Memorandum 34
Submission from the Staff and Educational
Development Association
"STUDENTS AND
UNIVERSITIES"
Summary
A. The introduction of professional pedagogic
development programmes for new staff was important and has been
successfully implemented across the sector.
B. The sector now needs to invest heavily in
maintaining the professional development of those new staff, and
in supporting the professional pedagogic development of established
staff. This is an urgent priority.
C. The professional pedagogic development of
middle and senior managers—those who manage and lead the
main teaching programmes and the innovation and enhancement work—has
been neglected. This has to change.
D. The effects of the RAE have severely damaged
the quality of student learning, by delaying and inhibiting the
growth of a scholarly approach to researching teaching and learning
and the development of the infrastructure required to successfully
implement change, enhancement and reform.
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 The Staff and Educational Development
Association welcomes the opportunity to make a submission to this
timely enquiry, especially focussing on the balance between teaching
and research.
1.2 SEDA's mission is "supporting and leading
educational change". It is the professional association for
staff and educational developers in the UK, promoting innovation
and good practice in higher education.
2. ABOUT SEDA
2.1 SEDA's work is organised around six
values:
1. An understanding of how people learn
2. Scholarship, professionalism and ethical practice
3. Working in and developing learning communities
4. Working effectively with diversity and promoting
inclusivity
5. Continuing reflection on professional practice
6. Developing people and processes
2.2 Through its Fellowship and Associate
Fellowship schemes SEDA provides accreditation for people involved
in academic staff and educational development in higher education,
both in the UK and internationally. The schemes are for staff
who help lecturers, support staff and their institutions to develop
and enhance the quality of the student learning experience. SEDA
also has development programmes for both new and established staff
in educational development.
2.3 SEDA established the Teacher Accreditation
Scheme which then accredited courses and programmes such as the
Postgraduate Certificates in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education.
They were described in the Dearing Report of 1997 as the basis
on which professional qualification for teachers should be built
and are now in place in almost every HEI in the UK. They are taken
in the main by new or inexperienced staff, and in various forms
enable them to reach Standard 2 of the National Standards Framework.
2.4 SEDA has gone on to create the Professional
Development Framework, through which institutions gain recognition
for their professional development programmes and the individuals
who complete them. SEDA has recognised a wide range of these programmes,
covering many aspects of the professional work of all staff in
higher education. At present it offers 16 awards and has recognised
19 institutions which are running 38 programmes. SEDA is engaged
in the active development of this area of its work.
3. PROPOSITIONS
3.1 SEDA believes that teaching and supporting
student learning in Higher Education is a profession in its own
right. As most practitioners in Higher Education are already members
of a profession, we propose the concept of "the dual professional".
We believe that every member of a profession has a responsibility
to contribute to the future of that profession, whether through
research, teaching or other means. We believe it is essential
for the future of UK Higher Education that a substantial proportion
of those who work within it should fully engage in scholarly pedagogic
professional development.
3.2 SEDA believes that all students have the
right to be taught well and
welcomes the sustained investment in recent years
into programmes for the initial preparation of teachers and others.
Further such investment is essential to build capacity.
3.3 However, SEDA is also concerned with
the long-term professional, scholarly pedagogic development of
all those established staff who teach and support students' learning.
At present too low a priority is given to this, it suffers from
a lack of recognition, arrangements for its support are fragmented
and it requires more significant investment. SEDA believes this
is a major challenge for the sector. Greater effort in this area
is essential for the successful implementation of further change
and reform.
3.4 SEDA believes that a second major challenge
is the professional pedagogic development of all those who lead
and manage teaching staff and who design and implement change
and innovation in teaching, learning, assessment and the curriculum.
3.5 SEDA believes its Professional Development
Framework, which has at its heart the enhancement of the student
experience, provides one means by which such development can be
structured, measured and quality assured. It enables the sector
to meet the requirements of all three levels of the UK Professional
Standards Framework.
3.6 SEDA also believes that it is essential
that the sector swiftly develops both an academic route (Certificate,
Diploma, Masters, PhD) and a professional route to pedagogic qualification.
SEDA is heartened by the expansion of the DProf and the EdD awards
in HE, which successfully combine academic and professional development.
3.7 However, SEDA also believes the introduction
at this time of compulsory qualification and registration for
established teaching staff in HE would be counter-productive.
There is still much more the sector can do through the implementation
of good promotion and reward structures. At present a voluntary
strategy will be far more effective than one driven by legislation.
The target must be that established teaching staff achieve Standard
2 of the UK Professional Standards Framework.
3.8 SEDA's final proposition is that that
the necessary development of a scholarly approach to pedagogy
challenges the existing model of quality assurance, which depends
heavily upon peer review. This is already under challenge as the
sector diversifies. SEDA thinks it is essential that the culture
of scholarly, professional pedagogic development should inform
the quality assurance process, for example in the selection and
preparation of discipline-based reviewers and especially of external
examiners. SEDA assumes it is reasonable to expect external examiners
to be qualified, and has developed an award within its Professional
Development Framework for this purpose.
