Trying to balance accountability with accessibility is one of the key problems of leadership in any organization, but in educational institutions the challenges are unique in that the fundamental purpose of the organization requires engagement and collaboration from all those part of the enterprise. This model makes sense of the challenges of designing an institution that supports learning and teaching, but which balances two sometimes conflicting goals: creating a culture of learning while achieving excellence in learning and teaching.
No single model is representative, each has its strengths and problems – the idea is to visualize the contrasts in some way. The range of ‘less focus’ and ‘more focus’ is meant to refer to the central purposes of the organization. So, if the central purpose leans more toward ‘excellence’ or ‘quality improvement’ that is one direction, while if it leans more toward ‘learning culture’ or ‘organizational development’ then that is another purpose.
Each model utilizes elements of the others and no model is exclusive, it is only in the degree to which the model leans in that direction that determines its position. The description of each model refers to a series of metrics, including ‘who’ carries out the functions, the direction and type of learning and service provision, whether it is focused on goals or process, and whether it is competitive.
Ultimately, the purpose serves the organization by creating the conditions for its operation, as well as by shaping expectations for performance. Like any good classroom, the function and purpose that underlie the enterprise should closely align with the structure. At the same time, purposes should be flexible and, to my mind, not neglect the processes that allow people to be people, and to realize their best selves in any organization.
Institutional centres for learning and teaching serve vitally important functions in higher education. They focus on core educational activities. However, across the country, for a variety of reasons, these offices are at a crossroads. I’d like to consider at least some of the factors creating change as we move ahead to a 21st century learning and teaching environment.
What is the ‘place’ of teaching in higher education?
The impetus to create centres for learning and teaching in the 1970s and 1980s arose from three main developments.
First, there was an explosive growth in literature in the educational field that could inform teaching and contribute to better learning outcomes.
Second, governments increased pressure on higher education institutions to make use of resources more efficiently and effectively.
Third, there was a growing unrest among students concerning the quality of instruction (understandably, given the rising cost of tuition and the declining relative value of a degree in an increasingly competitive job market).
Despite their prominence, these three sets of priorites (dissemination of knowledge, the need for cost savings, and response to demands) represent very different, often conflicting, pathways for institutions. The need for cost savings conflicts with the desire for student access to quality teaching, and student demands sometimes conflict with the best practices of teaching. As well, there has been an incomplete fit between the growth in teaching-oriented professional development and improved student learning outcomes overall.
The ‘Place’ of Teaching
In research universities, teaching has often been considered a ‘lower tier’ of academic activities . This is not without reason if the focus is on graduate education, since on average only 30% of PhDs actually go on to academic positions in which teaching is a primary activity. Given this, it makes little sense to ask graduate students to devote a lot of time to prepare to be teachers. In addition, the universities’ focus on research as a source of funding means fewer expenditures on other initiatives with less potential for return. As a result, despite the fact that teaching occupies a considerable amount of professors’ time and energy, professional recognition or institutional support for teaching remains comparatively low. While less apparent in teaching-oriented universities and colleges, the same dynamics are at work driving teaching-oriented professional development at other institutions.
Despite their prominence, these three sets of priorites (dissemination of knowledge, the need for cost savings, and response to demands) represent very different, often conflicting, pathways for institutions.
The Great Acceleration
All three of the conditions that contributed to the creation of learning and teaching offices in higher education still persist. The growth in knowledge about learning, student expectations, and governmental belt-tightening are still at work. However, almost everything else about the environment has changed, creating a sense of flux and transition, opening up new opportunities and choices.
The crossroads confronting education is at least in part, a function of the wave of disruptive technology, including mobile and online options, which has upended education. New technologies diffuse power, eroding the monopoly of knowledge and expertise. This is evident in the boardroom as well as the classroom. In response, managing technological transition has become a key focus for centres for learning and teaching. The technological imperative is accompanied by the perception among administators (although not necessarily the reality) that new technologies will create cost savings and that students will demand them. The drive to incorporate and disseminate new educational technologies and to encourage their adoption by faculty has become central.
