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Comments on the Learning and Teaching strategy document

Contents (click to jump to a section)

• Preface
• Balancing learning and teaching
• Talking about costs explicitly
• Saying what is meant by "problem"
  • What does problem-solving mean?
  • "Problem" in problem-solving and in problem-based learning
  • The appropriate scope for PBL
• Communicating about learning and teaching
• The difference between disciplines
  • The advantage to learning and teaching practice of diverse disciplines
  • Summary
• Research-led teaching
• Other points
  • Distance learning
  • Study skills introduction
  • Another key skill: reading graphs
  • Deep learning
• References

Preface

Each section represents a distinct point.

Balancing learning and teaching

• these need to have exactly equal weight in a proper view and practice,
• and that since in general more attention has been paid up to now to teaching over learning in the university, then it is proper to put an emphasis, in any changes we contemplate, on learning;
• but that our aim should not be to end up with a dominance of learning over teaching, or rather of learner over teacher.

I therefore agree with and support the phrase and word order "learning and teaching" in the title of the strategy document, and in the job title of the Vice-Principal. Both are essential components, and the order reflects the corrective emphasis currently appropriate. I regard the use of the phrases "student-centered" and still more "student-centered ethos" in, for example, the section on educational philosophy as needing amendment. My reasons for this position are:

• The Laurillard model of the teaching and learning process, which in my view is the best current synthesis of a theory of learning and teaching in Higher Education, treats learner and teacher as strictly equal and symmetric roles or components. [Laurillard, D. (1993) Rethinking university teaching: A framework for the effective use of educational technology (Routledge: London) fig.II.1, p.103. I have a diagram of it on the web. Laurillard served on the Dearing Committee.]
  In this respect it is in contrast to some neo-constructivist theories, which have reacted against an antediluvian teacher-centered approach by inverting it into an equally unbalanced student-centered theory.
• Dearing does not recommend student-centeredness but "the promotion of students' learning".
• To talk of student-centered learning evokes, in our current culture, a consumerist view of education with the student as a customer. This is fundamentally mistaken, but it is a view which is going to be encountered repeatedly because it is such a common model for many services. It is already clear (e.g. from despairing and cynical jokes in faculty meetings) that this misconception is repeatedly and spontaneously emerging among university staff, never mind in the rest of society. It is important for us -- and the strategy document should lead in this -- to develop an articulate account of how that view is mistaken.
  • To take the view that the student is our customer is incompatible with our role of providing not just learning support, but accreditation. Unlike some mail order colleges, we wish our qualifications to have meaning and value, and this means not giving them out either to please students or because they have paid for them. Accreditation can never be student-centered, and would be meaningless if it were.
  • Furthermore, even in the provision of learning support, to adopt a "student-centered" view is just as much educationally mistaken as a teacher-centered view, and in fact for the same reason. It presupposes that we have the power to cause learning in students independent of their actions, just as anyone can be given a bar of chocolate or an automobile in exchange for money but no other action. That view of learning is wrong, and hence so is a "student-centered" view. Learning and teaching are names for two aspects of a transaction that requires complementary and interacting contributions from the two parties.
• "Student-centeredness" is also incompatible with maximising the benefits of learning in a research environment. These benefits are most evident in project work (above all in a student's final year), where students come closest to learning in an apprenticeship mode. The whole point of apprenticeship is what Jean Lave calls "legitimate peripheral participation": that is, joining in a task meaningful and useful to others beyond the context of learning. The point of such projects is that they are useful by independent criteria: perhaps as publishable research, perhaps by constructing something (e.g. software) useful to an outside client. In other words, such work should be client-centered, not student-centered. Being student-centered not only goes directly against learning in a research environment, it also goes directly against acquiring skills that are marketable, since these too must be judged by someone else, and the learner oriented to satisfying that outside standard not themselves.
• The recent history of teaching and learning in schools (particularly in England) is a warning. For several decades, school teaching was dominated by a child-centered orthodoxy. We are now in the midst of a reaction to this, with the introduction of nationally assessed learning targets which clearly teachers are no longer trusted to manage. This has made it very clear that the learner is not the customer: society as a whole both pays the bills and uses the product, not the learner. The second lesson is that, at least in the judgement of a majority, a child-centered approach has not led to good education, precisely because it under-emphasised the "teacher" side of learning i.e. the learning targets to be attained. We should make every effort not to repeat this mistake in HE.

Finally, analogy may clarify my position on this. If someone (in Glasgow) were to say that what they wanted for their holiday was to go somewhere warm, they would be well advised to go south. But if they then elevated this to a strategy of being "south-centered", and this were interpreted as an aim, they would end up at the south pole, achieving a worsening not betterment of their present location: moving south is the right direction of action and correction for them, but is NOT their desired destination. Paying more attention to learning rather than teaching, and to student rather than teacher needs is a desirable direction of change for the university, but the aim should be an optimum balance (like the equator, or at least the tropics), and not to go as far as possible in that direction (southwards).

