Where do you go for advice on teaching (apart from Google)?
The Educationalist. By Alexandra Mihai
Welcome to a new issue of my newsletter! Imagine you want to try a new teaching tool or a new approach, like a simulation for instance. How do you go about it? Where do you go to get some advice or inspiration? The lucky ones among us have dedicated university departments they can go to for teaching support. Others have to rely on personal networks and more often then not end up asking a colleague who has experience using that method. If this sounds familiar, you’re in good company: it turns out most teachers prefer to go to peers for advice. You can read more about how to use and enhance exiting networks to provide more effective opportunities for sharing and peer learning in my latest blog post below.
Need some more inspiration on this topic? Take a look at these articles:
Peer Review Strategies that Keep the Focus on Better Teaching: some useful examples of peer learning activities for teachers that can also be used across disciplines;
Want to Help Professors Become Better Teachers? Find Them a Mentor: interesting insights into the value of coaching and mentoring at faculty level.
If you want to learn more about Open Educational Practices (OEP) in Higher Education, I warmly recommend Openness and Praxis: Exploring the Use of Open Educational Practices in Higher Education by Dr. Catherine Cronin (@catherinecronin).
If you have any interesting resources to share on this topic don’t hesitate to get in touch! Have a nice week!
Where do you go for advice on teaching (apart from Google)?
This was one of the questions in the informal survey I ran on my blog a few weeks ago. It turns out just under 50% of teachers answered Google. The vast majority answered either “colleagues” (80%) or “personal network” (57%).
Never has the need for advice on teaching been greater than today. Moving online in the past months has been a real challenge for teachers. Many of them had never taught online before and only used technology sparingly in the classroom. Most teachers have never taken an online course. So the dynamic and the practicalities of this mode of teaching were largely unfamiliar to them. With more online teaching ahead, it is important to develop more sustainable and accessible channels that allow them to gain knowledge and train the skill set necessary to teach online effectively.
What are some of the current options? Some universities offer various professional development formats, like trainings and workshops. But this is by no means the rule: in many cases such options are not available by default and, even more worryingly, pedagogical knowledge is often undervalued when it comes to hiring and promotion. When institutional support is not available or insufficient, own research and personal networks can provide access to resources that can help enhance the teaching and learning experience.
What seems to work best, as both research and anecdotal evidence seem to suggest, is learning from peers. When teachers want advice on a certain topic, they turn to colleagues, either from the same institution or from further afield. This can come as a surprise, given that teaching is often seen as an individual endeavour and that collaboration in teaching is substantially less common than in research.
The knowledge that peer learning plays such an important role prompts us to rethink how to make best use of this channel to develop expertise on online teaching. Here are a few ideas:
Start from within
Universities should encourage (and, why not, even reward) reflection on teaching practices at institutional level and beyond. Taking some time to try out new teaching and learning approaches, reflecting on the experience and sharing it with or making it available to peers should not be seen as a distraction from “real research” and undervalued on the academic career path. Peer observation can also be an excellent way to engage with each other’s practice in a constructive way; unfortunately in some cultural contexts this is still frowned upon and seen as an intrusion.
Leverage existing networks
A diversity of networks such as professional associations offer various formats for teachers to meet and share practices at national and international level. These can be specific conferences and events, professional development opportunities made available to the entire network, online platforms for exchange and collaboration or journals focusing on the scholarship of teaching and learning. This is currently often done at discipline level, with associations like the European Consortium for Political Research having a Standing Group on Teaching and Learning. A solid repository of educational practices can be built by further consolidating these networks and even establishing cross-disciplinary links.
Bring on new peers
Beside exchanges among teachers from various disciplines, the existing networks could be enhanced by including learning designers, educational scientists and IT experts, who at the moment are in different silos. This is especially useful when designing for online learning but it can add a fresh and inspiring new dimension to any learning endeavour. More importantly, this inter-disciplinary approach forces all those involved to step out of their bubble and learn from and with each other by creating a shared language.
We should try our best, both at individual and institutional level, to leverage the knowledge that teachers learn best from their peers. Technology can enable us to enlarge the circle of peers by overcoming geographical barriers. Open Educational Practices (OEP) can take the sharing of teaching practices to the next level by helping create an inclusive dynamic learning network of professionals. While these days meeting colleagues on the corridor for a spontaneous chat may not always be possible, we should put some more effort in designing peer learning and interaction opportunities that often prove to be more effective than formal professional development.