Teacher Development in Higher Education

Existing Programs, Program Impact, and Future Trends

Eszter Simon, Gabriela Pleschová

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136220036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Concerns about the quality of teaching and learning in higher education have given rise to teacher development programs and centers around the world. This book investigates the challenges and complexities of creating instructional development programs for present and future academics. Using case studies from a variety of countries including Estonia, Singapore, the United States and the United Kingdom, it examines issues that are important for higher education researchers as well as higher education managers.

The book includes international responses to the need to improve teaching in higher education. It demonstrates many different ways success may be understood, and investigates what factors may influence the results of instructional development. Contributors use these factors to explain program success through theoretical frameworks. This book also provides input for higher-education managers by pointing out how the local context and both institutional and national policy-making may help or hinder the effective preparation of professors for their teaching responsibilities.

1	What We Know and Fail to Know about the Impact of Teacher Development
	Gabriela Pleschová and Eszter Simon

FACTORS PLACING TEACHER DEVELOPMENT ON THE POLITICAL AGENDA

During the last decade, governments in most developed countries have aimed to increase the numbers of university graduates and to improve the quality of university education as means to maintain or to increase countries' growth and competitiveness. Yet, while educational expansion and structural changes, in particular relating to the Bologna Process (Reinalda and Kulesza 2006) have brought about improvements for students, they have not necessarily done so for faculty members who are in charge of teaching. Many professors are worried that institutional requirements brought about by the Bologna Process, such as paying greater attention to learners' needs, offering more flexible learning paths, or varied assessment techniques, will consume much of their time and thus negatively affect their research (Reichert and Tauch 2005, 38). Accordingly, many faculty members consider teaching enhancement courses as one of many bureaucratic demands on their time (Gibbs 1989, 58–59). At the same time, the characteristics of the teaching faculties are changing as graduate teaching assistants and doctoral students are increasingly being employed to teach. Indeed, many of them will replace the current “baby boom” generation of scholars, who will retire in coming years.

Some countries, most notably the UK, Ireland, Belgium, and the Nordic states, have responded to these challenges by paying closer attention to teacher development.¹ Centres and networks have been created and restructured to implement teacher development courses for higher education (HE) practitioners, starting from a certificate level, through to diploma and master's level courses. On a wider institutional level, the Higher Education Academy and the Staff and Development Association and the Heads of Educational Development Group were established in the UK, while the National Academy for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning was created in Ireland, in addition to a Network of Educational Developers in Sweden and to the Higher Education Research and Development Society for Australasia.

Especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, educational development has come into the mainstream as an important field of practice for any teacher. It has also integrated university management, amounting, for example, to the creation of positions of hierarchical importance such as that of the vice-president or vice-chancellor for teaching and learning at the University of Sydney (Prosser and Barrie 2003, 194), and of similar positions at the University of Nottingham and Open University, to name a few. Entities offering educational development are gradually being recognized for the importance of the service that they offer. In Europe and in Australia, in particular, their role is not only to research learning, teaching, and development but also to engage in curriculum development and to become involved with quality assurance (Knapper 2010, 3). In some countries like the UK, educational development is increasingly seen as playing a strategic role, as staff members at educational units are being engaged in designing university strategies for quality education (Gosling 2009, 9).

Some teacher development programmes already have a history of serving teachers and their students, and it is important to know what they have achieved. Baume (2003, 89–90) summarizes three main sets of practical reasons as to why staff and educational development programmes should be evaluated: first, to determine whether the programme has fulfilled its aims, second, to propose strategies for improving the programme, and third, to understand the reasons for the programme's effects, successes, and failures. Also, exposure to evidence showing that such programmes are successful in enhancing the quality of teaching could motivate those teachers who are hesitant to undertake them.

THE STATE OF RESEARCH ON THE IMPACT OF TEACHER DEVELOPMENT

In spite of increased attention to instructional development, not enough is yet known on its effects. Little has been done to systematically measure the results of many programmes that were established in the 1990s or earlier. Gosling (2001) sent a questionnaire to fifty-three heads of educational development units in the UK to map their work in much detail. The survey revealed that only a few units were required to systematically evaluate the impact of their activities, while many of them reported having used questionnaires or feedback tools to assess certain activities, and some had hired external evaluators. This is consistent with Kreber and Brook's (2001) findings in Canada, which concluded that the evaluation of teacher development programmes often relied on inference measures including the extent of students' participation and satisfaction. A number of authors (Coffey and Gibbs 2000; Eggins and Macdonald 2003; Smith 2004) presented arguments along the same lines: that debate about faculty development goes on in the absence of evidence on its effects.

