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Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Contents (click to jump to a section)

• Introduction
• My dimensions
• Examples
• Comments on teaching staff promotion and scholarship
• Comments on spreading better teaching
• Reflection scepticism
• Heuristic tests of our ideas in this area
  • Would we promote our best teachers?
  • Teaching in art schools
  • Do promotion policies serve teaching or committee members?
• Scholarship and the 3 components of teaching
• Conclusion

Introduction

Useful entry points to that literature might be:

• Boyer,E.L. (1990) Scholarship revisited (Princeton University N.J.: Carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching) [said to be the starting point]
• Healey,M. (2001) The scholarship of teaching in higher education: an evolving idea (The Higher Education Academy)
• Kreber,C. (2005) "Charting a critical course on the scholarship of university teaching movement" Studies in HE vol.30 no.4 pp.389-405 [a very recent paper]

My dimensions

1. One's own teaching vs. knowledge/scholarship of L&T. We could call this the private vs. public dimension, or personal practice vs. abstract understanding of it, or simply practice vs. theory. You can know about teaching, or you can do it, or both; but as with any skill, understanding it is not necessarily connected with good performance, and good performance may not be underwritten by any articulate or even conscious understanding as in singing, carpentry, amusing a child. The aim of one is to do effective, perhaps excellent, teaching as measured primarily by its effect on learners, while the aim of the other is to develop communicable understanding, primarily for other teachers, of how successful teaching works.

   Similarly evidence (e.g. in applications for promotion) may be about success in one's own teaching (e.g. student feedback, attendance records, exam performance of the students, dropout rates) or about contributions to the scholarship of L&T (e.g. papers published in education journals, collecting data on other people's teaching, ...).
   Combining these would be nice, but is still rare.

   It could be argued that inarticulate skill at teaching is not scholarship, but scholarship should include the skill it attempts to explicate or else it becomes disconnected from its subject matter. This is unsatisfactory, just as the education literature is full of the failure of science teaching that leads many pupils to be able to pass exam questions on (say) Newton's laws yet fail to recognise their connection to their own physical experience. Scholarship of teaching would immediately fail by the standards of its own content if it became in any way divorced from a strong connection to the practice of teaching.

2. Discipline-specific vs. generic or general. The content of the "scholarship" can be anywhere on a spectrum from completely generic to narrowly discipline-specific, including:
   • Disciplinary content i.e. keeping up to date with the research literature in the area, and making suitable selections for course content.
   • Didactique: how to present a given specific bit of disciplinary content to learners. Unsung, but probably really important, knowledge gradually evolves here as each concept moves from new research through graduate school down to undergraduate and eventually school courses. How best to present it is quite often very different from how the original researchers arrived at the idea. For instance to convince someone the earth is spherical, today a photo from a satellite would be best and direct, while originally the Greeks reasoned from the distance to the horizon, how sunrise varies as you travel, etc.
   • General theories of and methods for the learning and teaching process e.g. PBL (problem-based learning), constructivism, just in time teaching, ...

   Again, combinations of these are nice, but rare e.g. how would a general method like PBL apply in your discipline, what are the difficulties there and how do they differ from the difficulties in other disciplines, ...

3. Pure vs. applied. Just as, at least in the public's imagination, an advance in physics might proceed from a new concept, through lab. evidence, to a new applied device, through to mass manufacture and consumer sale (e.g. from the theory of stimulated emission of radiation through building lasers in the lab, to the little gadget I bought to point at projection screens with a red dot), so in education there are many steps from a general theory (e.g. constructivism) to particular recipes for organising teaching and learning (e.g. PBL) to demonstrating these worked for a convenient topic presented by a particular person, to teaching a whole curriculum fixed by others but using this method, to being able to train almost any staff to use this method successfully. Contributions to scholarship may be at any stage in this succession, which however require quite different skills and resources that are not very likely to be found in the same person.

