Journal of Academic Development and Education JADE Issue 8 | Page 74

EDITOR’S EPILOGUE | 75
74 | JADE
did not equal innovative practice because it opened these ideas up as a
pedagogic afterthought rather than the core driver for the technology…
perhaps a little obvious not to put the cart before the horse, but some
of the examples in the room from other institutes experiences with
learning technology suggested this was a point worth voicing.
Excellence and Strategy
The first of the break-out sessions I attended was delivered by Prof.
Julian Rawel (University of Edinburgh Business School) on excellence
and strategy as keys to success in HE. Prof. Rawel postulated that we,
as practitioners, were constantly trading on our reputations, be that
innovation, excellence or success. These were all being applied towards
creating the “great student experience” and one of the points he
brought up was that the quality of “live” performance in teaching was
a key factor and he suggested it was possible to value this skill and
aspect more. From a personal perspective listening to him speak, it was
clear to me (in a good way) that Prof. Rawel is a master of positive self-
promotion by using wider points and context to constantly exemplify the
very teaching skills he was emoting… a very meta experience when the
audience realise they are being immersed in a multi-layered deliver style,
something I intend to try to develop myself having seen how successful
this can be in practice. This is a situation that teachers and learners on
some post graduate certificate programmes can easily identify with,
when your colleagues are the learners they are observing more than
just your subject knowledge, they are experiencing a meta-perspective
of your delivery style as well. The upshot from his presentation was to
share that students want to be inspired and that they also want their
materials well delivered. This raised the topic of “non-discussion of
teaching style” in some practitioners due to self-awareness, perceived
vulnerability or other worries. At an institutional level peer support or
peer observation schemes (note to everyone; these are NOT the same
thing) go some way towards addressing this, but Prof. Rawel was quite
clear that he views “live” teaching performance as the critical factor in
excellent teaching, where student are most definitely impacted on by
this.
He pointed out that there is still some way to go in equalising the
perception of teaching importance in comparison to research and to
make this point, he had researched various institute webpages about
teaching and learning only to find them taking either about research or
core basic teaching skills sets rather than excellence per se. He seemed
to think this was a curious issue of practitioners having exposure to a
glut of teaching support resources but very little in the way of actually
“how” to do it well… in his words, a case of action vs. rhetoric.
His next tack was quite controversial for this audience, when he
postulated that in many institutes and departments, the minority of
innovative excellent teachers were in fact “carrying” their colleagues
that this this still resulted in good “satisfaction” ratings for many places,
which he suggested was leading to apathy in pursuing excellence in
teaching as institutes silently and tacitly approve of this by focussing
on research rather than teaching excellence. As you can imagine, in a
room of teachers this idea was not well received but the discussion
threw up some interesting ideas of what constitutes excellence in the
first place and how to motivate colleagues to strive for excellence in
their teaching rather than a “good enough is good enough” ethos. He
suggested that the key to achieving this rested at the level of the in-
house/departmental champions and institutional celebration/reward of
excellence… all aspects that Keele already invest significantly in.
An extension of this idea stemming from the group discussion was the
empowerment of the individual practitioner to innovate and experiment
without “interference” (it was unclear what he meant by this) through
devolution of what constitutes best pedagogic practice to the expert
teacher to select the “right tool for the right job” in their methods and
that the onus on the institute was to back them up rather than direct
them down pre-set paths. The example that many kept coming back to
was institutional directives to use specific learning technologies such
as audience voting clickers, regardless of their pedagogic merits/risks
until the pedagogic literature can catch up to inform these decisions
with rigor. It was an interesting discussion that raised many questions
and put forward relatively few solutions.
The group agreed upon a literature-based core of attributes that were
valued in expert teachers, linked with success:
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Training and Experience
Brevity
Creative Delivery
Empathy with the individual learner
Confidence when outside their comfort zone
What struck me was that this is mostly a list of personal skills rather
than subject knowledge and that in the audience I was in, this was
accepted as a given. If that is the case more generally, then institutes
might consider development of these skills for excellence as a priority
(as we do at Keele).
The next discussion was over terminology and what was inferred
by “research-led” vs. “research-informed” teaching, with the group
preference for the latter because they felt that it re-framed and