out of the mouths of students

First posted over at the Bioblog.

We’ve been trialling some software for on-line paper/teaching appraisals & I got my results back the other day. The appraisal form included open-ended questions where students could give extended feedback on particular issues that concerned them, & I’ve been going through it all so that I can give feedback in my turn, thus ‘closing the loop’. (This is something that I believe is absolutely essential: students need to know that we value their opinions & that, where appropriate, use them to inform what we do.) I’ve been interested to see that some of the class are definitely thinking outside the ‘box’ that represents my paper, and one comment in particular struck a chord:

One concern with the paper is individuals who were not taught certain aspects of the NCEA Level 3 curriculum. This is a major issue that has resulted from the preference of schools to not teach certain aspects of the course. There NEEDS to be consultation to standardise the NCEA curriculum as well as ensuring that the gap is bridged with communication between tertiary education providers and secondary education providers. As I understand it there is significant concern over the changed NCEA Level 3 Biology course, which now does not teach genetics in year 13. I don’t know the answer in the resolution of this issue, however it will greatly impact on future academic success as well as future funding when grades drop.

This student has hit the nail squarely on the head. Teachers reading this will be working on the following Achievement Standards with their year 12 students this year (where previously gene expression was handled in year 13): AS91157 Demonstrate understanding of genetic variation and change, and AS91159: Demonstrate understanding of gene expression. (You’ll find the Biology subject matrix here.)

And as my student says, this has the potential to cause real problems unless the university staff concerned have made it their business to be aware of these changes and to consider their impact. For the 2014 cohort of students coming in to introductory biology classes will have quite different prior learning experiences (& not just in genetics) from those we are teaching this year and taught in previous years. We cannot continue as we have done in the past.

science challenges & science education

The National Science Challenges have been announced – and have already received a lot of attention (including on Sciblogs, with posts by my colleagues Grant, Siouxsie, and John - who also points at where the money’s going). What I’d like to address here is the comment by the Panel that it

was concerned by the lack of significant proposals in educational research

I have to admit that my first response to that was, well d’oh! Because, well, the public discussion was around national science challenges, I suspect that for many (most?) submitters the focus was to come up with a science-based proposal. After all (& please note bulging cheek ensconcing my tongue at this point), isn’t science education something that schools & other seats of learning ‘do’, rather than requiring science research? Hopefully not many scientists really think that way, & it’s great to see the additional Challenge, “Science & New Zealand Society” with its two goals (the first a science goal, while the second is societal):

To ensure the science capacities and literacy of New Zealand society so as to promote engagement between S[cience] & T[echnology] and New Zealand society, in turn enhancing the role played by science in advancing the national interest.

To allow New Zealand society to make best use of its human and technological capacities to address the risks and Challenges ahead. This requires the better use of scientific knowledge in policy formation at all levels of national and local government, in the private sector and in society as a whole.

 

Both are relevant to what follows here.

Let’s look more closely at the question of science literacy/appreciation/education for citizenship. The chair of the Panel, Sir Peter Gluckman, has previously made it clear that we need to do much more in engaging young people with science, to the extent of developing a science curriculum that focuses far more on science literacy than on accumulation of science knowledge. But what constitutes science literacy? This is something I’ve written about previously, & my fellow Scibloggers and I discussed it between ourselves more recently. So I was interested to find a set of nine science literacy ‘themes’ listed and expanded upon in a recent paper (Bartholomew & Osborne, 2004):

scientific methods and critical testing

science & certainty

diversity of scientific thinking

hypothesis and prediction

historical development of scientific knowledge

creativity

science and questioning

analysis and interpretation of data

cooperation and collaboration in the development of scientific knowledge

And while we might not agree on the relative order of these themes, or the completeness of the list, but they do give us something to go on with. (I’m going to talk about the formal education system for the moment – but I’m perfectly well aware that there’s much more than that to public engagement with science! Let’s just treat this as a starting point for discussion.)

Now, I’d like to think that the current NZ Science curriculum gives a good basis for developing these skills & attributes in all students Right Now, regardless of whether or not they intend to go on to study science at tertiary level. And let’s face it, most won’t, so we surely have to work on engagement with and understanding of what science is about, for all students. in fact, that’s a tension I struggle with myself: a proportion of my first-year biology students are taking the subject purely for interest, & in some cases haven’t studied the subject before. I want them to come away with an appreciation of the wonder and worth of the subject in their lives, as much as I want them to accumulate biological knowledge. It’s a tricky balancing act.

