Are a thousand flowers blooming?
Is the key to improving teaching really just about spreading the money around?
The Chronicle has a piece on some significant investments by two leading US universities.
Three years ago, two of America’s most influential universities made eye-popping commitments to improve teaching.Harvard University announced that it would devote $40-million to encourage its faculty members to experiment in the service of learning. The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor would run a $25-million project seeking much the same thing.On both campuses, faculty members on and off the tenure track have submitted proposals for competitive grants of up to $50,000 to take calculated risks in their courses. They’re creating digital textbooks, organizing workshops on teaching statistics, assigning common reading in engineering, and, in all cases, studying the results.Larger grants, up to $200,000 from Harvard and $3-million from Michigan, are intended to scale up the teaching experiments. At Michigan, that money will let 19 schools and colleges at Ann Arbor use technology to tailor advising to individual students and retool three architecture courses to bring in outside experts for intensive two- or three-day sessions.Harvard has awarded about $2.5-million so far, and Michigan nearly $9-million. Their lofty status in private and public higher education may prompt others to try something similar, if less pricey, several observers say.“Harvard and Michigan are opinion leaders,” says Dan Bernstein, a professor of psychology at the University of Kansas and a former director of its Center for Teaching Excellence. “For being smart people, we have a lot of the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses mentality.”It’s too soon to judge the impact of the efforts on the two campuses and beyond. But it’s worth examining the underlying philosophy. Can money spark change where other attempts have failed? Will it overcome cultural and structural obstacles? And what can colleges without the same kinds of resources take away?
The report of the Harvard launch back in 2011 is filled with confident assertions about the investment but it really isn’t entirely clear from the Chronicle piece whether this has all paid off.
The approach has in one form or another also underpinned many teaching and learning initiatives in UK higher education. For example, we have had
- Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL)
- The Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning (FDTL)
- Higher Education Academy subject centres
- The National Teaching Fellowship Scheme
plus local schemes which follow a similar pattern of funding.
Yes, this kind of approach – at university or system level – does demonstrates a serious commitment to teaching and learning and money does send a powerful message to staff but in the context of the resource base of these US universities or in terms of the overall UK funding envelope these are always going to look like fairly modest allocations. It’s great that staff are having conversations about teaching but the real challenge here is to embed this kind of initiative and to ensure it is sustainable. Unless enhancing the quality of teaching is seen to be a genuine strategic priority and, for example, promotion criteria are consistently balanced between research and teaching it is always going to be a challenge to implement institution-wide change of this kind.
Of course Harvard is not a typical institution. But if it there really isn’t any compelling evidence from its extremely well-funded activity that this is the way to do it then perhaps it is time for a rethink about the real impact of this kind of initiative. Certainly it is difficult to claim that any of the UK sector initiatives have had lasting influence. Or is it always going to be too early to tell?
When you make that kind of investment in QE, you are investing in people far more than you are investing in institutions. Which is right, because HE teachers are people, and institutions are never going to be able to support innovative people unless they are also able to bring in money.
There is an argument for tracking careers through funded projects like FDTL (disclaimer: I ran FDTL for a couple of years) and seeing where people ended up. Often – anecdotally – in senior management positions, with influence over a generation of new academics who would take teaching seriously.
Despite the best attempts of stuff like “learning gain” and Pearson’s “efficacy”, there is not a simple linear relationship for dumb managers to wave at dumber directors of finance. But if we don’t recognise teaching at a national level, it gets squeezed out. No money = no time = no importance.
If we are concerned with the student experience, we should be concerned with supporting and funding the staff who deliver it.
Thanks for comment. Agreed, it’s not simple, it needs time, money and commitment. My point really is that some of these initiatives (and I’m afraid I include FDTL) are just not big or widespread enough and sufficiently sustained to make a real long term difference.
No – I’d agree with that (though CETLs would be a much better example of a failure to sustain). The issue is precisely the one that you detail in the post above, policy makers expect quick wins and nothing in QE is really a quick win. I’d love to do a proper evaluation of FTDL/TLTP now (10 plus years on) and have occasionally bothered HEFCE about this idea.
Teaching quality enhancement needs a sustained stream of support. Much like QR funding in research (which CETLs were supposed to counterbalance…)
Absolutely right
Oh, and happy to talk to you any time you like about the impact of the almighty #ukoer.