Examples

Summarising the dimensions as pure vs. applied, theory (public) vs. practice (private), discipline specific vs. generic, then the eight are:

1. [applied, theory, specific]. A book of practical advice for medical school PBL delivery.
2. [applied, theory, generic]. The material offering practical support for rolling out EVS (electronic voting systems for lecture theatres) to many real courses across the university, together with a website to help other teachers .
3. [applied, practice, specific]. Measures of a particular course's success. Or at a higher level: redesigning a whole level 1 course and leading the team that delivers it.
4. [applied, practice, generic]. One's personal skill at group facilitation; or at giving a talk.
5. [pure, theory, specific]. A book on what is required for professional medical education, including ethics, managing a team, communication with patients, etc. It discusses what is needed and why, not details of how to do it and whether it worked when tried.
6. [pure, theory, generic]. Methods of teaching like PBL, Just in time teaching, constructivism.
7. [pure, practice, specific]. Work that is pure (i.e. an abstract idea not yet developed and applied), yet to do with personal practice not theory, is essentially the private first inspiration of a new idea about one's one teaching practice: development will come next. A discipline-specific example might be: Quintin Cutt's "courselet" of remedial exercises for low-grade entrants to computing science level 2. He had a basic idea about the need for it and how he might do it drawing on his personal skills and experience; but the many details and the articulated justification came later.
8. [pure, practice, generic]. A generic example might be: Juggling in lectures: Iain Allison's idea before he published it, and before he tried it out at length on real classes. (Allison,I. (1990) "Juggling for results" Journal of Geological Education vol.38 pp.314-315) My idea for having staff give (extra) courses that would be valuable and valued by students: not what the overall degree programme requires, not what fills standardised numbers of credits, but actually the very most valuable and interesting things you could think of.

Comments on teaching staff promotion and scholarship

Here there are probably two major divisions, corresponding to interaction with two different literatures: that of the subject content and the L&T literature.

1. Keeping current with disciplinary content. Researchers do this for at least one (often small) area as a side-effect of their research: they do not need additional time or resources for this. Teaching staff do. Evidence for this would be publishing reviews, and publishing textbooks: traditional academic activities, but often not counted in research assessment exercises. Corresponding to citation counts would be uptake of a textbook by other institutions, being referenced on reading lists on their courses, or bought by university libraries. Other evidence might be generating (not only delivering) course content that was seriously scrutinised and validated by other subject experts.

2. Independently of that, studying the literature of teaching and learning particularly in their area and relating it to their own teaching. Evidence of that: introducing a method from the literature into the local context, and demonstrating its degree of success; writing critical rationales of their own teaching methods that relate these to those described in the literature. Published papers (in education related journals) sometimes do this, but such course design rationales are perhaps a kind of document that should be developed much more widely along with a process of peer review/validation. At the moment hardly any HE courses are justified. The point is that they should be, and such justification is essentially about showing awareness of the published alternatives and how one's own design relates to these: the essence of scholarship.

   Further evidence: use of their ideas and materials by others i.e. peer uptake (cf. citation counts).

   Another important thing to note is implied by dimension A: do you want to promote a university teacher because their teaching is effective, or because they write in a scholarly manner about it? These can be independent qualities: you can have a scholar of L&T who is poor at actual teaching, and the most effective teacher in the university who cannot talk or write about it to other teachers. We might say that the former could be promoted as an educational researcher, but not as a university teacher. If we won't promote the latter, we are back being unable to promote our best teachers, which would be like giving drama awards only to critics and not to actors and directors.

3. Contributions to other areas, e.g. new theories of L&T, empirical evaluations of others' teaching, are certainly scholarship of L&T (and could be evidenced by publication etc.); but it is a bit less certain if this is what most directly benefits a university if carried out by its teachers.

Basically the point here is that if we take publications as the main evidence, then we reward only public theory not private practice of teaching: but it is only the latter that directly benefits students.

