A club no one wants to join. Just weeks from its launch date, the Institute for Learning and Teaching is in trouble
Stirling University has proposed an approach that it says gives academics individual responsibility and autonomy within a framework of ILT priorities, writes Olga Wojtas.
Sally Brown, Stirling's deputy principal, condemned the ILT consultation paper as proposing "a mechanistic training manual" that had little chance of matching, or even taking account of, the way staff made sense of their teaching and their students' learning.
Stirling says there are no "right" ways of achieving competence or excellence in teaching in the way implied by the "outcomes statements" model. But staff should be expected to explain, give examples and justify how they have tackled a range of issues, from course planning to evaluating teaching.
Stirling says individual teachers might well not need to address all of these, but the assessors would then expect an explanation of why a particular issue was not relevant.
The issues it suggests include what the students were expected to achieve, and how the course design took account of this. What use did staff make of current research and scholarship, how did they make decisions about what resources to use, such as texts, course books and new technology, and what impact did these have on the teaching and learning?
"While this still has the sense of a 'list', it does enable a process of accountability in terms of how the individual higher education teacher makes sense of their teaching," the Stirling paper says.
The University of Glasgow strongly urges a completely different approach.
Initial membership should be open to anyone teaching or closely associated with learning and teaching in higher education. There should initially be only one grade of membership but with a lower level of subscription for, say, research students who undertake teaching.
Once members are enrolled there should be a substantial debate within the membership of what constitutes good practice within the profession and how this should be formulated. Once agreement is reached on this there should be a period of encouragement for members to adhere to this good practice. And a major role of the institute should be to help institutions and individuals by providing advice, guidance, publications, seminars etc.
This would, says the university, be far less bureaucratic and expensive both for the institute and its members.