Even more simply, learning is analogous to a journey. Learning outcomes correspond to the journey accomplished; the end point corresponds to the teacher (representing the curriculum or outcome to be attained); the starting point corresponds to the learners (representing their prior knowledge and interests). It would be ridiculous to talk about travel only by specifying the destination (as if a journey to London were unaffected by whether it were from Watford or Glasgow): corresponding to a teacher-centered approach. It would be equally ridiculous in precisely the same way to talk about it specifying only the starting point, as if travel from Glasgow were the same whether the destination were London or Motherwell (a learner-centered approach).

Talking about costs explicitly

What I take to be the case is that the university's top goal is to stay solvent, and that providing a high quality education is a second goal of lower priority. Nearly all decisions about learning and teaching do and must take this as their grounds. It is however uncomfortable and perhaps politically difficult to write or say this aloud. It may perhaps be said that this is of course "taken for granted".

The issue for the strategy document is whether to address this issue of costs explicitly. If it does, it may face the discomfort mentioned; and furthermore it explicitly says that it "will not provide a detailed blueprint: it will rather point a direction for the University" which seems to be a justification for not being complete. However if it does not address costs, then the document can never be the basis of decisions about teaching and learning: these must always have at their heart issues not mentioned in the document, which can then only be on the sidelines. If the strategy document nevertheless were to become frequently referred to, then it would simply further a situation in which people say one thing when justifying their decisions, while using different, unmentioned, grounds for actually making decisions.

This has had serious disadvantages in other areas. In safety decisions, the real decisions are more and more made in terms of the cost per life saved; but public pronouncements are too often in terms of "safety is our top priority" which then looks hypocritical when, in fact, some measures are not adopted on grounds of cost. It also encourages irresponsible demands by those who want the safety but are not paying for it. In software engineering most methods fail to mention costs or put them at the heart of their design procedures. This is an important component of the gross cost overruns and project failures that disgrace that industry. Closer to education, the most common method for designing educational software (Instructional Design) fails to mention cost even though designers pride themselves in finishing on time and on budget (as they must in almost all contracts); however they do not like it pointed out that this means that money is their top priority, educational quality second. Nevertheless, this refusal to state explicitly what the goals and priorities are, means that the central tradeoffs cannot be discussed or reasoned about explicitly.

I myself favour rationality. As a consequence, I believe we should reason about the decisions we make, and that the quality of those decisions would best be promoted by being explicit about the grounds for those decisions. This implies that the strategy document should discuss the centrality of costs in learning and teaching.

This will be difficult. However it would, among other advantages, widen the discussion to include -- as currently it does not -- the desirability of changes in practice whose main effect is to save resources rather than increasing quality directly. Some useful changes already introduced are of this kind: Gordon Doughty has some examples, and the introduction long ago of computer-run laboratory provision in Psychology is another case. Without discussing costs, the strategy cannot encourage such cases, which obviously are advantageous as resources saved in one teaching activity can be drawn on in another where greater quality must use greater resources than the approach it replaces.

Saying what is meant by "problem"

What does problem-solving mean?

"Problem" in problem-solving and in problem-based learning

I favour definition and explanation as the remedy. I suspect that both PBL and problem-solving are each common and commonly understood terms in only a (different) minority of departments. Clearly the strategy document wishes to speak to the whole university: it must make unusual efforts to explain itself if this is to succeed, as discussed further in a separate section below.

The appropriate scope for PBL

PBL may therefore apply directly to engineering disciplines, but others are not defined in that way, and will not have this natural affinity to PBL. It would be a good idea to acknowledge this in the document. We do not know whether PBL will transfer to other kinds of discipline, and here is a good conceptual reason why it may not. Nevertheless the gains reported for PBL are so impressive that they certainly provide a good reason for other departments to consider whether they can acquire some of the benefits, but a brief discussion of the caveats might introduce an air of realism that may in the end better promote suitable adaptation and adoption.