Comments on spreading better teaching

A major force for improvement would be to require course designs to have a written rationale that included a discussion of the relevant L&T literature, and self-comparison with colleagues' methods. This would create demand which at present is lacking, unlike in the research community.

A second major step would be to create supply, by rewarding writing up one's teaching i.e. the "push" half of the dissemination. Promotion criteria that call for this would be the obvious lever.

A third approach however is to consider not how to create a new demand for such material, but to think of teachers as users: what do they need, not to write a rationale, but to adopt and deliver a new method or new material? The considerations here are somewhat different, and journal papers are only a small part of it. Teachers looking for, and seriously considering adopting, something new want all of:

• a quick and accessible description (education and QA jargon is a serious barrier)
• a pedagogical rationale
• evidence of effectiveness
• a technical requirements list (what space, equipment, support, etc.)
• how-to instructions and concrete examples
• and a person of equivalent role to talk to (university teachers want to talk to other UTs, HODs need to talk to other HODs, vice-principals to other VPs).

Reflection scepticism

This is understandable (although should it be forgivable?): it has extremely deep roots in our intellectual culture, at least from Socrates's "an unexamined life is not worth living" (according to Plato's The Apology), and strikes a personal chord with many academics: certainly with me. I chose academic life exactly because I like to have time to think and pursue the feeling of understanding, as contrasted with having to rush on to the next practical action without reflecting on what just happened. Furthermore there are areas where something like reflection clearly works: certainly in Human Computer Interaction, testing designs on users and modifying the design in the light of the observed failures is central.

Nevertheless if we actually reflect on (or rather, think critically about) reflection, -- that is, if we try to recall areas of experience and knowledge that might contradict the consensus -- it is easy to think of cases where reflection is completely and permanently ineffective. No amount of reflection will get someone with a damaged knee to run faster. No amount of reflection improves our visual perception: this is permanently beyond the reach of our introspection, as are some other areas of cognition. Furthermore even when reflection provides both clear evidence of something wrong (the students are revolting) and an analysis of what the problem is (I'm failing to relate the topic to their experience) that provides no help in itself about what to do about it: for that, I need knowledge of alternative teaching methods, and reflection cannot ever provide that unless I happen already to have seen a remedy in my own experience. Thus it is an empirical, not a rhetorical, question whether reflection improves teaching.

Thus I would not regard evidence of reflection on one's teaching as all that valuable. It is not scholarship; and we do not in fact know whether it is likely to improve that person's teaching. All we know is that we feel it should.

Heuristic tests of our ideas in this area

Would we promote our best teachers?

When I think of the best ones I know, the answer is "no" for several different reasons.

Firstly, we might say that if their promotion had depended on scholarship of teaching (instead of other things like research) they would have learned to produce the evidence of scholarship. This is probably true: if motivated, many academics can learn stuff, however silly, quickly. However this is not a good counter-argument. It amounts to admitting that scholarship of teaching is of no use in how good teaching is done at present, but just an extra paperwork task.

Secondly, if asked orally, I think these people can often give a good, articulate justification of their teaching and course designs; they are just not asked to do so. And again, this suggests that at present, good teaching is produced without any use of the scholarship of teaching: there are clearly other ways to do it. If the aim is good teaching and learning, then this should be rewarded.

Thirdly, some of the skill is not scholarly: it is about showmanship applied to raising attention and enjoyment; about interpersonal skills; about facilitating groups; about not blurting out the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth but being able to hold back to allow learners to "construct" it for themselves.

A fuller treatment of this point would require a fuller analysis of where the current best HE teaching originates. Suffice it to say that few would say that "scholarship" was the foundation for most improvements up to now.

Teaching in art schools

This reference point is useful firstly to test whether our ideas are disciplinarily general, or unconsciously limited to fields we are familiar with; and also as a reminder that if "scholarship" means anything, it cannot in all areas mean consensus, conformity, or a single truth. But the third reason this is a good mental reference point here, is that teaching is a craft that is highly individual, and producing teaching, at least good teaching as opposed to kitsch, imitative, third rate teaching, may require us all to operate more like art students than like other kinds of learner. Producing good teaching may require play, experiment, and bringing stuff out of oneself, and NOT imitating something you read in the scholarly literature about teaching.

