Promoting excellence in learning and teaching

1. Promoting excellence in learning and teaching Cork IT Dr Sally Brown May 25th 2012 http://sally-brown.net Emeritus Professor, Leeds Metropolitan University, Adjunct professor, University of the Sunshine Coast, Central Queensland and James Cook University Queensland. Visiting Professor: University of Plymouth and Liverpool John Moores University.

2. The context in which we are working • Global competition for students in the Anglophone world; • Lean regimes with an emphasis on core business; • Challenges and opportunities associated with Technology-Enhanced Learning; • Central importance of student retention (balanced with maintaining quality); • Balancing Research, Assessment, Learning and Teaching; • Ambitions to work smarter rather than harder.

3. The role of the university in the coming decades • Providing creative, powerful and positive ways of supporting student learning; • Recognising and accrediting student achievement (not necessarily based on HEIs own programmes, diversity in type, scope, timing and methodologies); • Supporting student engagement with HEIs; • Significantly less emphasis on content delivery; • Stronger focus on supporting information literacies.

4. What are students getting like? • More value-conscious (expecting much more for their money); • More litigious and demanding and less tolerant of poor teaching; • Students as customers/clients? • Blurred distinction between part-time and full-time students; • More diverse by background, capability and experience; • Having increased expectations of diverse kinds of support and personalised learning.

5. How do we know if we are offering excellent teaching? • Students are satisfied, learn well, achieve highly and have fulfilling learning experiences; • Staff are satisfied, motivated and find their workloads manageable; • Quality Assurers and Professional and Subject bodies like what we do and have no complaints about systems and processes; • University managers are confident that the student experience offered is of high quality (and deal with few complaints).

6. What kinds of interventions can foster excellent teaching? • Promotion and reward systems that recognise the importance of teaching; • Identifying outstanding teachers and using them as advocates for commitment to teaching; • A culture of scholarship of teaching, that encourages evidence-based dissemination of good practice; • Dialogues around what makes for excellent teaching, particularly those associated with peer observation systems.

7. Characteristics of excellent university teachers: task • Knows subject material thoroughly. • Adopts a scholarly approach to the practice of teaching. • Is reflective and regularly reviews own practice. • Is well organised and plans curriculum effectively. • Is passionate about teaching. • Has a student-centred orientation to teaching. • Regularly reviews innovations in learning and teaching and tries out ones relevant to own context. • Ensures that assessment practices are fit for purpose and contribute to learning. • Demonstrates empathy and emotional intelligence.

8. Towards excellence: improving curriculum delivery: we can... • Explore how we can best use the first block of the first semester to induct students into good study patterns and practices to enhance learning and improve retention (Yorke 2009); • Reconsider the kinds of activities students engage with to maximise learning by doing; • Rethink the way in which we use lecture periods to include activity as well as delivery; • Consider how we can best make use of technologies to support learning.

9. What’s important to do in the first six week block? • Enable them to feel part of a cohort rather than a number on a list; • Help students acclimatise to the new learning context in which they find themselves; • Familiarise them with the language and culture of the subject area they are studying (Northedge, 2003); • Foster the information literacy and other skills that students will need to succeed; • Guide them on where to go for help as necessary.

10. Delivering content….. • is less like delivering a parcel (the postman model) and more like delivering a baby (the midwife model). • University staff can advise, guide, intervene when things so wrong, but in the end only the student can bring learning into life!! • Content can be gleaned from many sources (e.g. MIT and our UK Open University are putting more and more content into open access areas for example).

11. What should we consign to the rubbish chute of history (discuss)? • Classrooms containing fixed PCs ? • Electronic whiteboards other than for tiny groups of students? • Death by PowerPoint, linear approaches to use of presentations, the 6-per-page handout? • Chalk and blackboards? • Sixty-minute delivery-only lectures?

12. The importance of assessment for learning • Assessment can be a powerful driver for learning when well designed and effectively implemented; • But “Students can escape bad teaching, they can’t escape bad assessment” (Boud, 1995); • We need good systems for the management and tracking of student assessment (e.g. Taskstream AMS); • Timely, formative feedback is crucial so students can judge the quality of their own work. (Sadler, 1998).

13. Assessment for Learning: see http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/central/ar/academy/cetl_afl/ • Emphasises authenticity and complexity in the content and methods of assessment rather than reproduction of knowledge and reductive measurement. • Uses high-stakes summative assessment rigorously but sparingly rather than as the main driver for learning. • Offers students extensive opportunities to engage in the kinds of tasks that develop and demonstrate their learning, thus building their confidence and capabilities before they are summatively assessed. • Is rich in feedback derived from formal mechanisms e.g. tutor comments on assignments, student self-review logs. • Is rich in informal feedback e.g. peer review of draft writing, collaborative project work, which provides students with a continuous flow of feedback on ‘how they are doing’. • Develops students’ abilities to direct their own learning, evaluate their own progress and attainments and support the learning of others. (my emphasis)

14. Good feedback practice: (after Nicol) • Helps clarify what good performance is (goals, criteria, expected standards); • Facilitates the development of self-assessment (reflection) in learning; • Delivers high quality information to students about their learning; • Encourages teacher and peer dialogue around learning; • Encourages positive motivational beliefs and self-esteem; • Provides opportunities to close the gap between current and desired performance; • Provides information to teachers that can be used to help shape the teaching. (Nicol and Macfarlane Dick) (my emphasis)

15. The lecture: a recipe for disaster • Continuous non-stop delivery from the podium (particularly if reading from a prepared script); • Picking on random students to ‘test their mettle’; • Over-use of a single style of PowerPoint delivery, with handouts that all look the same; • Each session week on week following the same format; • Tell bad/insensitive jokes; • Behave as if students aren't there.

