for them. And I’ve been a teacher, first and foremost, ever since.

Looking back, the eight years I spent in secondary classrooms were invaluable as they gave me an insight into what I could expect of new students coming into my first-year biology lectures and labs, and that’s shaped how I teach. In fact, I’m as much a learner as my students. From secondary school teachers I learn about classroom practices and processes that work for them and with which ‘my’ students will be familiar when they arrive at Waikato. Working on national school curriculum and examinations has taught me a great deal about writing good assessment items. And writing a blog on biology, evolution, and pseudoscience has made me a better communicator and allows me to encourage students (well, anyone reading it, actually) to think more critically and read more deeply in the scientific literature, and hopefully helping to inspire their own passion for science.

I hope that all my students will finish their time with me with some understanding of the nature of science, given that science is such an integral part of modern life. Just giving them ‘the facts’ is never going to achieve this, and in fact I think that a discussion of just how much ‘content’ should be learned is long overdue. Guiding students to an appreciation of the process of science is just as important, something I try to do by telling stories, asking questions, and giving them the opportunity to ask their own. This sort of active participation in learning is what really turned me on to science, and can only help my own students to become ‘deep’, independent learners with a broad, in-depth understanding of the subject. This philosophy influences my course design, teaching, and assessment, and over the years I’ve worked closely with colleagues – in particular the senior tutor with responsibility for running our first-year labs – to review and redesign our introductory papers in ways that we hope will enhance student understanding, learning, and enjoyment.

First-year teaching can be a tricky balancing act, squeezed between the demands of second-year lecturers to have students prepared for their classes, and the need to develop understanding and awareness of what science is all about – in all students, not just those going on to major in science. Achieving this balance is made even harder by the fact that for a lot of students there’s a big gap between what they actually learned at school and what many lecturers assume that they learned. This is one reason I value my ongoing links with the secondary sector so highly – what I learn through them flows on into my teaching and enhances the whole learning experience for my students. I think it’s also put me in the relatively rare – and privileged – position of being able to easily recognise those gaps in learning and to work on bridging them with the young people coming into my classroom. And I do try to give something back, through help with preparing for examinations, and giving talks on human evolution (which resulted in my nickname, the ‘Skull Lady’!).

I’ve never been comfortable with the traditional university lecture format and its transmission model of teaching (lecturer talks, students take notes). I much prefer to actively encourage student participation and a two-way flow of information, telling stories rather than simply providing facts, and using open-ended questions and quick pop quizzes. Each quiz is just a few questions that either examine prior knowledge of the next concept, or tests their understanding of concepts just covered. Students discuss their answers with each other and then with me as well, plus I’ll put my answers up on screen so they get immediate feedback. And they tell me they find all this extremely helpful.

But it’s always easier to get this sort of active participation in tutorial classes, where you can more often use small-group and one-on-one techniques. To me, in tutorials students should feel comfortable asking questions about concepts that they find difficult; about material in upcoming labs; even about items in last night’s news. All these provide more opportunities to help them make those all-important links between new and prior knowledge. I find tutorials enormously stimulating because the students are always asking new questions, and I enjoy the challenge of working to present the answers in a meaningful way. Concept mapping’s a great tool for this, one I began using regularly a few years ago during a PhD research project. This technique lets students see how concepts fit together and allows them to build on their existing knowledge in a way that really encourages deep learning.

Of course, like it or not, students’ perceptions of assessment practices also affect their learning, and you also need to use assessment methods that encourage that desirable deep learning habit. Here again my involvement with development and review of national science curriculum materials, achievement standards and assessment has had a big impact on my own assessment practices, something that was brought home to me when I first set an ‘NCEA-style’ essay question in an exam. The great majority of my first-year class answered that question far better than any ‘standard’ university-style questions in the same exam paper, partly I think because it was a format they were used to and partly because it gave them the opportunity to provide a wide-ranging narrative in response rather than simply repeating ‘the facts’.

We also use the e-learning platform Moodle in a variety of ways: for extra tutorials, as a forum to discuss all sorts of things (including setting up revision groups and helping each other with problems), and as a way to obtain lecture notes to review later. I think this works because the students find Moodle a non-threatening environment (especially when you enable anonymous commenting), which encourages many students to become more involved than they might be in an actual classroom – it’s another way for them to build confidence and capability in their studies. It also gives students another way to contact teaching staff, especially if they don’t like to speak up in lectures or tutorials. Any opportunity to build a personal relationship with lecturers is useful, as we know that this can have a significant impact on a student’s decision to continue with a course of study, or even with their university career. And recently I’ve started using Moodle as a means of supporting the Scholarship Biology students, helping them to develop the critical thinking skills that they’ll need for their exams.

In a way this last is just an extension of my other on-line activities – a couple of websites (Evolution for Teaching and Science on the Farm) and the ‘Bioblog‘. I originally began blogging because some secondary colleagues asked if there was something else I could do to help their scholarship students, and a blog seemed a good way to write posts to get them thinking, to provide up-to-date information, and to talk about the exam. But it’s quickly grown to something that I use with my own students to introduce them to scientific papers, and I find it’s got an international readership – something that gives me a real thrill.

For the future – I want to keep on doing what I know and love. When I reach the point where teaching’s no longer exciting but ‘just another job’, and when I lose that frisson of nerves at the start of a new class, a new year, a new semester, then that will be the signal to stop. But in the meantime, the Ako Aotearoa award offers me the chance to do something (maybe many somethings) to enhance what I do in the classroom. Conferences beckon, but I’m in the fortunate position of having a bit of funding put aside for that anyway. Friends reckon that as the Skull Lady™ I should be buying a new, updated set of hominin skulls for classroom use. But for someone who writes and speaks about evolution, the opportunity to do something like visit the Galapagos and experience some of the things that so deeply influenced Charles Darwin would be hugely inspirational. (I suspect what eventually decides that one will depend on a combination of teaching commitments and the best time to go in order to avoid huge crowds.) But whatever I end up doing, I will remain deeply grateful to Ako Aotearoa for putting me in the position of being able to contemplate this conundrum in the first place.

Congratulations Alison!

Ako Aotearoa last week announced the winners of the Tertiary Teaching Excellence Awards.

Among the recipients is our co-blogger Alison Campbell.

The readers of this space will not be surprised: her love for teaching, for her studensts and her insights on education she shares with us on every post. As a teacher myself I admire her commitment and insight and this blog has for me become a place where I come to find inspiration from the posts and the comments.

It is wonderful to see Alison’s  teaching excellence recognized, so here is to you Alison! Well deserved!