We might perhaps usefully attempt an analysis of PBL into its educational components in order the better to consider how it might fit or be adapted (or be already practised in some respects) in other disciplines. The medical model of PBL simultaneously introduces multiple features that are novel with respect to the lecture based teaching it replaced. This naturally raises the question of the separate importance of each of these features, particularly when considered in the context of disciplines which either already have some of these features, or else would not value them in the same way. These features include:

• Organising learning around tasks of the kind central to a discipline.
  • These are "problems" in concrete contexts for applied subjects, but what would the corresponding type of task be for other disciplines?
  • This is motivating by corresponding to students' original reason for doing the course (to become a professional of this type);
  • and motivating by offering and corresponding to a social identity -- practitioners of the discipline.
• Groupwork. This can be seen as an important personal skill for many later jobs, independently of any other consideration. It is also intrinsically motivating for many students (feeling supported by others, yet able to contribute usefully and be valued for it) -- although not by another subset of students who find it aversive. Its biggest drawbackis that it decreases flexible learning by requiring group members to find a time (and place) to meet. Work on the MANTCHI project showed that this was a recurrent and significant problem (see here item B10).
• Resource based learning. Structuring learning by offering passive resources (e.g. books), plus setting a goal, and leaving control of the learning actions to the students, rather than telling them what to think and do at each step. Many disciplines, especially in the Arts faculty, have always taught in this way e.g. with courses organised around a weekly essay or seminar. And in fact computer science teaching of programming languages or even Maths teaching is often really organised in this way, when it revolves around writing programs or doing examples, with lectures seen only as one resource to support this central activity.

Communicating about learning and teaching

There are several sources of difficulty. One is that the same word may denote different things in different departments (e.g. "tutorial"). Another is that a term and what it refers to may just not be used by many departments (e.g. "problem-solving"). A third source is the use of terms from some part of the education literature but never encountered in other departments e.g. "deep learning", "PBL", "reflection". Definitions, examples, and references for all such terms would be helpful, indeed essential.

The document has only one reference, in a footnote on page 13 to a CVCP module. This document is not in the library. This too is an issue that should be addressed, if the strategy document is to be effective. What message does it imply: that the authority quoted by the strategy document is so unimportant -- and so little expected to be read by others -- that it has not been worth acquiring for the library?

The difference between disciplines

One exercise we may attempt in order to address this, is to take Laurillard's model of 12 activities, all of which she claims should be present in well designed learning provision, and try to classify disciplines by which of those activities they not only support, but take as central and defining. In a heavily fact-based discipline it may be that their definition of what a graduate is, is someone who knows a large body of essential facts: for that discipline activity 1 (exposition) may be the defining activity. In contrast, for some Arts disciplines, lectures are subordinate occasions, and the heart of student activity and of the assessment is the production of essays (activity 2). For these disciplines, students inherently have much practice at producing their own arguments and doing so in writing. It is no accident that research found philosophy students to score higher than others in critical thinking (Kuhn, 1991): that is what they are continually exercised on. In contrast again, for engineering disciplines including medicine, the practical application of knowledge in concrete situations (activity 6) is central.

These differences are based on genuine differences of primary value in different disciplines, and they show through in largely consistent ways into different practices in teaching, learning, and assessment. However very little, perhaps none, of the literature on HE really takes this into account. Most authors unconsciously think of just one or two disciplines, and their general statements are actually usually false as generalisations. It is an important exercise, but one which apparently very few do, to check every general statement about HE against a test set of diverse disciplines. (One might for instance start with: chemistry [facts dominant over argument structure; theory dominant over practice], philosophy [argument structure dominant over facts; theory over practice], medicine [practice over theory, facts over argument structure], music.) The strategy document too is in danger of failing this test with its claims about general key skills and general approaches to teaching in HE.

One of the consequences of these differences is that some key skills would be automatically fulfilled to a very high standard by some disciplines, but a trickier consequence is to ask whether all disciplines would in fact agree about the key skills. What has teamwork to do with philosophy, or problem-solving with music? Unless these questions can be answered convincingly (and neither the strategy document nor I have so far done this), the options may be:

• Promote or enforce a set of key skills anyway. Yet if key skills are to be promoted in the absence of any connection with a student's discipline and education, then why not promote a much wider list of them, beginning with touch typing, first aid, and changing baby's nappies: all of very wide utility in the workplace as well as at home, although they would require retraining most senior academics if they were to retain their status as "educated".
• Find different meanings for the "skills". Philosophers debate, and this requires coordinated interaction: does this count as teamwork? Problem-solving in the arts and social sciences might be construed as conceptual analysis: analysing what the terms of the question or problem could mean, and reasoning from there. In many ways an attractive interpretation, it poses the further problem of whether to settle on a single interpretation. If we do not, then there will not really be core skills taught to all students: it will depend upon their discipline as now, disguised by sloppy use of language. If we do, then is it likely that science students will be taught conceptual and linguistic analysis because it is seen as an important skill in other faculties?

The advantage to learning and teaching practice of diverse disciplines

In this context, the differences in disciplinary practices for teaching and learning is a source of strength not weakness. Because, as I suggested above, a given discipline tends to make one learning activity central, it is very likely to acquire expertise at organising it. Other departments, who may feel like Laurillard that a range of activities is desirable and so wish to put on non-focal activities, may be able to draw on this expertise. For example, when I went on a course on running small-group tutorials (a non-central activity in my department at that time), I got useful advice from a Vet. school academic where small group teaching is the central mode. Innovative work on seminars (using email) was done in Music, where seminars are a central mode. If I want advice on organising teamwork in students, I go to computer scientists who have for decades recognised this as a key professional skill (most programmers in industry work in teams). Even if I am arrogant enough to think I can do it better, it is they who have the most and longest experience of the difficulties in teaching it.