Anyway, while I might like to think that about the curriculum document, in reality I suspect that it doesn’t yet deliver. And that’s something that’s unpacked further by Bartholomew & Osborne, who note that there are a number of factors that affect teachers’ “ability to teach effectivelyabout science”.

One of those factors is the teachers’ own understanding of what science is all about, as opposed to their body of content knowledge. NB Please note, at this point, that this is not a criticism of teachers and the demanding work that they do; it’s a question of whether the training and experiences we offer our teachers prepare them well for this particular aspect of teaching science.

The researchers found that a reasonable proportion of the teachers they worked with were not really confident in their own ability to teach lessons based on the ideas embedded in those themes. This was partly due to uncertainties about their own knowledge, and partly around feeling that they lacked the classroom skills to deliver such a program. Which, of course, raises issues around provision of professional development opportunities (with the associated resourcing).

Related to that is their own engagement with the subject. OK, if you’re teaching the subject as a specialist science teacher, I’m guessing that you took this role on because you enjoy the subject and want to share that. But if someone’s a primary school teacher with very limited exposure to science during their training, then the story might be very different.

And so that would be a fruitful area for research, in NZ (and at this point someone is probably going to tell me that they’re Already Doing It): what is the actual level of science literacy – using, for example, those 9 themes listed above – in NZ science teachers at all levels? And how does that translate into classroom practices? And – if the answer is, not as well as we’d like - what do we do about it?

Teachers’ ability to enhance learning about science (as opposed to of science) is also affected by factors outside their classrooms. For example, the pressure is on, at senior school level, to ensure students do as well as possible in national assessment – which, for all the changes associated with NCEA, remains largely content-based. And classroom time is limited, so it’s easy to see how there can be more focus on content & less on the other desirable attributes. As Bartholomew & Osborne comment,

developing a questioning and sceptical attitude to scientific knowledge claims in students might actually be disadvantageous.

Perhaps that also needs to change. [Pace, Schol Bio examiners!]

 

H.Bartholomew, & J.Osborne (2004) Teaching students “ideas about science”: five dimensions of effective practice. Science Education 88: 655-682 doi: 10.1002/sce.10135

sending mixed messages

I attended a presentation today that just didn’t sound right. It was one of several about teaching and learning, & I’m afraid that if I’d been doing a formal appraisal I’d have marked it down.

Why? Well, for starters the presenter seemed a bit confused about IP & copyright. (OK, they had a fairly jokey way of presenting that could have clouded things, but still…) Students’ work is their own, it doesn’t ‘belong’ to the institution or the teacher. This means that if you’re going to make it available to subsequent classes as, say, an exemplar, then you really do need to make sure you get their written permission for this. This, of course, opens a whole new can of worms, & the wriggling is due to the power imbalance that exists in any classroom.

By which I mean that students may feel that they can’t really refuse a request such as the one I’ve mentioned. They may not actually want it to happen, but their response is always going to be tempered by the awareness that the person doing the asking is also the person doing the assessment of their performance. This shouldn’t matter – but the student may still worry about it. (This is why, when we get a paper & teaching appraisal done, the lecturers never get the original handwritten responses back until after the semester’s grades have been finalised – just in case they recognise the writing, or can in some other way identify the respondent: it protects the student.) If I was in this position, I’d be waiting to ask about using their work until after I’d finished teaching (& assessing) them. And maybe that’s what happened, but it wasn’t made clear.

The other thing that bugged me a bit was how the students were presented almost as acting as research assistants – unknowing aides, in that their projects could be mined for useful information that would inform future lectures. OK, from time to time (actually, reasonably often, & it’s one of the things I enjoy about teaching as it creates the opportunity to model how scientists think) my students will ask a question I can’t answer, or tell me about something I’ve not heard of before. In the former, I’ll find out the answer & let them know in a subsequent class (that’s how I learned about s*x determination in mosses, for example), & maybe incorporate what I’ve learned in next year’s lectures; in the latter – well, I’ll probably go & check it up. But that’s not the same as regularly ‘mining’ information to use in future classes.  Especially if the students aren’t aware that someone’s doing it, but even if they do know – well, should they be acting as unpaid research assistants? It comes back to that power imbalance thing again :(

Jokey or not, that presentation wasn’t my style.

falling numbers in physics – what do teachers think?

