5. Target audiences

• New Graduate Teaching Assistants
• New inexperienced full time lecturers
• New inexperienced part time lecturers
• New experienced lecturers
• New experienced part time lecturers
• Visiting lecturers
• Professional tutors/supervisors

New Graduate Teaching Assistants

Many university teachers gain their first teaching experience as post graduates and develop classroom teaching habits and a personal style before they take up their first full time academic appointment. In the UK 'Teaching Assistant' posts have been established in many Universities to enable PhD students to work their way through their postgraduate studies while providing cheap teaching support. They often involve a third of a full time teacher's teaching load for a third of a full time teacher's salary plus tuition fees. This is becoming a common first step on an academic career and this makes it a particularly vital time to attempt to influence their teaching.

In the USA the majority of preparation of university teachers is undertaken with 'Teaching Assistants' or 'Graduate Teaching Assistants'. Training can be on a vast scale involving over a thousand GTAs a year across a University or over a hundred for a large enrolment first year course in English or Psychology. The sheer scale of this training and the very specific uses to which GTAs can be put provides opportunities for Department-based, Departmentally run and discipline-based programmes rather than centrally run or delivered programmes.

There are special US networks and conferences devoted to the preparation of GTAs. GTA training in the USA has developed in sophistication and has used research into how GTA's concerns change developmentally to sequence the focus of attention and processes of training programmes accordingly.

In the UK the formal training of GTAs is a relatively recent phenomenon although Universities such as Leeds and Edinburgh have moved very quickly to substantial training programmes involving hundreds of GTAs and these programmes have sometimes overtaken those for new full time teachers in terms of the total resource expended on them.

The first conference about GTA training in the UK took place in December 1994 at Warwick University and is now an annual event, organised by the Oxford Centre for Staff Development who publish GTA training materials and run the GTA training for a number of Universities.

GTA training characteristically concentrates on details of classroom practice concerned with small group teaching, with marking and giving feedback on student work, and on laboratory 'demonstrating'. It tends not to emphasise lecturing and rarely addresses issues of course design or the design of assessment or evaluation systems because these decisions are made by more experienced teachers: GTAs usually do what they are asked within courses which have been designed by others. As a result, where GTA training is the only preparation which exists, teachers may never be prepared as course designers or managers, with predictable consequences. Where both GTA training and preparation of full time teachers exists there may be a problem of overlap and articulation between courses to avoid repetition of basic skills training or complete absence of such training for lecturers who were not previously GTAs.

New inexperienced full time lecturers

This is the most common audience for preparation programmes in the UK but the least common in the USA. It is now rare in the UK for new full time lecturers not to have a special preparation programme which may be compulsory Optional vs Compulsory courses for those with less than three years full time teaching experience in higher education and no formal teaching qualification. Many such lecturers will have been GTAs Graduate Teaching Assistants) or have held temporary or part time teaching posts before they obtained their first full time teaching post. They may therefore be relatively experienced as teachers, at least compared with new teachers a decade ago, but they may have received little or no preparation.

In the USA there are very few programmes for new Assistant or Associate Professors and where these exist they tend to be modest in scale and optional.

New inexperienced part time lecturers

In North America and in the UK undergraduate courses are being taught to an ever increasing extent by part time teachers with no long term commitment to the university or to the course they are teaching - in some universities such teachers are now in the majority.

In the UK provision of preparation for these teachers is largely haphazard. In some universities they are invited to attend GTA programmes and in others they are allowed to attend programmes for new full time lecturers, but in few are special programmes provided or required. 'Learning from Audit', a summary of external reviews of the quality assurance systems of universities in the UK undertaken by the Higher Education Quality Council, reported that the preparation of part time tutors was rarely undertaken adequately.