Administrative Imperatives
The fear of being overtaken by competitors is almost overwhelming. As W.D. Smith pointed out in Maclean’s a few years ago, the drive to be competitive (which incurs increasing costs for recruitment advertising and change management) are causing ballooning administrative costs. CBC news reports that “non-academic full-time salaries at Ontario universities, adjusted for inflation, rose 78 per cent from 2000/01 to 2013/14, from $934 million to nearly $1.7 billion (Davison, March 16 2015).”
The 2012 removal of Teresa Sullivan as President of the University of Virginia was motivated largely by concerns over “competition, technology and scarce resources.” Her subsequent reinstatement after an outcry from students and faculty vindicated her view that “corporate-style, top-down leadership does not work in a great university (Sampson, Aug 27 2012).”
Professional development that uses a transmission model is less suited to a world of rapid technological change.
The pressure to compete and for cost control also accelerates a focus on superficial measurement of professional development activities. As Broad and Evans point out in their summary of the PD literature, “evaluation connected to professional development tends to consist of “counting” or recording activities or outlining the activities undertaken with no analysis of their impact on learning or practice (25).”
Growth in Knowledge
The second big change is around the literature on learning and teaching. There is little agreement on what kinds of professional development actually lead educators to improve their teaching practice. The result is a cacophony of conflicting advice and forces. Approaches veer between the extremes of standardized delivery models on the one hand, and collaborative peer-led models of professional development on the other.
The complexity and ambiguity of learning and teaching, as evidenced by the trends in the literature, defies an easy fit into the ‘one size fits all’ model of delivery. Together with the trend toward knowledge sharing facilitated by network technologies, the need for a collaborative model of professional development is increasingly apparent.
The benefit of a collaborative approach is its recognition and respect for diversities of opinion and for the knowledge and experience of teaching practitioners. This philosophy prioritizes bottom-up expertise, dialogue, exchange of knowledge, problem-solving, realistic expectations, caring for the teacher and learner, and, at its core, a recognition of the ambiguity of the practice of teaching and learning. It prioritizes a consultative, open, and mutually supportive culture that recognizes disciplinary knowledge and respects differences while working to improve student learning outcomes by building relationships.
The complexity and ambiguity of learning and teaching, as evidenced by the trends in the literature, defies an easy fit into the ‘one size fits all’ model of delivery.
This approach, while true to the state of the literature on learning and teaching, is at odds with the third driver, that of improved cost-effectiveness. It is also at odds with the increasing pressures to be competitive and cutting-edge in an era of shifting technologies. Managing change under this philosophy is slow, incremental, and consensus-driven.
What is the ‘place’ of teaching in higher education?
The future of learning and teaching will be shaped by many conflicting forces. Shifting student demand, changing technologies, and a focus on organizational efficiency and measurable outcomes will continue to influence decisions. Proceeding as if all options are possible (and compatible) only deepens the cacophony and reduces effectiveness. Managing change in this transition means going beyond superficial forms of consultation to create new, more inclusive and open forms of collaboration. This is in line with the levelling influence of technology, and is a good fit with the dominant philosophies of education, which increasingly recognize the need to acknowledge and include the learner in all dimensions of the educational process.
Disruptive innovations are those that open up new markets by creating a demand using a simpler or different package of attributes from those available in existing markets. Such disruptions tend to emerge in contexts remote from the immediate concerns of an established industry, but ultimately have wide and deep effects that can cause radical shifts. Disruptive innovation is often less about the product and more about the delivery system or point of access to the product. For example, most of us still watch movies or tv shows, but tend to download or stream the content rather than visit a Blockbuster. Most of us listen to music and follow the news, but tend to download or stream music and use the internet to follow the headlines. In the past, we may have opened up our morning newspaper or put a record on a turntable. One of the lessons is that it is not sufficient to rely on demand for the product to drive a given mode of delivery.