A topic that gets quite a frequent airing in our tearoom is the decline in the number of students taking physics. This issue isn’t peculiar to my institution – a quick look at the literature indicates that it’s a global problem**. The question is, what can be done about this? It’s a question that Pey-Tee Oon & R.Subramaniam (2010) set out to answer.

They identified (from the science education literature) several reasons why students don’t like physics: it’s perceived as boring, with signficant mathematical demands; the passive teaching methods used in many classrooms are off-putting; and the curriculum is crowded. They also noted that teachers‘ perceptions  are important as they can affect students’ subject choices, and so they sought the help of physics teachers in Singaporean secondary schools, noting that

[physics] teachers are in a position to this debate [around declining interest in studying physics at university] as the intent to study or not to study physics is made by students at the school level – the influence of physics teachers on students taking physics cannot thus be underestimated.

In addition to collecting data on teaching experience and educational background, Oon & Subramaniam asked the teachers (all 166 of them) for suggestions on how this might be turned around:

Suggest one way in which more students can be encouraged to study physics at the university.

Several key points came up again and again in the teachers’ responses to that open-ended question: reviewing the current school physics curriculum, “making the teaching of physics fun”, improving graduates’ career prospects, publicising career opportunities, and running enrichment programs.

Now, the NZ physics curriculum was recently redeveloped, as part of the rewriting of the National Curriculum document; more recently, the Achievement Standards were rewritten to align them more closely with that document. So, if that redeveloped curriculum doesn’t “go beyond the classical topics and include more modern topics which are related to current applications” (& Marcus can probably give more informed comment on that than I can), then we may have missed the boat on that one. Of course, the teachers’ suggestion that more modern topics be included means that – when we do get the chance to spring-clean – that it may be necessary to drop some ‘traditional’ content. Otherwise we’d simply be cramming the curriculum ever fuller – and the perception of an overloaded curriculum can make the subject seem more difficult (a problem that Biology shares), and which other research has found to be a definite turn-off for students. There’s also the ‘fun’ aspect to consider – how do we address that?

It’s hard to see how the universities can improve physics graduates’ career prospects (something that probably needs a push at government level, if the government of the day is serious about the importance of studying the sciences) but we can certainly help to promote those options that are available. Among other suggestions, the teachers thought that the following could help: careers talks emphasising the value of physics, roadshows fronted by high-profile research scientists, better marketing by university physics departments, and enhanced career guidance (at both secondary and tertiary level). On the career front, Oon & Subramaniam point out that “Wall Street has a high concentration of physicists”, which suggests that career opportunities are more diverse than many students might think.

As for physics enrichment programs – again, a significant majority of the teachers surveyed felt that the following steps would be valuable:

• creating opportunities for physics researchers and lecturers to go into schools to promote the subject;
• running workshops in schools to raise awareness of the importance of this subject;
• offering ‘popular’ physics seminars;
• running on-campus physics enrichment camps;
• and developing outreach programs supporting and promoting physics.

The teachers felt that university-level teaching also needs a review (ie, the problem of declining enrolments won’t be solved solely by changes in & support for physics teaching in schools):

One of the most striking findings from this study is the urge by teachers for a rebranding of the university physcis curriculum. Creating innovative interdisciplinary programs at the undergraduate level – for example, marrying physics with other disciplines (eg, finance, management etc) to meet the growing needs of current market demand, deserves consideration… For example, students can gain scientific training in physics and technical skills in finance if physics is integrated with finance… It is a win-win solution with minimum sacrifice… [that] will not only increase the employability of physics graduates but will also further the attractiveness of undergraduate physics programs.

The researchers note that such interdisciplinary programs are already being offered at some overseas instititutions, and certainly we are beginning to see an increasing emphasis here in New Zealand on the value of interdisciplinarity.

Oon & Subramaniam have definitely provided some food for thought. And given the nature of the problem, perhaps it’s time for physicists around New Zealand to work together to address it?

