Liz Beaty

The Role of the Developer in Linking Research on Learning to Teaching Practice

Liz Beaty, University of Brighton

Reproduced with permission from Gibbs, G. (ed.) Improving Student Learning - Theory and Practice. Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff Development (1994)

Introduction

Research which is published in journals is read only by other researchers. Teachers are interested only in practical solutions to problems. These two statements may be contentious but in my experience they are mostly true. Yet there are many ways in which research on learning could improve practice. It is not that researchers are researching the wrong things nor that their findings are not applicable, and it is not that teachers are disinterested or unable to learn from research on learning. Rather it is the lack of a common meeting place in the literature, conferences, etc. This paper discusses the role of educational and staff developers as a conduit between research on learning and teaching practice. The paper asks what is the role of the developer in linking research to teaching and what strategies and approaches work? What types of publication, workshops, staff development events, etc., produce an effective strategy for linking research into practice?

In this paper I outline my own development as an educational and staff developer in some depth. The reason for this approach is that I have gone from being a full-time researcher to being a full-time educational developer and a full-time teacher and am now working half time on staff development and half time as director of a management research programme. My ambition has always been to improve student learning and this chequered career has provided me with much to reflect on.

An Abridged Autobiography of a Development Agent.

Full-time research

From an undergraduate degree in sociology I went to study at IET Surrey University and spent an interesting three years researching student orientations to study towards a PhD. The institute was a small but thriving unit full of research students from around the world, many working on aspects of technology in the curriculum, including early work on computers and learning. The concentration at this time seemed to be moving away from the idea that technology held the answers to effective learning - e.g., the teaching machines towards technology used for diagnosis and support for learning - and as my three years went on increasingly the interest was on the learner and their approach, style, orientation towards and feelings about their learning context. Concepts of individual difference were very much to the fore. The view that approaches to teaching would affect all students in the same way was strongly questioned. What we learnt in those times from the strong research groupings at Surrey, in Lancaster and in Goteborg, Sweden, was how to research student learning from the point of view of the student.

How far our growing understanding affected teaching practice is questionable. The researchers were not teachers, nor were we on the whole concerned with staff development of teachers. Rather, we wrote articles in journals and talked to each other at conferences about learning. There were one or two notable exceptions to this. Professor John Cowan, then at Heriot Watt University, was eagerly transforming the first-year engineering course to encourage deep learning and intrinsic motivations for his students. He was loved by most of his students but sometimes misunderstood by his colleagues. There were also the beginnings of small-scale training courses for new teachers into higher education. Professor Lewis Elton's teaching and learning week course at Surrey University has been running since 1975 and by 1977 had a distance-learning version used by teachers as far away as Japan. Apart from these few areas, however, research into student learning and staff development were on the whole separate activities. Staff development, to most staff in HE, meant going to conferences in the area of your academic speciality.

In 1979 I became a research assistant at the Open University. The work was in two parts. Primarily I was to continue and extend my research on student learning to look at how far the concepts drawn from the recent research could be applied to mature Open University students studying at a distance. Secondly we were to help with the evaluation of a foundation course and the development of the next generation course. The study methods group comprising Alistair Morgan, Graham Gibbs and myself worked intensively with longitudinal interview data from a small group of students which eventually became a set of eight-year long-case studies. The focus on students' development was stronger now as was a wish to influence the course design of the new course from an understanding of how students learn.

This focus had been one that was deeply underpinning the work of the IET at the Open University. There were at that time two groups within the institute. One part was research made up of a number of discrete research groups concentrating on an aspect of educational technology in order to feed ideas into courses. The second was a course development group very much concerned with the development of material in a form which would be useful to students. Technically the ideas from the research groups found their way into courses through the course development groups. True to form however, the research was rarely applied enough or timed to have any direct bearing on course design except over a long time period. The Open University has been very successful in making its course materials accessible, and some of this is due to a concentration on the process of development of materials in a form and style to suit distance learners. So research on learning has had some impact, but to me and to the group the impact felt so indirect and so tenuous. We still spent most of our time talking to other researchers about our research. There was still an enormous gulf between our research work and the development of courses. There was still a credibility gap between our work and its being used by course teams. The impact we had on the new course was visible but marginal.

