Context is oftentimes important. For this discussion, I was in a room of early and mid-career university academics with a shared, nascent interest in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). We all worked at a large, research-intensive university where research productivity—as in publications and grants—was seen as more important than high-quality teaching for career progression. And the person who made this statement is a global leader in teaching adults, one not prone to overstating things.
Hmmm.
Pivot
This interaction happened at a point where I was—again—trying to pivot in my higher education career. I was, as is often the case, something of an outlier in the group. Everyone else had a permanent academic appointment at the university: I was a member of the precariat, with a primary non-academic appointment in academic development, as well as some teaching “above load” on top of my day job.
These course-specific contracts were always time-limited and offered no security. As a result, I did my full-time job, and then I taught as well. There was some flexibility in how I integrated this into my time on the clock for the main role, but it was very much extra work. My wages were not awful, so some friends and family queried my choices to do all this “extra” work. I was also keen to be a viable candidate should a suitable permanent academic role become available.
First and foremost, I love teaching: I feel like it’s a way for me to make a better world. I also think that unless an academic developer is doing academic work—hopefully teaching and some form of research—they are limited in how much of a peer they are, when advising or mentoring academics.
Since leaving a post-doc a few years earlier, I had managed some outputs, on my own (including paying for the odd conference) but was now short on data and largely ineligible for acting as a principal investigator as a researcher, since I had no researcher appointment. In the end, participating in the SoTL initiative helped me develop enough competence in SoTL research to design and conduct a study, which led to several outputs including one journal article. Pivot achievement unlocked!
About a year later, the invisible door opened, and I landed that permanent, academic role, more than a decade after finishing my doctorate.
Surely
As an academic developer, one focused on the practice of academic teaching and how to ameliorate it, the “learning more important than teaching” statement gnawed away. Were the workshops, short courses, and mentoring relationships I had been cultivating well-intentioned distractions? We certainly talked about learning, but we were focused on teaching practice.
In fact, every institution at which I have worked (many, thanks to precarity) has been focused on teaching quality metrics. There are a number of data sources to ascertain teaching quality, including:
- Student performance data: monitoring student achievements (i.e. grades), including distributions, median/mean values, and pass rates.
- Student evaluations of teaching: large scale, systematic surveys for students to give feedback on course and teachers.
- Peer review of teaching reports: having a colleague review a multiplicity of elements of another’s teaching practice, including (but not limited to) observations of their teaching.
Each of these in isolation provides a worthwhile, constrained evidence base: combined they offer a comprehensive view of one person’s teaching acumen. But do they indicate how well students learn?
It turns out, they can. If we ask salient questions via each.
Transitions
We know that a lot of students who do very well in secondary school struggle when they get to university. For some FIFs—first in family to attend university—there is a great deal of expectation and pressure to perform as well as in high school; many do not. Ask those who’ve taught first year courses and they will have stories of super-bright young women and men whose interactions in class indicate high intelligence, who still struggle.
As part of my role, I sometimes speak to our new cohorts. I try not to intimidate them, but I do introduce the possibility that they could be in for a rough transition to university study. To put it in terms to which they can relate:
- Reactive learning high school social contract: do all your assigned work and get an A (which I call studenting)
- Self-regulated learning university social contract: do what we tell you and you might not pass – we expect you to do much more, but to manage that work independently
- Reading as a social or entertainment activity rather than an intensive cognitive task
- Common complaint observation about “not being taught” by staff
To succeed in university learners need to transition from responsive (or reactive) learner to self-regulated learner, unless someone in their life (teachers, parents, community) has already begun the process for them. Since we know a lot of students do not have these competencies we increasingly try to integrate some transition pedagogies into first year.
“Surely the most important thing is learning, rather than teaching” is perhaps a way of saying while we can do as much as we can to support you, ultimately you are responsible for your own learning.
This does not obviate anyone (or the university) from its responsibilities in terms of teaching. But it does mean that our focusing more in the first year on structuring our courses in ways that enable the transition towards self-regulated learning competence will set more students up for success, as learners rather than failure as students. As Zimmerman (2002) summarises:
Self-regulated students focus on how they activate, alter, and sustain specific learning practices in social as well as solitary contexts. (p. 70)
Reference
Zimmerman, B.J. (2002) Becoming a Self-Regulated Learner: An Overview, Theory Into Practice, 41(2), 64-70, https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4102_2
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Author: John P Egan
John P Egan is Associate Dean (Learning and Teaching) and Director of the Learning and Teaching Unit in the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences. Previously, John was Senior Manager, Strategic Curriculum Services at the University of British Columbia. He holds a PhD in Educational Studies from the University of British Columbia and a Master of Higher Education from the University of Auckland.