P-T Oon & R.Subramaniam (2010) Views of physics teachers on how to address the declining enrolment in physics at the university level. Research in Science and Technological Education 28(3): 277-289. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02635143.2010.501749

** Having said that, Michael Edmonds has just drawn my attention to this talk (shown on Youtube) by UK physicist, Professor Brian Cox.

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.

more on active learning in the biology classroom

At the moment I’m up in Auckland at Scicon (the national secondary science teachers’ conference. There’ve been some great presentations, including a lovely on on bioluminescence by fellow sciblogger Siouxsie Wiles (did you know that our very own NZ glow worms mate for hours & then die of exhaustion? Or that 4500 people die oftuberculosis every day? Yes, there really is a link to bioluminescence there.). I gave mine this morning & could then focus on enjoying everything else that’s going on.

My talk was about the ‘flip teaching’ idea that I wasintroduced to by Kevin Gould, &  which I’ve written about previously. Actually it wasn’t really a talk, as I simply gave a bit of background & a summary of some of the recent research, & then asked participants to do the activity themselves. At which point everyone got involved & the chatter started – & it was hard to get them to stop at the end! But we managed a show-&-tell & some great discussion before our time was up.

One of the things people really picked up on was something I really hadn’t thought much about: using it to underpin development of students’ writing skills. That’s in addition to conceptualising, discussing & drawing their organism: there are also things like annotating that diagram,  & writing descriptive paragraphs about the various ideas they’ve used. Really integrated learning!

And there’s also the issue of creativity – exercises like this are an excellent way to show students that science can be creative, & that this creative side is an important part of ‘doing’. science :-)

the ero on primary school science: ‘should do better’

The Education Review Office’s report on primary school science is all over the news today: here at Yahoo, for example. You’ll find the original paper, Science in the New Zealand Curriculum: Years 5 to 8, on the ERO website. It does not fill me with joy and the following quotes from the report’s Overview should show why:

Effective practice in science teaching and learning in Years 5 to 8 was evident in less than a third of the 100 schools [surveyed for the report]. The wide variability of practices between highly effective and ineffective practices was found across all school types.

And

Few principals and teachers demonstrated an understanding of how they could integrate the National Standards in reading, writing and mathematics into their science programmes. In the less effective schools principals saw science learning as a low priority. They struggled to maintain a balance between effective literacy and numeracy teaching, and providing sufficient time for teaching other curriculum areas, but particularly science.

And

Knowledge-based programmes were evident rather than interactive thinking, talking, and experimenting approaches… Student involvement in experimental work was variable.

So – I was saddened by the report, & I wasn’t exactly surprised either. I’ve written previously (here, for example) about the problems and challenges faced by primary school teachers wanting to enhance their students’ understanding of & engagement with science. Back in 2010, Bull et al presented data showing that the average NZ primary school student spends 45 hours a year studying science (it was 66 hours in 2002), with only 6 other countries of those surveyed spending less time on the subject.  The other worrying point was that the number of students reporting that they never did experiments increased between 1999 & 2007. At the time I commented that it could simply have been that the students didn’t always recognise when they were involved in science activities, but also that at least some primary teachers might lack confidence in teaching science & so omitted it from any integrated lessons. And indeed, the 2010 ERO report cited by Bull & her colleagues found that

most primary teachers did not have a science background and that low levels of science knowledge and science teaching expertise contributed to the variation in quality of science teaching across schools… [and] that many teachers had not learned about science in their pre-service teacher training.

Nor am I surprised that schools & teachers struggle to balance the literacy & numeracy requirements of National Standards with encouraging students to a deeper understanding of science. After all, it’s not that long ago since schools lost the services of school science advisers, who’d been tasked with supporting science education and teachers’ professional development in this area. That loss makes it rather ironic that this latest ERO report recommends that the Ministry should look at ways to provide such support and ongoing professional development in areas including:

• integrating literacy and numeracy into science teaching and learning
• considering the place of National Standards for achievement in reading, writing and mathematics across all learning areas, including science
• developing an approach to inquiry based learning that maintains the integrity of different learning areas, including science.