Full-time educational development

In 1980 Graham nailed his colours firmly to the mast of development by moving to Oxford Polytechnic Educational Development Unit, from where great things have come, including the work with Trevor and Sue Habeshaw on 53 interesting things . . . and OCSD. I followed his lead a number of years later by moving out of research and joining the Educational Development Service at Newcastle Polytechnic. This shift was a rude awakening into the busy world of the developer. Incidentally the person who had the job before me was Paul Ramsden, so I took over a firm foundation in the use of research on learning. I took over Paul's Diploma in Educational Development and produced a masters level course.

I discovered the power of courses in harnessing resources for development. Universities understand that courses need staff and other resources. It is a mode of operation that can fit the system and make staff development a mainstream activity. The second discovery was hard won - through the route of frustrating mistakes. The one-off workshop or seminar series put on by a central organisation for the institution as a whole is a poor use of time and resources. If this 'central place' happens to be the back end of beyond in a lunch-time slot when it rains then it is likely that very few people will come. One vivid picture of this reality was drawn by Graham at a SCED conference a year or two ago - it showed a very full desk with memos and books all over it and an advert for a seminar pinned on the over-full notice board. The implication was that with all these pressures the priority will rarely be to attend a workshop of something neither urgent nor perceived to be central to today's concerns.

There were also some positive discoveries. I learnt that to work at the policy level was a powerful thing to do. An example was working on a group to address the issue of student feedback, and we designed a policy to ensure that all courses each year gathered student feedback in a way which would allow each individual student their say. The policy allowed for great flexibility of approach while ensuring that all course teams did collect and use the information. Without this policy workshops on collecting and using student feedback were poorly attended. After the policy there was a rash of requests for such information and support. The research can be used when there is a perceived need for it and the motivation to take it seriously.

The second important discovery was that, instead of spreading thinly across the whole institution, it was very much more powerful and also fulfilling to work with groups of staff, course teams, interest groups departments on things that they were concerned about and developing at the time. My work become much more responding to needs and much less stabbing in the dark with things I imagined people wanted. It also targeted my work. There were down sides to this. I expect that I was invisible to some parts, indeed whole faculties, of the university, while other groups used a great deal of my time, in accessing both my research library and my knowledge of other educational services they could use. The results were tangible. When a group of librarians asked me to join their team meeting I was able to introduce ideas on student learning that influenced their choice of teaching methods. They knew they wanted to change things, but without the ideas from the research they would not have had a rationale for the changes. Some of the lecturers even read some of the research papers on the subject. People are interested in their own concerns. Researchers have to meet them halfway and provide the ideas and information at the right time and in the right form to be usable.

So the move to educational development felt good to me. At last I felt that my research training had been of some practical benefit to students. Where I felt inadequate was in how to present this efficiently. It seemed to me then that I had to be there, in person, to talk people through my understanding of the research on learning: I was the translator. There were few books that were of a practical nature to give to lecturers who wanted to develop courses. This has changed, and with SCED publications, USDU materials, Enterprise and RSA work on capability and the 53 series, we have an increasing library of useful and informative work which is practically oriented. This is an important way in which research can help to inform practice without every teacher needing a translator in tow.

Full-time teaching

My next move was into a teaching post. This was a side step that was almost accidental in that I didn't intend to make this kind of a career move, but when it happened I became intrigued by what I was learning. The set of courses I worked on were BTEC, HND and HNC for those aspiring to management within the public sector. The courses were all about learning skills, including transferable skills of teamwork and communication. The course team was innovative and a challenging group within which to work and I found myself learning about learning in a different way. What I found out was that many lecturers are interested in teaching and learning and are very concerned about the development of their students. "Development" was a new word for learning and it included much more about the development of the whole person and not just intellectual development. The work took me into a whole new area of research on learning to do with personal development and management development. Was it coincidental that many other researchers from the students learning world were also taking this road? David Boud and John Heron spring to mind. I was very surprised to find that a whole new literature of practical developmental work was available to me from the management development field - a lot of it American and much of it transferable easily into the staff development in higher education. I broadened my vision to encompass the development of the lecturer as a whole person. Stress and time management became part of what I recognised as useful to the lecturer, alongside a new focus on the development of skills for students and skills that went a good deal beyond the original focus of researchers on study skills.

