Learning to Teach in Higher Education

Paul Ramsden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134412051
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This bestselling book is a unique introduction to the practice of university teaching and its underlying theory. This new edition has been fully revised and updated in view of the extensive changes which have taken place in higher education over the last decade and includes new material on the higher education context, evaluation and staff development.
The first part of the book provides an outline of the experience of teaching and learning from the student's point of view, out of which grows a set of prinicples for effective teaching in higher education. Part two shows how these ideas can enhance educational standards, looking in particular at four key areas facing every teacher in higher education:
* Organising the content of undergraduate courses
* Selecting teaching methods
* Assessing student learning
* Evaluating the effectivenesss of teaching.
Case studies of exemplary teaching are used throughout to connect ideas to practice and to illustrate how to ensure better student learning. The final part of the book looks in more detail at appraisal, performance indicators, accountability and educational development and training. The book is essential reading for new and experienced lecturers, particularly those following formal programmes in university teaching, such as courses leading to ILT accreditation.

Part 1 Learning and teaching in higher education

Chapter 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780203507711-1

You cannot be wise without some basis of knowledge; but you may easily acquire knowledge and remain bare of wisdom.

(A.N. Whitehead)

University teaching in its context

We work in surroundings that our colleagues of thirty years ago would not recognise. Higher education has become part of a global shift to a new way of creating and using knowledge. The new way is focused on solving problems and is sensitive to customer needs. It strives for quantity as well as quality. It cuts across disciplinary boundaries. It is enlivened by apparently infinite quantities of instantly accessible information.

That is the good news. In knowledge-based economies, governments see universities as engines for social change and the expansion of prosperity. Being competitive on world markets means that we must invest in higher education. However, being competitive also demands controls on public expenditure. The only way to solve this equation is to spread available resources more thinly and to find new, non-public sources of income. University teachers have accordingly found themselves working harder and at the same time being required to be more businesslike and more accountable.

We have seen assiduous pressure on universities to give more formal and public accounts of themselves for funding purposes. Progress towards connecting university funding with performance is an international phenomenon. Implacable forces mandate it: the staggering cost of mass higher education means that those who pay the piper will want to call the tune. More visible and intrusive types of evaluation and reporting now link resource allocation intimately to the kind of achievements that taxpayers, students, employers and governments want from their institutions of higher education. Accountability, quality assurance, league tables and performance indicators have become permanent entries in the higher education lexicon. Variation in the level of external inspection may come and go, but not the principle that all support comes with strings attached. ‘Gone are the days’ said a higher education minister approvingly, ‘when being a university or a teacher in a university was enough to command respect. Opening our services to public accountability is a key way in which we support quality enhancement and improvement’ (Margaret Hodge, quoted in The Guardian, 13 March 2002).

Because of these various changes, the pleasures of the academic life have dwindled for many university teachers. They are unimpressed especially by the administrative effort associated with quality assurance and accountability. It uses up time and energy that could be focused on the core business of research and teaching. It seems to compromise the uncertainty that is intrinsic to scholarship and discovery. The idea of learning as a dialogue between student and teacher appears to retreat before a tide of bureaucracy.

Tensions arise especially from the requirement to do more with less — to teach more undergraduates, to supervise more research students, to get those students through their degrees more quickly. Where many lecturers in the 1980s handled classes of 30 to 50 students, they are now faced with groups in the hundreds. Widening participation means that today's academics are also expected to deal with an unprecedentedly broad spectrum of student ability and background. They can no longer rely on students having detailed previous knowledge, especially in mathematics and science. Attainment in literacy, the primary generic skill, often leaves much to be desired. One in five students in the United Kingdom, and one in three in Australia, will drop out. Yet most of these very same students are contributing substantial sums to their education and are working to pay their way. They have grown up with the expectation of staying connected to a customer-focused, instant, 24-hour, 7-day week service: why should a university education be any different? Today's undergraduates are at once harder to teach and less indulgent towards indifferent teaching.

It is little exaggeration to say that these changes, taken together, mean that the average university teacher is now expected to be an excellent teacher: a man or woman who can expertly redesign courses and methods of teaching to suit different groups of students, deal with large mixed-ability classes, apply information and communication technology appropriately, and inspire students with zero tolerance for delay whose minds are probably on their next part-time job rather than on the pleasures of learning. At the same time she or he will be expected to be highly productive in research, search out fresh income sources, juggle new administrative demands, and show accountability to a variety of masters as both a teacher and a scholar. How should we adapt to this changed environment?

A rationale for learning to teach better

These pressures form an inescapable background for any discussion of better university teaching. As you read this book, you may be wondering how to cope next week with a class that has grown to twice its former size, how you will find the time to acquire the formal training in teaching that your university now expects, or how to convince your head of department that your performance is excellent in your annual performance review. One way to address these problems would be for me to write and you to read a book about how to handle large classes, how to prepare a teaching portfolio, how to rescue failing students, or how to present evidence in an appraisal interview.

These are reasonable questions, and there are plenty of books that will help you answer them. But we should be careful not to confuse symptoms with causes. We deceive ourselves if we think that responses to new demands like these constitute our real problem, as surely as institutions and governments deceive themselves if they think that the forces of accountability and quality assurance will inevitably improve the standard of teaching and research, and as surely as students deceive themselves if they think that passing tomorrow's examination is what learning is all about. The truth is that external pressures form an inadequate basis for enhancing the quality of teaching. Something else is needed to make teaching better. If you really want to improve your own teaching, you must understand what this something is.