16. What can we do in lectures rather than talk flat out? • Provide three 15 minute inputs (or five eight minute ones or whatever) with interactive tasks to enable them to learn by doing; • Use clickers, quizzes, videos, role plays, short tests, in-seat mini discussions, periods of silent reflection, questions to and from students, short reading tasks and other means of getting them to interact; • Use some classroom time to advance brief and give class feedback on assignments; • Bring material alive with passion and enthusiasm.

17. Technology enhanced learning: we can... • Use more Computer-Based Assessment (stop marking, start assessing!), • Encourage productive course-related discussion in formal and informal social learning spaces, • Provide links to electronic readings with guidance on what to do with them: • Make better use of Open Educational Resources and Re-usable Learning Objects; • Communicate with students via mobile phones, Podcasting, SMS et al rather than just letters, university email addresses and notice boards; • Offer some level of personalised approaches to learning and assessment.

18. Encourage autonomous and shared learning • Let students loose on source material to find their own way around it; • Welcome their findings, while encouraging them appropriately to evaluate what they find; • Acknowledge what students bring to class from their prior formal and informal learning; • Encourage them to use their peers as valuable resources from whom they can learn much;

19. What improvements can we make to assessment practices? We need to: • Review our diet of assessment to ensure that we are not over-assessing, repeatedly assessing the same skills, rewarding risky behaviour like guessing what will come up; • Review the programme as a whole to make sure assessments don’t bunch together, putting unnecessary pressure on students and the staff who are doing the marking; • Consider how assessment can prompt the kinds of learning behaviours we would wish to see (rather than reproduction, plagiarism, cutting and pasting etc). • Rethink what exams and essays actually look like.

20. Conclusions • Working towards excellence, the enhancements we make to improve the student experience need to be convincing, strategic and evidence-based; • It is possible to make significant improvements, but it needs ownership by staff at every level of the organisation; • Strategic approaches aren’t worth a fig if individual staff don’t embrace the need to improve things; • Doing the same things we have always done in the same way we have always done them is doomed to failure.

21. References & further reading Biggs, J. (2003) Teaching for Quality Learning at University, Buckingham: SRHE & Open University Press. Bristol University Characteristics of excellent teaching http://www.bris.ac.uk/esu/academicdevelopment/prizes/excellentteacher.html Brown, S. Rust, C. & Gibbs, G. (1994) Strategies for Diversifying Assessment, Oxford Centre for Staff Development. Browne, J. (2010) Securing a sustainable future for higher education www.independent.gov.uk/browne-report. Brown, S. and Denton, S. (2010) Leading the University Beyond Bureaucracy, in A practical guide to University and College management (Eds. Denton, S. and Brown, S.) New York and London: Routledge. Brown, S. (2012) Managing change in universities: a Sisyphean task, Quality in Higher Education, Volume 18 number 1. Brown, S. (2011) Bringing about positive change in the higher education student experience: a case study, Quality Assurance in Education, Volume 19 Number 3 p 195-207. Carroll, J. and Ryan, J. (2005) Teaching International students: improving learning for all, London: Routledge SEDA series.

22. References: 2 Rust, C., Price, M. and O’Donovan, B. (2003) Improving students’ learning by developing their understanding of assessment criteria and processes Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education. 28 (2), 147-164. Race, P. et al (2009) Using peer observation to enhance teaching, Leeds: Leeds Metropolitan University Press. Renfro, W. L. and Morrison, J. L. (1983) Anticipating and managing change in educational organisations, Educational Leadership Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development Roxa, T. and Martensson, K. (2009) Significant conversations and significant networks- exploring the backstage of the teaching arena Studies in Higher EducationVol 34 no 5 pp.547-559 Newton, J. (2003) Implementing an Institution-wide learning and Teaching strategy: lessons in managing change, Studies in Higher Education Vol 28 No 4. Nicol, D. J. and Macfarlane-Dick, D. (2006) Formative assessment and self-regulated learning: A model and seven principles of good feedback practice, Studies in Higher Education, 32(2), 199-218.

23. References 3 Northedge, A. (2003) Enabling participation in academic discourse, Teaching in Higher Education, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2003, pp. 169–180. Peelo, M. and Wareham, T. (eds) (2002) Failing Students in higher education, Buckingham, UK: SRHE/Open University Press. Race, P. (2006) The Lecturers toolkit 3rd edition, London: Routledge. Race, P. and Pickford R. (2007) Making Teaching work: Teaching smarter in post-compulsory education, London: Sage. Rust, C., Price, M. and O’Donovan, B. (2003) Improving students’ learning by developing their understanding of assessment criteria and processes, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education. 28 (2), 147-164. Ryan, J. (2000) A Guide to Teaching International Students, Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development. Sadler, D. R. (1989) Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems, Instructional Science 18, 119-144. Yorke, M. (1999) Leaving Early: Undergraduate Non-completion in Higher Education, London: Routledge.