Educational and Student Policy

Pedagogic support - the ways forward?

Report of LTS Lunch 9: Monday 11 December, 2006

This report relates to the talk given by Research Associate Alice Sheridan at the LTS Lunch on Monday 11 December. Alice's full project report will be presented to the General Board in March, and an Executive Summary will subsequently be published in Reporter.

Professor Melveena McKendrick, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education, introduced the speaker who discussed the methodology and findings of a year-long project to scope the University's pedagogic support needs.

Purpose and definition of the scoping project

The project was established in order to identify what University and College Teaching Officers consider to be their pedagogic support needs and to recommend how best the University could meet those needs.

Pedagogic support was defined as factors which help Teaching Officers to carry out their educational role effectively. These factors included discipline knowledge, motivation and enthusiasm, and communication skills. In addition, since the 1990s, the UK HE sector has recognised the importance of understanding pedagogic knowledge which encompasses an understanding of the learning process. Concurrently, technical, financial and administrative back-up have also become increasingly significant, and often resource-intensive, constituents of pedagogic support.

Methodology

Alice Sheridan met 20 key University teaching figures and received survey responses from 227 randomly selected University and College Teaching Officers. Subsequently, discussion groups (33 participants) were organised around the main themes which emerged from the surveys.

Five Schools were evenly represented. However, the School of Clinical Medicine tends to work more with the NHS and medical practitioners to provide their pedagogic support. Analysis of respondents by rank and gender revealed that they were broadly representative of the University population.

Findings

Prompted by the demand for variable levels of support Alice devised a pedagogic support needs pyramid (figure c), which was inspired by Maslow's needs hierarchy (figure b).

According to Maslow's hierarchy, a particular need normally only becomes important once those lower in the pyramid are satisfied. The pyramid reflects the view that University and College Teaching Officers often consider administrative and technical support to be their most pressing requirement and that other factors, such as belonging to a community of teachers, reward, and creativity, only become important (successively) after this need has been fulfilled.

Administrative and technical support

More time was one of the most pressing needs identified by Teaching Officers who felt that the growth in bureaucracy and administrative burdens, as well as pressures from the RAE, made it increasingly difficult to devote as much time as they would like to the development of their teaching.

Respondents suggested that more effective administrative support could ease this pressure and aid academics in carrying out their educational duties. Such support staff would have the technical skills necessary to allow academics to delegate work to them i.e. creating online resources. Therefore, in this context IT proficient assistants are needed or, where funds allow, work could be outsourced.

Some respondents envied the US model whereby each academic has a dedicated Teaching Assistant (TA). The TA's academic knowledge enables them to carry out basic teaching responsibilities e.g. creating suitable and effective web learning tools and correcting appropriate level examinations.

It was suggested by respondents that academics in Cambridge could delegate more of their basic responsibilities to graduate students although opinions about what constitutes an appropriate level of delegation varied among the Schools.

Belonging to a teaching community

Referring to Lave and Wenger's theory of 'communities of practice' (1991) Alice suggested that research competence alone does not qualify an academic for membership of a teaching community. Recently mandatory training programmes have been introduced for new lecturers to equip them with pedagogic skills and knowledge. Alice argued that a more comprehensive knowledge of pedagogy would enable lecturers to vary their teaching methods in response to the students' learning needs.

The research uncovered examples where a strong advocate of pedagogy had established an enduring teaching and learning culture in their Department or Faculty. This culture enhanced personal satisfaction and peer support amongst Teaching Officers. However, without such leadership some academics and administrators considered knowledge of pedagogy and the creation of a teaching community to be less desirable.

Reward

Attendees expressed surprise that only 38% of the Teaching Officers surveyed wanted a reduced teaching load. There was a marked gender difference in attitudes towards recognising the value of teaching with female respondents, who tended to teach more, wanting their investment in teaching to be valued by the University of Cambridge.

Alice highlighted the discrepancy between professional and career development whereby teaching excellence does not lead to the ultimate academic reward i.e. a Chair. She noted that Senior Lectureships had been introduced as a way of overcoming this. The inequality between rewards for research and teaching was recognised as an international problem.

Creativity

Academia is, by nature, a creative profession with academics always innovating and adapting both in their research and teaching. However, the research revealed a tension between the support requirements for creating new and innovative courses and delivery methods and the perception that the University favours resource neutrality and somewhat traditional examination structures.

Benchmarking, or specifying minimum expected standards, could also stifle creativity; for example, academics have to state learning outcomes at the start of the course rather than letting students' learning evolve organically.

Recommendations for the way forward

The model which Alice will propose in her report to the General Board is based on the following acronym:

1. Generative - supporting academics in bidding for funding for teaching and learning. This would enable them to pursue creative ideas.
2. Educator fronted and research-informed. Academics would have access to research-active educationalists who specialise in HE pedagogy.
3. Nurturant - building on the academics' emergent ideas using current research.
4. Ownership - protecting Intellectual Property Rights and enabling academics to determine how they share their ideas and to what degree they collaborate with other parties.
5. Monitoring administrative and technical support. An ongoing awareness of time and resource allocation to administrative and technical requirements should be included in policy documents.
6. Engendering a reward system. Ongoing research into perceptions of investment in the educational role need to be established and the results included in policy documents.

This model combines the following three constituents: research outcomes, the Cambridge context, and national funding issues.