An exception is the Open University where all their many thousand distance learning tutors are part time and where all tutors are briefed and trained - sometimes to a greater extent than for full time tutors in conventional universities. This training is focussed primarily on marking and tutorial feedback on written work but includes running group tutorial sessions and telephone tutoring and counselling. The Open university has a long tradition of publishing materials to support such training and researching the briefing and training of its tutors.

Many university teachers were part time teachers before they became full time and the provision of preparation for new part time teachers is a vital area which is currently underdeveloped. See also New experienced part time lecturers (below).

New experienced lecturers

The needs of new experienced lecturers can be difficult to meet. Despite their experience they may be poor teachers and have received little or no preparation if they started some years ago before current provision of preparation was established. They may well have been appointed entirely on the grounds of their research record. It is rare, however, to undertake any diagnosis of training needs, either at interview or after appointment, and few universities require new experienced lecturers to undertake any preparation for teaching.

In some universities they are offered access to programmes for new inexperienced teachers and some take up this opportunity - though usually those that least need to! While such experienced teachers can be a valuable resource to those running preparation programmes for inexperienced teachers, simply because of their experience, they can also cause difficulties, intimidate inexperienced teachers, dominate sessions and make it harder to address really basic skills and issues.

Even if their teaching is sound they may need support in learning to operate effectively in a new institution with a new culture, organisation and ways of accessing teaching resources and perhaps new kinds of students and with new educational goals. Beyond a simple induction to the university new experienced teachers rarely receive such support and are only offered the same opportunities to develop their teaching as established experienced teachers.

New experienced part time lecturers

Experienced part time teachers may not ever have been prepared for teaching, despite their experience, but may well have developed teaching skills or at least ways of coping. They are often primarily in need of adequate briefing about the courses they are asked to contribute to and how they are normally taught and assessed, and about the way the university operates and facilities such as the library, computers and the print room, are accessed, rather than basic teaching skills. They often lack adequate documentation and social interaction with other part time or full time teachers, rather than training.

Few universities in the UK have specially organised preparation for new experienced part time teachers.

Visiting lecturers

Some courses and institutions make heavy use of 'visiting lecturers' - especially in professional schools such as medicine and architecture where the experience of practising professionals is invaluable and on post-graduate programmes where advanced specialist knowledge is in short supply within the university. In some courses students' experience of teaching is dominated by such visiting teachers - and they are often terrible - both poorly briefed and lacking basic teaching skills despite their professional experience.

Preparation for such teachers has to be quick and economical - and also socially acceptable because they are often senior and respected figures in their field who would not take kindly to compulsory training.

Some universities have established a code of practice for the use of such teachers and supply a teaching manual providing guidance linked closely to a student feedback or evaluation system which is designed to orient the teachers' attention to a few key issues such as the relevance of material, the level at which material is tackled, the provision of handouts or references (to substitute if necessary for clear lectures and the lack of visual material) and the opportunity for interaction within sessions.

Some professional training courses include a short programme on teaching and training methods because they know that professionals will inevitably find themselves teaching and training even if this is not their main job: most professions, such as law and accountancy, involve CPD and inter professional briefing and training. For example the PhD programme for Clinical Psychologists at Oxford University includes a two day workshop on teaching and training to prepare them for changing working regimes on hospital wards or contributing to nurse training programmes.

Professional tutors/supervisors

Many professional courses employ supervisors while students are on work placements, on teaching practice, undertaking clinical practice, and so on. These supervisors are usually practitioners, teachers or clinicians rather than academics and only undertake the supervision role for a small proportion of their time. They are nevertheless crucial to the effectiveness of professional courses and their preparation for their role is also crucial.

Preparing such supervisors may involve:

• briefing about the overall operation and philosophy of the course they are a small component of, either face to face or in documentation;
• meeting full time tutors and joining in more general seminars or training sessions so as to absorb the culture and values involved in the course;
• special training sessions concerned with supervision where they can meet other supervisors and discuss their role and practice;
• shared supervision with an experienced supervisor;
• observation by and advice from an experienced supervisor.