4. SPECIFIC RESPONSES
4.1 Level of funding:
SEDA, along with many other agencies in the
sector, believes that well-funded higher education is essential
both for individual students and for general benefit to the economy
and society. However, as that unit of resource has declined since
the 1970s, it is SEDA's members who have been at the forefront
of the work to maintain quality, while wholeheartedly welcoming
the significant increase in student numbers. That long process
of change has revealed the need to move away from traditional
and in many ways inappropriate pedagogies towards models of learning
more suited to today and the future. The development of a scholarly
approach to pedagogy has enabled professionals more effectively
to evaluate costs against the quality of learning and outcomes,
and will enable them in the future to make best use of resources.
4.2 Balance between teaching and research:
The effect of the funding model derived from the
Research Selectivity (now Assessment) Exercise since 1986 has
had a real and damaging impact on the quality of the student experience.
In the face of elements such as prestige, fear, career advancement
and money it has been hard to hold the line that educating students
and caring for their intellectual and personal growth is one of
the noblest and highest callings in a civilised society.
The deleterious effects of the RAE has penetrated
throughout the system and diverted even specifically teaching-focussed
institutions. The level of funding is not the issue—it is
the flexibility of research funding and the fixed nature of teaching
funding which causes the imbalance. It is especially grievous
that research into pedagogy has been belittled and that committed
subject teachers have found it impossible to develop an equivalence
either in their generic or discipline-based pedagogic research
to their discipline-based research.
4.3 Financing of innovation:
Much of the financing of innovation has been less
efficient that it could have been through the absence of a scholarly
pedagogic culture able to incorporate project outputs in a systematic
and managed way. In many universities the current analysis is
that the core teaching processes are working well, the prestige
of the institution is high, and innovation is an enhancement activity
rather than the core of essential reform. In these places the
claim is made that modest incremental improvement will be sufficient
to guarantee high quality. SEDA's view is that a more critical
approach is required, and that funding both to devise and then
embed innovation is a necessary part of a bigger package of simultaneous
developments.
4.4 Teaching/research integration:
Too many institutions have diverted energy and funding
into a thin interpretation of this issue—namely that as
long as its staff keep abreast of the latest developments they
can teach them to their students. An associated development has
been the growth in research-led universities of a substantial
amount of student-tutor interaction being carried by postgraduates
(many of whom have attained Standard One of the UK Professional
Standards Framework by engages with elements of the PG Certificate
courses described in 2.3). A more imaginative development, which
SEDA supports, has been the incorporation of research activities
and processes within undergraduate study Students learning in
"research mode" should be central to the curriculum.We
endorse the view, recently outlined by Healey and Jenkins (in
the University & College Union Newsletter, October 2008),
that "all undergraduate students in all higher education
institutions should experience learning through and about research."
4.5 Teaching provision and facilities:
Many institutions, buildings, rooms and spaces
have been built to deliver a range of pedagogies that are becoming
progressively less appropriate. SEDA would strongly urge future
investment to be in flexible and adaptable provision, supporting
the development of social learning spaces which are more suitable
for the student centred learning approaches in which students
become producers and not just consumers of knowledge. There is
no doubt that for some staff the rigidity of the provision and
the assumptions that go with it make significant educational change
harder than it needs to be.
4.6 Methods of assessing excellence in teaching:
The significant educational research in the last
20 years has been into the quality of student learning, and away
from more traditional assumptions about the concept of the excellent
teacher. It has revealed in growing detail how the different elements
of the programme interact with each other and emphasised issues
of programme design, assessment and outcomes, revealing the vital
importance of well-managed course teams which themselves include
many roles beyond simply that of the lecturer. While recognising
the value of some of the recent steps to identify and reward individual
excellence, SEDA expects in the next few years the emphasis will
move towards the excellence displayed by schools, departments
and programme teams, incorporating such features as cooperation,
scholarly enquiry and evaluation, and leadership.
In terms of promotion and reward, while many HEIs
have developed notions of equivalence between teaching and research
in their procedures, embedding these in practice has been a slow
process, and today the picture is patchy across the sector. While
staff in a few institutions are reasonably confident that a commitment
to developing their teaching will benefit their careers to the
highest level, many are still hesitant and sceptical. In some
institutions, choosing the teaching route is seen as a public
acknowledgement of the weakness of their research status. Those
who wholeheartedly choose the teaching route more frequently speak
of the personal satisfaction of working with students and becoming
progressively more professional in one of the great vocations.
5. ENDORSEMENTS
5.1 SEDA has had sight of, and endorses,
the submission from Professor Lewis Elton.
5.2 Degree classification and plagiarism.
SEDA has chosen to confine its comments to the Committee's questions
about the balance between teaching and research. However, SEDA
wishes to stress that the outcomes of the enquiry into degree
classifications and plagiarism will make significant changes to
assessment processes, therefore to curriculum design, teaching
and learning activities and the quality of student learning. This
alone will require a major investment in the professional pedagogic
development of established staff to support the changes which
are long overdue. SEDA wishes to endorse the approach taken by
the Assessment Standards Knowledge exchange (a Centre of Excellence
for Teaching and Learning) in its "Assessment Standards:
A Manifesto for Change".
December 2008
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