A ‘back to the future’ prescription, in a way. And, if we accept that science and technology and engineering and mathematics are crucial to our future, it’s a prescription that needs to be met. Students who have positive, engaging experiences of those subjects at primary school might just be more likely to want to continue their engagement at higher levels. Including going on to study at university level. In light of today’s statement by the Tertiary Education Minister, Stephen Joyce, that the Government intends to “rebalance tertiary education toward science, technology, engineering and maths”, then all science educators (primary through tertiary) need to look at how to support teachers and students in developing that engagement.

And in that same light: next week is NZASE National Primary Science Week, set up to offer both engaging activities for primary students and free professional development opportunities for their teachers. There’s a lot going on in the regions, and they’re a brilliant opportunity for scientists in the universities, research institutions, and industries to help deliver the support that our colleagues in the primary schools desperately need. So, a question for my colleagues: what can you do to support this event, if not this year, then next? It could just make a difference, in your own classroom or workplace, in the future!

A.Bull, J.Gilbert, H.Barwick, R.Hipkins & R.Baker (2010) Inspired by science: a paper commissioned by the Royal Society and the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER), August 2010

Education Review Office (2012) Science in the New Zealand Curriculum: Years 5 to 8.

in the lecture theatre – but definitely not giving a lecture!

Today’s class was a real experiment for me, & although I try lots of different things in my classes, it was also a step outside my normal comfort zone. (But hey! life would be a bit boring if we always stayed safely inside that zone!) Why? Because I put into practice an idea I stole from my friend & colleague Kevin Gould (who also very kindly let me use the resources he’d developed): today was ‘design-a-plant’ day, & probably to anyone looking into the lecture theatre during the first 30 minutes or so it would have looked as if chaos definitely ruled.

Last Friday I gave everyone an information sheet: descriptions of the features of leaf, stem & root that you might see in plants adapted to different environments. Today I trotted off to the lecture room with a box full of overhead transparency sheets, overhead pens, & printed scenarios (descriptions of a particular environment). The lecture theatre was already full – everyone had come ahead of time! This definitely wasn’t usual (it’s not that they normally trickle in late, but we’re talking seriously early) – obviously they were expecting something special. Gulp.

So I put up these slides:

then once they’d sorted out their groups I dished out pens, transparencies, scenario sheets (& copies of the info sheet for those who’d forgotten them), & away we went on a mutual journey of discovery. After all, this wasn’t my idea & I had no idea how it would really work out.

Well! The class erupted into happy, productive noise. I know it was productive because while they talked, argued, explained & persuaded, I circulated, listened in, & answered the occasional question. Those with computers had them open – looking up information related to their scenario. (Next time someone asks a question that I can’t answer on the spot, I’m jolly well going to get someone else to google it for me!) They drew, & altered their drawings, & drew some more. The original 20 minutes stretched towards 30, & still they were focused on what they were doing. I was almost sorry to interrupt :-)

Then, I called for volunteers. A hand went up almost immediately, & its owner came down to the overhead projector, not looking too nervous. She picked up the microphone, described her group’s scenario, & showed – & explained – their response. The next speakers followed just as quickly, and each speaker received a round of applause as they finished.

But the proof’s in the pudding – just what sort of plant had they designed? Well, they didn’t necessarily look like plants that my botanical colleagues could have put a name to, but nonetheless, the explanations each group gave for their particular design were sound, & science-based. They’d obviously taken on board not only the info on that fact sheet, but also the material we’d been looking at in lectures & that they’d found on line. And they’d had fun doing it. (I particularly liked the Nepalese Death Vine – the eerie noise of the wind passing through its herbivore-deterring spines apparently puts the locals off harvesting it, lol – and the Serengeti ‘cactus’ that traps water in basin-like leaves, but when there’s a fire the plant’s transpirative water loss is such that its tissues become flaccid and it wilts, spilling that water onto the ground where the dampness keeps the worst of the fire at bay.) Plus – so far, the feedback for this exercise on our Moodle page is all positive: students felt it definitely helped their learning about plants.

Thanks, Kevin – your design-a-plant lesson got an A+ from all of us today!

the tutor’s tale: how i keep my teaching fresh

I’m lucky to work with some wonderful teachers in my job. One of them, Brydget, runs all our first-year bio labs & is constantly looking for ways to improve the quality of what we offer in order to enhance the students’ learning experiences. (I am extremely envious of the fact that she’s the only person I know who routinely gets a perfect ’1′ in students’ appraisals of her teaching.)