This book has been written because I believe that teaching is one of the most delightful and exciting of all human activities when it is done well and that it is one of the most humiliating and tedious when it is done poorly. Let me be clear about one fact: the quality of undergraduate education can bear a good deal of improvement. Outside a few favoured institutions, and even then for only a brief moment in history, no golden age of impeccable instruction and taken-for-granted high academic standards ever existed, except in the world of academic mythology. Accountability or no accountability, large classes or small, it is useless to deny that, although there is much that is and has been excellent in higher education teaching, there is a great deal that has always been frankly bad. And there is little in the world of education that is more depressing than bad university teaching. Perhaps its nadir is reached in the vision of an outstanding scholar standing before a class of brilliant, handpicked first year students. He or she mumbles lifelessly from a set of well-worn notes while half the class snoozes and the other makes desultory jottings, or maybe — if this is an engineering or medicine lecture especially — tests new aerodynamic theories by constructing and launching paper projectiles. Everyone longs to get the hour over and get back to something serious.

The greatest fault of this sort of ‘teaching’ is not that it is inefficient or ineffective as a way of helping students to learn (though it is that as well) but that it is a tragic waste of knowledge, experience, youth, time and ability. There need never be any excuse for it: every teacher can learn how to do better. Anyone who has seen good teaching in action will not need to invoke the exigencies of performance review and assurance of academic standards as reasons for improvement. I think they will begin to understand the truth of the proposition that good teaching, though never easy, always strenuous, and sometimes painful, is nevertheless its own reward.

A view of learning and teaching

The basic idea of this book is that we can improve our teaching by studying our students' learning — by listening to and learning from our students. It will be useful to be clear from the start just what I mean by learning. One of the ideas you will meet time and time again as you read the following chapters is that learning in educational institutions should be about changing the ways in which learners understand, or experience, or conceptualise the world around them. The ‘world around them’ includes the concepts and methods that are characteristic of the field of learning in which they are studying.

From this point of view, the vital competences in academic disciplines and the application of knowledge consist in understanding. By understanding, I mean the way in which students apprehend and discern phenomena related to the subject, rather than what they know about them or how they can manipulate them. Many students can juggle formulae and reproduce memorised textbook knowledge while not understanding their subjects in a way that is helpful for solving real problems. Merely being able to repeat quantities of information on demand is not evidence of a change in understanding — at any level of education. Learning that involves a change in understanding implies and includes a facility with a subject's techniques and an ability to remember its details- These skills become embedded in our knowledge during the slow process of changing our understanding of a topic, as anyone who will reflect on their own learning will recognise. In a university education, facts and skills are by no means the opposite of understanding, but they are of little use without it.

The idea of learning as a qualitative change in a person's view of reality is essential to an appreciation of my main argument. I shall maintain that improving teaching involves the same process that informs excellent student learning. It implies changing how we think about and experience teaching — it involves changes in our conceptions, in our common-sense theories of teaching as they are expressed in practice. These theories consist of sets of ideas and knowledge of their application. They are not coherent conceptual structures inside teachers' heads; they are expressed, as far as the individual teacher is concerned, solely in their experiences of teaching. They are exemplified through activity in the classroom, the design and implementation of educational programmes, teamwork with colleagues, and even the management of academic departments and universities. If the way in which lecturers understand teaching determines how effectively they will teach, as I hope to show, then simple solutions that offer better teaching through such devices as presenting them with a thousand and one techniques for using ICT are bound to fail. In subsequent chapters, I shall try to illustrate exactly what this means for improving university education.

The aim of teaching is simple: it is to make student learning possible. Teaching always involves attempts to alter students' understanding, so that they begin to conceptualise phenomena and ideas in the way scientists, mathematicians, historians, physicians or other experts conceptualise them — in the way, that is to say, that we as academics want them to understand them. There can be no such thing as a value-free education. This book, too, embodies an overriding educational value. Its main object is to help improve university teaching through encouraging academic staff to reason about what they do and why they do it. This argument rests on the proposition that higher education will benefit if those who teach inquire into the effects of their activities on their students' learning. This proposition, together with the idea that changes in how we think about and experience teaching are crucial to improvements in higher education, leads to this book being different from many others that have been written on the subject.

A reflective approach to improving teaching

The assumption that the primary aim of teaching is to make student learning possible leads to the assertion that each and every teaching action, and every operation to evaluate or improve teaching, should be judged against the simple criterion of whether it can reasonably be expected to lead to the kind of student learning which we desire. I shall look at what this kind of learning is in Chapter 3.

This in turn leads to an argument for a reflective and inquiring approach as a necessary condition for improving teaching. Such a strategy has always been tenable: good teachers down the ages have continually used what they learned from their students to improve their practice. But it is easier to implement it today than it used to be. During the last quarter century, some important research has taken place. It has looked, from the students' point of view, at the processes and conditions of effective university learning. It offers a valuable foundation — a basis in evidence — for...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART 1 Learning and teaching in higher education
• PART 2 Design for learning
• PART 3 Evaluating and improving quality
• References
• Index