Since the end of the 1990s, much more has been done to evaluate the effects of teacher development programmes. Unfortunately, many studies suffer methodological weaknesses. Because of the volume and varying quality of studies that are currently available on this topic, studies included in this literature review were selected carefully. Studies were included either on the basis of having made major advancements in scholarly knowledge on the effects of instructional development, or because they can serve as illustrative examples of particular research methods. Preference was also given to those studies which were methodologically strongest. In the review of existing research presented in this book, areas of consensus or near-consensus, areas of disagreement or debate as well as gaps in knowledge have been identified (Knopf 2006). In the presentation of these studies below, ideas and findings are related to each study's particular methodology, allowing the reader to understand possible limitations of the methods used and how these may have influenced the results obtained (see Boote and Beile 2005, 8). A different review of published literature on the results of instructional development can be found in Trigwell's chapter in this book.

Areas of Disagreement or Debate: Which Research Methods to Use?

An important proportion of studies that attempt to measure the effects of teacher-training courses are informed solely by the opinions of those educators who went through them. For example, between 2000 and 2003, Donnelly (2006) studied the self-perception of change in teaching practice by lecturers who received a postgraduate certificate on HE teaching and learning from the Dublin Institute of Technology. Her respondents indicated that training transformed their teaching practice, because it increased their reflection on their own teaching methods, allowed them to learn about and introduce new teaching strategies, improved their focus on the design and delivery of classes, and increased their confidence about learning and teaching, among other things. Using a similar method, MacDonald (2001) examined the results of a model that has been evolving at Monash University and Swinburne University in Australia for the professional development of teaching staff. The author concluded that the Teaching Community Approach² had brought about remarkable changes in teachers' understanding of their role, as well as in their teaching skills and, most importantly, in their enthusiasm for teaching.

Unfortunately, there are certain noticeable weaknesses in the methodology used for conducting these studies. Above all, their results are solely based on self-assessments from teachers, which were collected either through interviews or questionnaires. Because of this, the validity of findings by Donnelly (2006) and MacDonald (2001) that teacher development programmes yielded positive impacts is limited.

Coffey and Gibbs (2000) and Gibbs and Coffey (2004) took these studies a step further by undertaking quantitative research that was centred on students' opinion on their instructors' teaching. In their first study, the authors collected and analysed data from 302 matched pairs of student responses providing feedback on seventy-two teachers from nine institutions in the UK. Later, they conducted an extensive study at twenty-two universities in eight countries. However, the study's methodology showed important limitations. Indeed, while researchers found that teachers having undergone training received the best ratings from their students, they could not attribute these positive results to development programmes themselves, or state whether other factors, for example teachers' institutions, had brought about these results.

Norton et al. (2005) examined the effects of teacher development programmes using a quantitative survey that was informed by teachers' opinions. The authors analyzed questionnaires from two groups of university teachers from one British institution, the first of which was composed by fifty teachers who had taken a programme on teaching and learning in HE, and the second of which was made up of twenty-two teachers who had not undergone training. Contrarily to studies by Donnelly (2006) and MacDonald (2001), this study did not ask teachers how they felt they changed as a result of teacher development programmes. Instead, the study compared the beliefs and intentions of two groups of teachers, with the assumption that those having undergone training would view teaching as the facilitation of learning, rather than as simple transmission of knowledge. Studies have confirmed that the way instructors understand teaching is critical in informing their actual teaching practice (Prosser and Trigwell 1999). Therefore this is a valid method for examining effects of teacher-training.

In their study, Postareff, Lindblom-Ylänne, and Nevgi (2007) used both qualitative and quantitative methods. The authors examined the impact of pedagogical training on teachers' approaches to teaching and on their beliefs of self-efficacy. Two hundred teachers from two HE institutions in Finland were divided into four groups according to the extent to which they had undergone teacher-training—from not having gone through any programme at all, to having completed one year or more of such training. The researchers used the Approaches to Teaching Inventory with an additional questionnaire measuring motivational strategies and they also interviewed seventy-five of these teachers. This study advanced the research method by including several control groups; however, it did not consider teachers' practice or students' learning.

