After achieving and demonstrating initial competence in teaching there are a number of proven ways to secure continuing career development. In broad terms these might include some or all of the following:
• Gaining experience, confidence and competence across a wider repertoire of teaching, learning and assessment methods at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
• Leading the design and integration of larger ‘units’ of learning, for example, clusters or sequences of modules across semesters; taking responsibility for the overall quality of a substantial part or the whole of a course programme.
• Leading or managing curriculum innovation, both to enhance the student experience and to provide a ‘market advantage’ to the institution, faculty or department.
• Securing small institutional grants and competitive national funding for developmental projects or trialling of leading-edge practice. Success of this kind develops project management and leadership capabilities as well as generating academic outputs for dissemination.
• Gaining internal teaching awards or similar external recognition such as a National Teaching Fellowship or HEA Senior Fellow status.
• Providing support, coaching and mentoring to colleagues and external, teaching- related consultancy or training to other institutions nationally and internationally.
Helping to deliver a formal postgraduate teaching programme for new staff is an excellent way of sharing expertise and contributing to the next generation of teachers.
• Building a base of expertise as an external examiner, including chairing examination boards. Undertaking this kind of role exposes individuals to the fine-grained workings of a range of other institutions and helps develop more rounded judgement about teaching quality and standards.
• Significant responsibility within a graduate school.
• Contributing to the activities of, or taking a formal role in, appropriate national committees, learned societies and HEA Subject Centres.
• Contributing to the accreditation and CPD activities of professional, regulatory and statutory bodies. Engagement of this kind provides extensive opportunities for subject/professionally specific CPD and may be particularly relevant to career 490 ❘ Enhancing personal practice
progression in areas such as law, medicine, dentistry and social work which are regulated through a ‘licence to practise’.
• Participating in internal subject reviews and QAA academic reviews and institutional audit activities.
• Undertaking further formal and accredited study to update, extend or replace initial qualifications. This may be particularly relevant where individuals feel they have ‘hit a ceiling’, choose to change roles or are required by their institution to add new skills to existing expertise (see Case study 3).
• Engaging in teaching-related scholarship, research and editorial activity of a generic and/or disciplinary nature.
Individuals who can demonstrate a convincing profile across most of the above categories and who additionally evidence commitment to reflection and continuous professional improvement should be well placed to respond to promotion criteria for senior
‘teaching-focused’ posts irrespective of institutional mission or their own teaching specialism.
A strategic decision at Coventry to make ‘third-stream’ activities the second major activity in the university led to the revision of academic contracts to include significant amounts of such activity. The opportunity was taken to review and revise an existing Master ’s programme that had previously focused solely on teaching and learning. New modules were introduced. Developing an Applied Research Profile offered an opportunity for participants to take stock of their expertise, to learn new skills and to plan their future applied research.
The Centre for the Study of HE (CSHE) worked closely with the university’s applied research support staff in order to offer the programme. A module in Academic Leadership was designed to complement existing non-certificated provision offered by human resources. The module focused on issues that were specific to leadership in an academic setting, including distributed leadership, collegiality and interdisciplinarity. An existing module, Perspectives on Professional Practice, was revised to provide a core experience for participants.
Each module was made available on both a stand-alone basis and as part of a full Master ’s award. These changes, which brought provision into alignment with the institution’s strategic plan, together with more focused and energetic marketing, have meant that Coventry staff participation in the Master’s provision has increased considerably.
(Prof Paul Blackmore, now King’s College London, and Dr Andrew Rothwell, Coventry University)
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Case study 3: A Master’s award at Coventry University
What is it to be scholarly, what is it to be competent?
Demonstrable personal competence in teaching and the production of a range of appropriate scholarly outputs are interrelated and indispensable elements of appointment to a senior ‘teaching excellence’ post. Indeed, understanding the myriad connections and syntheses between ‘doing’ teaching and concepts derived from theoretical frameworks for learning and other professional literature lies at the heart of what it is ‘to profess’ and to earn the title ‘professor’ or ‘professorial fellow’. It is this kind of praxis which promotion procedures attempt to interrogate.
It might be argued further that scholarship is the vehicle which draws the tacit knowledge (Polanyi, 1958) of excellent teachers into the public domain and, hence, makes it available to other practitioners. Moreover, scholarship is the means whereby
‘reputation’ is built and ‘esteem’ validated. It is not surprising therefore that promotion boards give it close attention, nor that valid forms of scholarship are now more frequently interpreted as ‘action- ‘ or ‘policy-based’ as opposed to discovery-led ‘blue sky’ research.
It would seem that Boyer’s (1990) plea for a reconsidered view of scholarship and new respect for a ‘scholarship of applications and teaching’ has been not only heard but enshrined in the promotion criteria of the most forward-looking HEIs.
Activities associated with reflection, action learning and action research are now well documented (see Chapter 28) and widely accepted as precursors of praxis, leading to continuing professional development.
Numerous studies of ‘professionals’ trace the development of practitioners from novice to expert, and Case study 4 provides an interesting account of one such journey and gives insight into the kind of profile presented for promotion to a ‘pedagogic’ Chair.
Progression in a practice-based activity such as university-level teaching has been described as passing through a number of stages (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1986). Level 1, the novice stage, is characterised by adherence to taught rules and little discretionary judgement; level 2, the advanced beginner, takes more account of the global characteristics of situations but tends to treat all aspects and attributes as having equal importance.