Anyway, Brydget recently wrote a piece on how she keeps her teaching fresh, for the University’s in-house teaching journal, & has very kindly allowed me to reproduce it here :-)

Anyone in academia realises that there just aren’t enough hours in the day.  When I first started teaching I had plans of learning more about teaching, I envisioned myself understanding pedagogies and theories and thought I’d regularly read education journals.  I was soon to realise that while it was a nice idea it was not going to happen.  However, I was still determined to learn more about teaching.  The biggest resource I was to learn was not the myriad of academic journals but my colleagues both within and external to my department.

Communication with others in the university has been the biggest factor in keeping my teaching fresh.  Through participating in TDU seminars and the teaching network meetings I’ve been able to talk to teachers outside of my faculty.  This has been invaluable.  It opened my eyes to the fact that we become very entrenched in the way we do things.  It’s always been that way so it must be right.  Going through university right from the undergraduate level we become accustomed to a certain style of teaching and assessing, as students we accept that this is the norm.  When all the papers are presented in a certain way it seems that must be the right way.  And thus when moving roles from student to teacher it is unsurprising that we emulate the styles with which we were taught.  As a new teacher, I knew no different, I had not been exposed to many different ideas.

Being able to converse with teachers from different disciplines opened a new world.  At the TDU seminars I would hear what seemed like impossible ideas.  What do you mean we should give them a marking schedule?  Shouldn’t they have to work out the question, interpreting what I’m asking is all part of the mystery.  The more I talked with others the more I realised that teaching has to evolve and sharing ideas is such a valuable tool.

Even within a discipline, the act of just talking with colleagues about what they are doing in the classroom can open you to new ideas.  A simple conversation in the tea room, or attending the school teaching advocacy sessions allows for this exchange of ideas.  We tend to think of teaching as something we do in isolation (even with 200 students watching us) but we need the feedback and advice of those around us if we hope to keep our teaching alive and avoid the tedium that can come with repetitive teaching.  I am lucky that I teach in a role that allows me time to regularly talk to my students and from them I can gain feedback.  In every class students are given an opportunity to write down comments through the use of a “feedback box”, in addition to being encouraged to post on moodle.

One of the natural ways I keep my teaching fresh is purely through identifying a need.  In the first year of teaching it seems to be more about getting through (and hoping you don’t make a fool of yourself).  Once you’ve made it through that year it is like you’ve passed this first test and you start to settle in to teaching.  This is when I was able to change my focus and started identifying problem areas both in my teaching, and the courses I taught in general.  Any good teacher is going to address these problems.  Sometimes the problems are easy to fix, other times they take some creative thinking.

A few years ago I realised that one area of my teaching just was not working, the students were disengaged and found the topic a bore.  So like most of us I started thinking how I could alter this, and as I started planning I starting to keep a journal with ideas.  At first it was very factual and rudimentary, focusing on experimental change.  To my surprise the nature of the journal changed, as I implemented my new teaching strategies I started recording students reactions.  The changes brought about conversations with students that were unexpected, they moved beyond what I was teaching and asked questions.  Writing down these conversations I began to see the value in keeping a journal.  I was later to learn that this was called being a reflective practitioner.  This one small change helps keep my teaching fresh because it is a constant reminder of what I’m doing, what is working, what I did in the past and how the students are reacting.

With time and confidence you start casting your net wider.  I’ve joined online communities, forums and blogs all allowing us to share our problems, successes and ideas.  I’ve become more familiar with some of the education terminology and while I’m not quite at the stage of regularly reading journals, articles from education periodicals are becoming more frequent in my reading list.

tertiary teachers & accreditation

Over the years I’ve had a fair number of conversations with my students about what’s involved in being a university lecturer. They ask things like how I decide what to teach, how we develop programs, and – this year – just what I do when I’m not in front of a class. (They genuinely thought that I’m ‘on holiday’ when the teaching semester’s over: I found this rather sweet *smile*.)

And someone will always ask, do university lecturers have any training in how to teach? After all, these days primary, secondary & pre-school teachers are all required to have professional qualifications in education.

The answer is, it depends. (I’m going to talk about university lecturers here as that’s the area I’m familiar with.)