While it is difficult to identify industries and firms ripe for disruption, the tendency is to point to large-scale concerns with overpriced products and stilted business models based on industrial-era formats. Higher education has been in the sights of those writing about disruptive innovation for precisely this reason. Its reliance on mass delivery of material through face-to-face lectures, the credit system which offers degrees based on time investment rather than competency, and its increasingly overpriced credential system has the hallmarks of an industry ripe for innovation.
I would argue that higher education is not a perfect fit, however, for the types of analysis offered by Clayton Christiansen and Sebastian Thrun and others concerned with disrupting education and encouraging more radical innovations.
In the case of higher ed, the product is less like a song or a movie or even a news article than it is like an extended experience.
In the case of higher ed, the product is less like a song or a movie or even a news article than it is like an extended experience. A better comparison might be with the travel industry, similarly engaged in delivering what might be termed an ‘experience’, and one which operates on the basis of time as an investment [or, in the case of a vacation or an education, a reward for effort].
Experience or even time is a more complex commodity than a book or a song. Although web-based booking has almost completely replaced travel agencies, professors are not like travel agents in that teaching involves a more complex and involved relationship than simply the ‘delivery’ of the material and the ‘reception’ in the mind of the learner. Music and movies are still ‘mass produced’ and streaming a movie or song is virtually the same experience as playing the song on a record or watching a VHS. In those industries, innovation was more disruptive because the experience the products offered were interchangeable. In education as in travel, the experiences are more differentiated and uniqueness is the stock in trade, and increasingly, it is the singular and unique interaction between the ‘consumer’ and the ‘product’ that creates and adds value.
it is for this broad reason that I hesitate to apply the frame of disruptive innovation to higher education. Yes, there are problems with the mass delivery model based on lectures and textbooks and tutorials. Yes, there will be challenges to the delivery model through MOOCs and even peer-led educational models as found on Redditt and other sites. However, a more likely outcome than a full rupture may be a disaggregation of the educational functions of accreditation, time in class, competencies, and resources. In my next blog post, I’ll explore a bit more how I see disruptive innovation affecting Arts education, which some see as particularly vulnerable to disruption. In fact, I will further argue that Arts education is actually less vulnerable to disruptive innovation than the STEM subjects precisely because of its unique character as an experience created by the organic relationship between teacher and student. Education is as much process as product.
Recently I’ve come across a couple of posts in support of ‘old school’ teaching styles. This one presents the ‘latest findings’ of recent studies that tend to support ‘tough’ teaching methods. This one, written by a prominent political scientist, laments the ‘demise’ of traditional education. It’s worth noting that these traditional voices are still relevant and in fact the arguments are becoming more prominent as educational technology upends the traditional teaching model in unexpected ways. It is completely understandable that educators might long for a more comfortable past, where authority was intrinsically respected (at least in our minds’s memory) and the power of the educator could be more easily leveraged to convey a universally recognized canon. One could also point to the ‘generation gap’ between ‘digital natives’ and others. However, I feel the heart of this debate is less technological than it is philosophical.
I’d like to use the next two posts to analyze this phenomenon. I’ll state from the outset that I remain an advocate of learner-centred teaching, which I understand to draw from constructivist and connectivist learning philosophies that contend: 1) that learners be held responsible for their learning process and goals; and 2) that teaching be attentive to the specific needs of learners.
I’ve noticed that considerable misunderstanding arises when learner-centred teaching is counterposed with ‘traditional’ teaching methods.
Do we need to choose between ‘the guide on the side’ instead of the ‘sage on the stage’?
Learner-centred teaching is not the ‘opposite of’ traditional teaching. Learner-centred teaching does not mean upending the relationship of respect between the learner and the teacher. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how instruction could be at all effective in the absence of mutual regard.