At level 3 the practitioner is considered competent, is beginning to see actions as part of longer-term goals, and is able to undertake conscious and deliberate planning and perform standardised or routine procedures. At level 4, that of proficiency, situations are seen more holistically, important aspects are more readily recognised, decision-making is less laboured and guiding axioms can be interpreted differently according to situation.
The expert, the level 5 practitioner, no longer relies on rules and guidelines and has an intuitive grasp of situations based on deep understanding, knows what is possible, and only uses analytic approaches in novel situations or when new problems occur. Thus the expert stage is characterised by implicit and unconscious practice. For the experienced mid-career teacher in higher education, and particularly for those applying for promotion via the learning and teaching route, much practice will be at levels four and five. This type and level of accomplishment need to be evidenced in the documentation presented for progression to a promoted post and triangulated with data derived from students, direct peer observation and other metrics.
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Professor Mick Healey holds a Chair in Geographical Education at the University of Gloucestershire. His main interests include links between research and teaching, learning styles, active and enquiry-based learning, and promoting the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Mick sees his career since 1980, as falling into two overlapping stages, each about 15 or so years long. The first phase was dedicated to working as an economic geographer. During this period he developed a reasonable publication record, including about 50 articles and chapters, four edited books, a textbook and a number of consultancy reports. Despite this profile he felt he was never going to develop more than a modest reputation as an economic geographer. ‘I owe in large part, my chair, my National Teaching Fellowship, and my opportunity to visit universities around the world, to my involvement with the scholarship of teaching and learning’, says Professor Healey. However, it was not until his mid- career that he engaged seriously with this particular aspect of academic activity.
In the early 1990s, ‘My interest in teaching geography led me to start investigating aspects of my practice, I gave a few conference presentations and wrote a few articles and within a few years I became a joint editor of the Journal of Geography in Higher Education.’ But perhaps the key event was winning one of the first Fund for Development in Teaching and Learning projects in 1996, which led to directing the Geography Discipline Network and ultimately laid the foundation for the University of Gloucestershire’s successful bid for a Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL)in 2005.
The other key milestone in Mick’s career came in 2000 when he was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship. His project was concerned with embedding the scholarship of teaching and learning in disciplines and institutions, a ‘hugely overambitious project,’ he now admits, ‘but it did allow me to go and discuss this kind of scholarship with people in many different parts of the world.’ Mick has subsequently exploited his international network to collect examples of interesting teaching and learning practices, which he uses to inform the many workshops, keynotes and consultancies he presents and undertakes. Since 1995 he has delivered over 250 educational workshops, seminars and conference presentations in Australasia, mainland Europe and North America, as well as the UK. He has also written and edited over 100 papers, chapters, books and guides on various aspects of teaching and learning in higher education.
He talks enthusiastically about the scholarship of teaching and learning and says that ‘one of the most enjoyable things is working with like-minded colleagues on a project’. He particularly values discipline-based approaches, but notes that
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Case study 4: Extending experience and building expertise: a personal account
though he started work as a geographer, nowadays he is more frequently involved with research and development projects spanning all disciplines. He gives much credit in this aspect of the development of his career to working collaboratively with a mentor, who is also a colleague and co-author, and says,
‘I wouldn’t be where I am now without his help and support.’
(Professor Mick Healey, in conversation with Stephanie Marshall)
For many institutions, the evidence of teaching expertise is required in the form of a teaching portfolio. Teaching portfolios have been written about extensively over the years (Fry and Ketteridge, 2003) and Case study 5 provides an example of the long-established use of teaching portfolios for tenure and promotion purposes from McGill University.
Interest in teaching portfolios first emerged in Canada in the 1970s, with the idea developed and promoted by the Canadian Association of University Teachers.
Since then, portfolio use has become relatively commonplace throughout North America. McGill University, a research-intensive university in Montreal, has had a portfolio-related policy in place since 1994 when its Senate approved the requirement of a teaching portfolio for all promotion and tenure decisions.
Initially, basic requirements were outlined by the university, but by 1997, Faculties had begun developing specific protocols for portfolios that best represented the particular teaching demands of their own disciplines. Although university policy has subsequently been reviewed and refined, the basic conception remains largely the same, namely a teaching portfolio is required for any tenure and promotion decision, including (1) promotion to the rank of full professor, and (2) hiring with tenure from outside McGill.
The portfolio includes a teaching statement (five to ten pages) plus appendices of no more than 30 pages. The statement addresses: (1) an individual’s teaching approach or philosophy, (2) their teaching responsibilities, (3) evidence of teaching effectiveness, and (4) teaching development activities. A full description of the relevant policies and portfolio may be found in the references (under McGill University). Policy implementation was secured with developmental support from the teaching development unit which worked with heads of departments to help define criteria for interpreting and assessing teaching portfolios. All orientations for new academics include information about the requirement. The development unit regularly offers workshops on creating and maintaining teaching portfolios; these workshops include a panel of individuals who review 494 ❘ Enhancing personal practice
Case study 5: Use of teaching portfolios for tenure and promotion at McGill University, Montreal
dossiers for tenure and promotion. The unit also works with individuals who request help in constructing such portfolios. At this point, the policy has become embedded in university practices.
(Professor Lynne MacAlpine, McGill University, Montreal)