Studies by Stes, Coertjens, and Van Petegem (2010) and Stes et al. 2011a, Stes et al. 2011b combine quantitative and qualitative methods to compare the effects on trained teachers with a control group that had not undergone training. Moreover, they tested teachers' capacities before and after having undergone training to assess the effectiveness of teacher development programmes. Aside from this, the researchers considered the link between the performance of individual students and the extent to which their teachers had gone through a teacher development programme in assessing these programmes' impact.

Indeed, there are many challenges in controlling all possible variables when conducting such research. The methods used in this study were quite rigorous, and so the results obtained raised important considerations on the limitations of quantitative methods. Quantitative methods only allow researchers to receive answers to predefined questions; and these questions cannot be modified or added to. Also, when using quantitative methods, informants have little opportunity to express their own perceptions on what they find to be important.

Ho 1998, Ho 2000 used a research design similar to Stes, Coertjens, and Van Petegem (2010) and Stes et al. 2011a, Stes et al. 2011b; however, she traced the impact of teacher development on both teachers and their students. Ho interviewed twenty-one participants of a programme at the University of Hong Kong before and after completing the programme, and analysed teachers' reflective diaries. Quantitative data were collected from these teachers' students over a two-year period, and four teachers who had never undergone a teacher development programme were included as a control group. Contrary to studies conducted by Stes et al. 2011a, Stes et al. 2011b, Ho measured the impact of the training programme on students two years after it was completed, rather than after three months.

Similar studies that examine the impact of training in the longer term are, however, rare. In 2007 Stes, Clement, and Van Petegem found that two years after finishing the programme, respondents still referred to the programme as a means of explaining changes in their day-to-day teaching practice. However, in this study these results were solely derived from teachers' self-assessments, and the impact on students was not examined (Stes, Clement, and Van Petegem 2007).

Examples of research mentioned earlier illustrate that studies which go further than to rely on teachers' self-assessments face severe obstacles in terms of their design. Their samples are small, because only a relatively small number of teachers usually participate in a given training programme at a time. Moreover, samples are based on the self-selection of participants because participation in research, just like participation in teacher development programmes, is voluntary. As these programmes are relatively new, they are often weak at supporting teachers in implementing newly developed knowledge and skills in practice. This makes it difficult to measure the programme effectiveness in terms of student learning (Stes et al. 2010).

Researchers try to overcome these obstacles in different ways. Some conduct interviews with directors of schools and mentors to gather information about teachers' behaviour (Smith 2004), while others rely on materials produced by teachers having gone through the programme, such as portfolios (McLean and Bullard 2000; Groom and Maunonen-Eskelinen 2006) or their letters to the programme team (Smith 2004). Some use a combination of these methods of data collection to obtain a more comprehensive picture (Smith 2004). This is consistent with Berk's recommendation to use more objective strategies to measure programme effects, including, among others, peer-to-peer class observations, student interviews, student performance assessments, alumni and employer ratings as well as teaching scholarship and teaching awards (Berk 2005). Even if some measures can be difficult to carry out, including alumni and employer ratings, others can be carried out quite feasibly, for example peer-to-peer class observations or teacher assessments on the difference in students' results in relation to changes in their own teaching.

Areas of Consensus or Near-Consensus: Teacher Development Programmes Yield Positive Impacts

Most publications that measure factors beyond teachers' self-assessment suggest that instructional development programmes yield positive effects. According to a study by Gibbs and Coffey (2000), students' ratings of their teachers, as part of the Student Evaluation of Educational Quality (SEEQ) questionnaire, showed considerable improvements in scores on four of the six scales for teachers having gone through one semester of two- and threesemester-long training programmes. These four scales included learning, enthusiasm, organisation, and rapport with students. In a larger study, the authors detected a range of positive changes in t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Routledge Research in Education
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 What We Know and Fail to Know about the Impact of Teacher Development
• Part I Training for What? Instructional Development for Graduate Students
• Part II Using Programme Assessments to Improve Programme Design
• Part III Top-Down Determinants of Success in Instructional Development Programmes
• Part IV Theorizing about Instructional Development
• Contributors
• Index