The defenses of those advocating ‘old school’ methods are therefore founded on a mistaken impression of what the ‘reformist’ alternative philosophies and methods are fundamentally about. It is, appropriately, the job of those who advocate changes to make their case. With the goal of opening a dialogue, let’s examine the arguments of the conservatives and some of the possible responses. What is precisely the argument for ‘old school’ instruction as we experience it today? I think it draws from several main premises, which I will extract from the two blogs posts described above. In this post I will address 2 of these, and in the next post I will talk about the last few.
‘Old School’ Arguments
Standards matter. Grades represent a real measure of accomplishment and effort. High levels of accomplishment deserve reward, and lower levels send an important signal to the student about their degree of learning, which can either motivate more effort or help the student realize they are unsuited. Standards are best determined by the experts in a field, who are best-placed to judge what skills and knowledge are necessary to succeed. To fudge on or de-emphasize grades is to rob students of the opportunity to excel or fail, both are necessary in the process of learning, and both will help students to advance.
A well-rounded education based on mastery should be the goal of learning. It is clear that a ‘well-rounded’ education for Barry Cooper (see his blog in the Calgary Herald) does not include things like anti-discrimination training or sustainability education, or explicit attention to soft goals like ‘well-being’. But what might a well-rounded education include?
Let’s take each of these premises in turn:
With respect to standards, learner-centred teaching emphasizes that the expectations of teachers must be high. There is no real disagreement on that. The disconnect arises I think when the emphasis is solely on meeting the standards set by teachers and other authorities. The assumption is that students will always set their own standards too low, and require the teachers’ intervention to achieve.
Students will choose high standards for themselves very often if given the chance, and will benefit from a learning environment in which the material is advanced, sometimes very advanced.
When students do choose high standards, requiring a teachers’ intervention actually robs students of the ability to be more conscious, and yes, more self-disciplined and persistent. This is because these external standards give the message that teachers are their sole source of feedback. Lipman mentions an interesting example: music students who chose teachers that would be tough on them. The point is that the students chose those standards and were therefore more self-motivated to learn as a result. Here I would cite work done by Ken Bain and other educators and psychologists who emphasize that an intrinsic interest in learning can be compromised when the focus is on extrinsic rewards and punishments. The result of ‘learning for the grade’ is that learners will do just enough to earn the grade and no more. If part of the goal of education is to learn self-reliance, why compromise that goal by removing any chance to be accountable to oneself.
2. With respect to ‘mastery’, there is again not really a disagreement here about the goal. For Cooper, though, mastery means a specific thing: the ability to be conversant in a specific culture. While one may argue about the content of that culture, I think we can agree that certain habits of mind underlie all forms of learning: the ability to be open-minded, critically-minded, curious, thorough, persistent, detailed, even-handed, thoughtful and reflective, a problem-solver, expressive, and/or skeptical. How we acquire these habits is still a question in hot debate in educational circles. It is far from resolved, but there is no reason yet to believe that mastery is any less likely to occur in a constructivist than in a traditional setting. There is also really no reason to believe that tolerance, commitment to community, or even self-development are incompatible with mastery learning. If we uncover the conservatives’ focus on a ‘well-rounded’ education, I think we will see something that very closely resembles ‘character-building’ or ‘service to the community’ as well as the acquisition of skills. These values underlie a lot of the ‘old school’ philosophy and are implicit values of education.
In my next post, I’ll look ahead to other components of the ‘old school’ argument: discipline, stress, and failure. Just what we look for in a well-educated individual.
Political Science students at Okanagan College this past Fall term have worked very hard to prepare work on cutting-edge political topics and issues. Students were challenged to analyze a political problem, consider various policy options, and come up with creative solutions. They prepared a blog, poster or paper to present their work. This showcase is a sampling of some of the best work done this term. My thanks to all of my hard-working students, it was a close competition among some outstanding submissions. I am blown away with the outstanding work that you do!
I have focused on those that are free, semi-free or web-based. I have also focused on those that are best suited to educators’ purposes, or are customizable for particular functions, or are particularly inspirational examples of what is possible.
singular and unique interaction between the ‘consumer’ and the ‘product’ that creates and adds value.
Dr. Rosalind Warner 
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