Summary

• They cause significant difficulties to communication in the document itself. This could be overcome, but only with effort. The assumption of mutual understanding across disciplines and departments based on common ground is usually false.
• Many differences in teaching practice stem from real and principled differences in the nature of different disciplines. All generalisations across disciplines (e.g. about HE, or about all teaching in the university) need to be checked in detail against at least a test set of diverse disciplines. Few if any generalisations survive this.
• Of particular concern is whether a set of key skills can be found that really do cross all disciplines. If not, this compromises the notion of a coherent education with a miscellany of unrelated training courses. The strategy document presupposes without discussion that such a set can exist. In fact there are reasons to regard this as problematic.
• On the other hand, the diversity of emphases in different departments, stemming from disciplinary differences, is a potential source of strength. Departments are likely to have developed particular expertise in the teaching and learning activities central to that discipline, and to be able to offer this to other departments for which that activity is desirable but secondary.

Research-led teaching

• Latest research content. At its simplest, this would mean updating courses continually with the latest research results as appropriate.
• Practice in the methods of the discipline. Student projects train them in the techniques of the discipline. These may be research techniques, but in engineering (and computer science) the projects may be mainly new applications of design methods. This is learning by applying. Even when the project does address novel research, the research aspect may be largely controlled by the supervisor. But there remains the core benefit of training and practice in techniques on novel problems.
• Seeing the process of the discipline demonstrated. Novel applications have the benefit of providing opportunities for the students to see the staff struggling, thinking out loud, and generally demonstrating the process of the discipline themselves. This conveys information about the process that is usually not written down, and is not exposed by having familiar questions and problems answered from memory. As well as exhibiting the process, it also frequently exposes and conveys to the student vital "meta-information" about the basis and status of the knowledge taught: about what is certain, what generally believed yet still questionable, what merely standard custom and practice, and so on. In science disciplines, lectures generally do this very little, but student research projects do this well. In other disciplines, however, essentially similar benefits are probably achieved in other ways. In English Literature, for example, lectures often serve this role: becoming, not an occasion for distributing facts, but for displaying what a practitioner can do with them in an extended discourse. They may be rather like what a science student can gain by attending a research seminar.
• Another benefit is that research-led teaching motivates staff, as it easily becomes time that serves both their teaching and their research duties and interests simultaneously. This is a true gain, with two benefits for each unit of time spent, whether in particular cases it appears as less time "lost" to teaching or more time spent with students than required. (Of course, this benefit cannot be mentioned or acted on if we adopt a student-centered approach, or forbid costs to be mentioned in polite policy documents.)

Discussion of recent important papers and books will have most of the same benefits as research project work. Before staff become familiar with them and adopt a settled view, their critical processes will be displayed and so conveyed to students. They will also be more motivated and engaged in this teaching. Seminar or lecture series that do this will offer some of the essential benefits of research-led teaching.

Other points

Distance learning

Study skills introduction

Another key skill: reading graphs

The literature on graph reading suggests firstly that there is a wide-spread deficit. Secondly, it suggests that most people (including many researchers on this topic) tend to assume that everyone has the same ability as they do, and that it is a binary ability (cf. either someone is literate or not). This is not consistent with the fact that graphs are a relatively recent invention, and graphs where time is not one of the axes are very recent. In fact, like most things, the skill constitutes a continuum and there are always people more skilled than you, as well as others less skilled. A student may be able to read off one or two features from simple graphs, but not use them in other ways. This may be a good candidate for a centrally developed and delivered package (like the IT course) because even departments that require their students to use graphs routinely seldom provide explicit teaching on it. Furthermore, in its character of a general skill, it would be good for students who had worked on graphs in one subject to be exposed to examples with a quite different content (as they would indeed find in newspapers and other reports). Such a package could also contain some material on how to spot attempts to deceive with graphs: useful as a general skill, but not normally taught in the physical sciences.

Deep learning

References

Cassels, J.R.T. & Johnstone, A.H. (1983) "The meaning of words and the teaching of chemistry" Education in chemistry vol.20 pp.10-11

Kuhn, D. (1991) The skills of argument (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge)

Laurillard, D. (1993) Rethinking university teaching: A framework for the effective use of educational technology (Routledge: London) fig.II.1, p.103. I have a diagram of it on the web.

Lave,Jean & E.Wenger (1991) Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation (CUP) Marton,F., D.Hounsell & N.Entwistle (1984) (eds.) The experience of learning (Edinburgh: Scottish academic press)

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