Back in the ‘old days’ (ie when I was a student, lol) you probably would have been scratching to find any university lecturer who had a teaching qualification alongside their discipline-based qualification. (Back then, Colleges of Education were generally not part of the university system here in NZ.) These days, universities have some form of professional qualification available for their staff to study for, but it’s purely a voluntary decision to take it up. It’s probably fair to say that a significant majority of university lecturers still do not have formal training in education.

The obvious question is, does it matter? After all, generations of lecturers have learned the necessary skills ‘on the job’, and generations of students have completed their degrees or diplomas & gone on to graduate.

Yes. Yes, it does matter. Let’s have a look at the meaning of the term ‘accreditation’ (Ingarson et al, 2006):

‘Accreditation’, as used in this report, refers to an endorsement by an independent external agency that a professional preparation course is adequate for the purpose of a particular profession; that the course is able to produce graduates who meet standards for entry to the profession and are competent to begin practice.

..Accreditation is also an important mechanism for engaging members of a profession in decisions about standards expected of those entering their profession, as well as standards expected of preparation courses.

In the context of this post, ‘accreditation’ would refer to confirmation that someone had been through a program of study that adequately prepared them to teach a class. In a teaching context, that program would include exposure not just to good teaching practices, but also to the professional literature around teaching in a particular discipline. And this matters a lot, because as I’ve said elsewhere on Talking Teaching, there’s so much more to teaching than simply transmitting information – the method which very many lecturers would have picked up, because that’s how they themselves were taught. (Certainly that was my experience, back in the day, & it’s one that my friend & colleague Kevin Gould described to great effect in a recent presentation on good use of teaching technology.)

In other words, university teaching is a profession (after all, I’ll bet many of us put ‘lecturer’ on census forms & the like!), and there’s a good case to be made to support academics’ ongoing professional development in education and to recognise that through form of accreditation. As Hicks, Smigiel, Wilson & Luzeckyi (2010) note, such professional development can

[promote] a set of shared expectations and understandings about the nature of university learning and teaching

which would help to promote consistency in approaches across the institution and also the sector and, because staff are gaining an enhanced understanding of just how students learn, enhanced learning outcomes for students. Note that consistency =/= homogeneity! But rather, academics at the various institutions would have (Hicks et al, 2010)

some common understanding of core learning and teaching principles.

This sort of professional development, leading to accreditation, should probably be focused on new lecturers to begin with, as they’re arguably those who really, really need such support. After all, as Kevin pointed out in his talk, if you’re thrown in the deep end & simply emulate the practices of those who taught you, you’re likely to pick up some pretty bad habits along with the good, & over time these can become deeply entrenched. (Which does suggest that it would be good, at some point, to involve experience lecturers in the conversation around best-practice in teaching and learning as well.) And you could also ask, why should both new teachers and their students struggle while the teachers find their feet? That’s not good for anyone.

The other thing is, universities have changed from the days when I was a student, & they’ll continue to change. Along with technological advances (which as Kevin said, have been embraced in very many secondary schools, to the point where students view teaching technology as the norm & may well expect to see it used in similar ways in university classrooms) and increasing numbers of ever more diverse students attending university (with ever more diverse experiences and needs), there’s also

an expectation that universities should be more accountable to funding bodies and other stakeholders (students, parents, employers, etc.) (Hicks et al, 2010).

One way to respond to this is for institutions to be able to demonstrate that their staff have that “common understanding of core learning and teaching principles” and are able to apply these in their classrooms for the good of their students’ learning.

And what’s the best way to show this? Through some form of accreditation.

(Of course, for all this to happen we do need a definite change in the culture of universities. Staff are probably not that likely to want to participate in professional development if they perceive that teaching is accorded less value than research when it comes to promotion, or when they perceive that such programs are’t valued by their colleagues – or when models for workload allocation don’t take into account staff involvement in these programs. But there’s nothing to be lost by talking about and working towards that ideal.)

M.Hicks, H.Smiegiel, G.Wilson & A.Luzeckji (2010) Preparing academics to teach in higher education. Australian Learning & Teaching Council. http://www.flindrs.edu.au/pathe/

L.Ingvarson, A.Elliott, E.Kleinhenz & P.McKenzie (2006) Teacher education accreditation: a review of national and international trends and practices. pub. Teaching Australia. ISBN 0-9775252-6-0