The impact that this time had on my staff development work was profound. For example, I realised that staff development encompassed all staff and not just lecturers, that staff development was distinct from educational development in that it was about a focus on the development of the person. I learnt that research must have a personal dimension to be of use. Creating a knowledge base may not be the best way to disseminate research - rather research needs to link into teaching and curriculum design through the skill of the developing teacher practitioner. Researchers themselves or developers on their behalf must translate their work into highly practical and targeted publications.

Later, in working more centrally in management development, I began to focus on experiential learning through a concentration on working with part-time students - or rather full-time managers who were studying part time. I have spent the last three years using and developing approaches to action learning. This process with its heavy emphasis on learning through reflection on practice has provided a potent force for the development of professional staff in higher education. Action learning draws together the need for action and practical approaches to development of courses and methods of teaching with a method for linking this action to ideas, theories and knowledge gained from research. People develop through learning from an informed approach to actions. Learning follows from experience informed by ideas. The action learning sets are not enough on their own but, with workshops to display and discuss the ideas and with experience gained from practice, the circle between research and practice is joined.

Half and half

In this half-and-half capacity I run two programmes: one is an action-learning part-time MPhil programme for managers and the other also uses action learning and is a programme for our new staff at the University of Brighton. This programme has workshops on different aspects of teaching and learning and includes a good dose of learning theory, albeit in the context of practical implications for teaching. We make good use of basic texts on helping students to learn and on learning how to teach (e.g., Ramsden, 1992; Morgan, 1993; Gibbs, Habeshaw and Habeshaw, 1987-93; and SCED publications). The regular action learning sets help the new staff to solve problems encountered during their everyday teaching and to reflect and learn from practice and from each other. I have learnt to respect the care and effort that new staff give to their new jobs and to understand the nature of the stress that the swift changes in higher education have caused.

I also learnt that I had become used to working as a teacher and that the normal day to day of it all caused me little stress. I found that direct empathy with the new lecturer was harder as I grew more experienced. The physical stress symptoms of shaking or nausea before sessions was a thing of dim memory. That is, until I had to do a presentation for a press launch of a new venture with 90 people in the audience, including Vice Chancellors and members of the press. For the first time in years I suffered the stress of a sleepless night and anxiety attacks the day before the presentation. This showed me in a very direct way what some new staff face as they begin their career. It also demonstrated the need for me as a developer to continue to develop myself; to be open to new challenges in order to understand the situation of those I want to help and to mitigate the danger of complacency and cynicism. I learnt again the importance of the individual orientation - I felt like I did because it mattered a great deal to me that the event was well received. It emphasised the emotional content of individual development. Individual staff development involves commitment to the focus of the development. Development involves risks - it may go well or it may not. Just doing what I have done before is not the best way to develop me or the programme. But the risks taken must be measured: they need to be acceptable risks or I will not develop, only fail. Reflection is crucial for development. It is through analysis of what happened and how I would have liked to do it differently, etc., that helps to foster learning from the experience. I also needed the challenge of a new type of event and the support of my colleagues in planning and designing as well as in dealing with my anxieties. Challenge and support are important props on the road to development.

The current context

Staff development is now a higher priority for institutions because of the need to change and because without help for staff the pace of change would involve a deterioration in standards. The new challenge for researchers on student learning is to gain access to change agents, and to make an impact where there is now opportunity to do so. Working in a faculty as well as at the 'centre' of the institution has shown me that the way to have an impact is through a constant awareness of where change is happening - in curriculum, in course design and in teaching and learning processes. It is also necessary to have the time to help inform those changes. Having a split job gives me little room to manoeuvre or to focus attention where I know it would be most useful.