Do promotion policies serve teaching or committee members?

Scholarship and the 3 components of teaching

1. Selection of material Course content has to be selected. The degree to which this is an original choice in a given HE course varies enormously. The main statistics concepts every psychology student must learn are about 80 years old; Newton's laws which are taught to every engineering and physics students are over 300 years old; in some disciplines, accrediting professional bodies strongly constrain the curriculum. On the other hand, a final year undergraduate option in a rapidly evolving field such as immunology in biology, the nature of individual identity in a digital world in philosophy, or the scholarship of HE teaching are going to contain new material perhaps never taught before. This is, on one view, the defining function of a university: to teach new knowledge, to take the first steps in moving it from the research/scholarly literature, to a form for student learning. This may consist only of selection e.g. expressed in a reading list and in learning aims and objectives. But anyone who has changed discipline may remember what an enormously important service it is for a newcomer, simply to be given some idea about what it is most important to learn in a new area. And someone who is equipped for lifelong learning -- as our graduating students should be -- needs only this, and not the next two components at all.

2. Selection /design of learning methods The next kind of thing that may be added by teachers to facilitate learning is some kind of learning design: perhaps the adoption of PBL, labs with demonstrator assistance, exercises to do, or essay tasks with some feedback, etc. This design, this choice, is the subject of boards of study etc.: it is distinct both from the subject content and from actual delivery and the personal skills that involves.

3. Teacher delivery skills The third addition is the personal skills of the teacher e.g. giving a talk that holds the attention, being able to run a discussion group in a way that involves all the participants, shy and over-loud alike, etc.

Once we ennumerate these three broad subdivisions we can see three things: that they require different skills; that someone may contribute to one and not to the others, or be excellent at one and not the others; and that each is different in what they draw on.

1. Selection (curriculum design) comes from knowledge of the field, usually from researchers. It requires no "teaching" knowledge or scholarship. It is all about what it would be good for a learner to end up knowing. Scholarship of teaching has little contribution here. What is needed is knowledge, both theoretical and practical, of the topic. A researcher in the topic will be well equipped: this is the central justification for "research-led" universities, because researchers have to keep current in the literature, because their own experience of learning the material is personal and fresh, and because of the argument that contributing members of the research community have in practice much better access to the knowledge than others (and to its informal, unpublished aspects as well as the formalised, written ones). However research publications are only a measure of the latter informal aspect, since an avid reader or reviewer of the literature would be at least as good as a researcher.

2. Learning design is the most likely to be assisted by the scholarship of teaching. On the other hand, it is also the one most bound by habits and traditions in a given institution, since they often do things like define a job by the number of hours of lectures given, or insist on a uniform number of labs regardless of learning objectives.

3. Communication skills are the most variable between people, suggesting that training has relatively little effect in evening out differences in skill, and that good practitioners are not effective in communicating that skill, at least at present. (Observing colleagues teaching may address this a little: but will not disseminate the other aspects of teaching. Reading their course documentation and following up the reading might do that for (1), while working through the course as a student may be best way of grasping (2).)

Promoting on the basis of scholarship of teaching is therefore likely to reward only one of the three main elements of teaching.

Conclusion

One issue is that we are asking our teachers to engage with not one but two different literatures: of their subject and of teaching itself.

Another is, that relying on writing (publication) as a measure of knowledge in effect ignores half the space of knowledge by measuring theory but not practice and skill. This not only embodies a poor theory of knowledge, which is itself the subject of criticism in the education literature, but is particularly inappropriate in an area like teaching whose value must ultimately be defined in terms of its practical effect. It would also probably mean we couldn't promote our best current teachers on these measures, and ignores the origin of much of the innovation and excellence in HE teaching to date.

Acknowledgements

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