New term, new teaching

A national teaching certificate could soon be compulsory for lecturers, but controversy surrounds the issue. David Baume argues for a cultural change

What would persuade universities to put energy and resources into training and accrediting teaching staff? And what would persuade lecturers to become accredited as competent in their teaching?

Funding, obviously. Finding a funding regime which achieves these goals will be an exhilarating challenge.

The evidence is that the most effective motivation for improved teaching is a sustained appointment and promotion policy which favours teaching as much as it favours research. National funding and other policies must help universities to implement (and then monitor and report on) such an appointment and promotion policy.

But a cultural change is also required. An extreme view, recently expressed, is that failed researchers should be made to teach more. But good teaching enhances the life and spirit of those it touches; it informs research; it is of enormous cultural, personal and economic importance. Teaching is not a profession for failures.

How will this change come about? Training and accreditation will increase the value of teaching. The change is already underway in institutions that run substantial and successful training programmes for those who teach. A new teacher on such a programme has protected time and expert support. New teachers are supported and guided to read and discuss and think hard about the nature of learning their discipline, and to choose and devise and then test ways to help students achieve this learning.

Hopefully, experienced teachers will also be supported and encouraged to work towards accreditation for their teaching expertise. Systematic evaluation of past teaching experience is a powerful and effective way to extend teaching ability, and an energising force for continuing professional development.

Compulsion apart, where training and accreditation are undertaken, both new and experienced teachers apply their critical intelligence to developing better ways to teach. This is further aided by the commitment to scholarship and professionalism they bring from their discipline.

Through this development of their teaching they discover and make a scholarship of the pedagogy of their discipline which sits comfortably alongside the scholarship of the discipline itself.

How to explain the low status sometimes given to teaching in higher education? Funding is again one explanation; improved research systematically attracts additional funds in a way that improved teaching does not.

Beyond that, teaching is sometimes treated as a low-level craft skill, as the relatively unproblematic activity of simply professing one's discipline. What do teachers do? They may or may not put together a teaching programme; they teach; they assess whether students' work is correct or not; and of course they do lots of clerical work. Call that a profession?

Some of the other duties of a teacher - tutoring students, for example, and helping even good students to grasp difficult material - hint at a higher level of skill.

And if we unpack any of the work of a teacher, we start to see much higher-level skills. Teachers decide, from a vast field of possible content, what students need to learn, and can learn, at a particular stage of their studies.

Having made these choices, teachers sequence material coherently and appropriately. They present it in a way that supports and challenges students' understanding, and which thereby helps students construct a new understanding.

They devise appropriate learning activities for their students. Finally they assess students' learning, providing feedback to students to guide their future performance and providing assurance to the wider world that appropriate and valuable learning has been achieved. These very clearly are, or should be, skilled professional activities. We too often undervalue the difficulty and the expertise in what we do as teachers.

We should also find, in these teaching activities, some necessary underpinning principles or values. These include the need to inform teaching with a scholarly understanding of the conditions and requirements for student learning, or a commitment to undertake continued critical reflection on teaching and thereby its improvement. From this perspective we can increasingly see a job which is substantial, difficult, well worthy of study and development and professionalism.

A voluntary accreditation scheme, based on these skills, values and principles, already exists, devised by the Staff and Educational Development Association. Since 1993, training courses for new lecturers have been recognised by SEDA, or have been preparing for recognition, in some 60 institutions.

The wide acceptance of this scheme, the rich variety of programmes developed under it within the common standards it describes, and the very high quality of the work done by participants, are enormously encouraging for the future of teaching in higher education.

One challenge for the group planning the next stage of accreditation is to build on this work.

Another challenge, broader and at least as important, is to harness to teaching that commitment to scholarship and excellence which already exists within higher education; indeed, it may be argued, which defines higher education.

David Baume is co-director of the Centre for Higher Education Practice at the Open University and Accreditation Coordinator for the Staff and Educational Development Association.

A good training and accreditation scheme: * adapts training to local circumstances and priorities.

* is subject to some national accreditation, to ensure common standards and make teaching qualifications portable.

* is informed by principles and values, because teaching cannot adequately be described in terms of skills or competences.

* applies accreditation to all those who teach, including full and part-time teachers, graduate teaching assistants, librarians, technicians and demonstrators.

* gives careful attention to teaching at all stages in the career of staff with teaching duties - from selection, induction, training, support and initial accreditation, and then into continuing professional and career development, promotion and awards for teaching excellence.

No single activity or process will ensure good teaching.

SEDA accreditation involves:

* explicit underpinning principles and values

* accounts of abilities or outcomes

* peer assessment

* open processes

* a national steering committee

* national recognition of locally-designed courses and processes*

* institutions' quality systems*

* not applicable to the fellowships scheme, which accredits individuals rather than programmes