The latest synthesis for me has been working with SCED - now SEDA - to develop a national accreditation scheme for teachers in higher education. This scheme is a set of objectives and values. Programmes of staff development which can show that they assess against the scheme are given recognised status and individual staff who successfully complete the programmes are awarded accreditation. This scheme is a flexible approach to development. It provides a framework which is clear and yet allows very different modes of delivery and practice in each institution. It feeds off current issues of quality and competence and it provides an opportunity for learning from shared practice nationally. The scheme aims to produce the reflective practitioner. To gain accreditation teachers must demonstrate how their practice is informed by values including:

• an understanding of how students learn
• recognition of individual differences
• concern for students' development
• commitment to scholarship
• team working
• practising equal opportunities
• continued reflection on professional practice.

In setting the agenda the SEDA scheme makes staff development an assertive activity and not merely a responsive one. The scheme demands that staff are given the support and training to do their work as teachers. The aim is that in demanding this reflective practice in early training the habit will be formed which produces in teaching staff a willingness to learn from research on student learning thereafter.

Conclusions

In reflecting on my career I have presented some views about where research, development and practice meet. I want now to make a small number of concluding statements by way of summary.

1. As a full-time researcher there was little opportunity to ensure that research informed practice.

2. Working with course teams while researching is unlikely to produce much change since the research takes longer than the development of the course.

3. Research on learning is a very useful form of training for a staff and educational developer.

4. Development needs to follow the needs of staff/departments.

5. Development is more likely when linked to policy.

6. Development is easier to fund when linked to course provision.

7. Concentration of effort where it is wanted is better than a thin spread evenly across the institution.

8. Staff development is not the same as educational development; it involves a holistic approach at the individual level.

9. Research needs to be translated to inform the practitioner.

10. The emotional content of development must not be ignored.

11. Development of staff involves a blend of challenge and support within a context of an acceptable level of risk.

12. For learning to take place, reflection is crucial. It is the link between research and practice and between experience and practice.

13. It is easier to gain resources and commitment for staff development in a time of institutional/sector change.

14. Staff and educational development must be assertive and not merely responsive.

15. In order to be credible and to empathise with those they support, educational and staff developers must continue to develop themselves.

The role of the developer in linking research on learning into teaching practice is crucial. In order to be able to do this a research training is extremely valuable. This is not to say that only ex-researchers on learning can be effective developers of academic staff. More crucial than doing the research is scholarship - keeping up to date with theory and practice as it evolves throughout the system. This implies an academic type of job - one which has the academic terms and conditions which allow time for this scholarship.

Secondly the statements above point to the role of experience in learning how to design and deliver staff development events. This, for me, points to the importance of training for the staff development role. New staff and educational developers should learn their professional role with help from their more experienced peers. This may point to the need for specific training courses or mentorship. It also shows the background need to specify the nature and responsibilities of the role. The SEDA accreditation scheme for teachers is being followed by a similar scheme for the accreditation of staff and educational developers. This could prove to be the emergence of a new professional group within higher education.

The third link is in the encouragement of staff in the crucial activity of reflecting on their teaching practice. The support given to staff in designing new programmes and through action research in developing them is an important and effective approach to staff development. Academics in the new universities are being encouraged to become researchers. Research does not need to be a competitor for attention with teaching. We need, rather, to reinforce the value of the teaching role through researching the process of teaching as well as its content.

Finally, if research on learning is to have an impact on how we teach and how students learn we must above all else ensure that research on learning continues to happen. Whether or not they are active researchers themselves, staff and educational developers have a responsibility to point out where further research is required.

References

Gibbs, G.(1992). Improving the Quality of Student Learning. Bristol: Technical & Educational Services.

Gibbs, G., Habeshaw, T. and Habeshaw, S. (1987-93) 53 Interesting Ways Series .

Morgan, A.R.(1993).Improving your Student's Learning . London: Kogan Page.

Ramsden, P.(1992). Learning to Teach in Higher Education. London: Routledge.