Changing Teaching Practice: Strategies and Barriers1

There is now a considerable amount of empirical research on teaching and learning in higher education that should provide a guide to effective teaching practice. In particular there is an impressive body of evidence on how teaching methods and curriculum design affects deep, autonomous, and reflective learning. Yet most faculty are largely ignorant of this scholarship, and instructional practices and curriculum design are dominated by tradition rather than research evidence. In particular, teaching is largely didactic, assessment of student work is often trivial, and curricula are more likely to emphasise content coverage than acquisition of lifelong and life-wide learning skills. A recent study of excellent teaching departments in 11 research-intensive universities world-wide shows how good teaching can be encouraged and led, despite formidable barriers to embedding change. Faculty Conceptions of Teaching and Learning University professors who are critical of efforts to improve teaching often challenge educational developers by asking what information and techniques we can offer that might have a tangible effect on the quality of instruction. Assuming every university teacher did receive some training, would it really make any difference? After all, despite years of mandatory training for elementary and high school teachers, there is still widespread criticism of the quality of Canadian schools. This raises an intriguing question. If you as a faculty developer or educational researcher had the attention of all the teachers in your institution for, say, half a day, just what would you tell them? For me the answer is quite simple: I would try to raise the issue of how students learn, beginning by having faculty consider what they know intuitively from half a lifetime of learning themselves, and ending by encouraging them to become familiar with some of the seminal research from the past 30 years that helps explain how the way we teach affects the quality and effectiveness of student learning. The act of teaching is of course meaningless without a corresponding act of learning. Yet a great irony of much university teaching is that, although professors have themselves excelled as learners, the insights gleaned from this experience are often abandoned as soon as the instructor ascends the classroom podium. Instead of reflecting on their own experience, supplemented by relevant research about effective practices, many faculty base their approach to teaching upon an uncritical adoption of the model that comes most readily to hand – their own professors. 1 Paper presented at Taking stock: Symposium on teaching and learning research in higher education, University of Guelph, Ontario, April 25, 2008.