Modelling pedagogy in the university

Reflections on teaching in an education faculty

10th International Conference on University Learning and Teaching (InCULT2021)

One of my publications is

Taber, K. S. (2021). Modelling pedagogy in the university: reflections on teaching in an education faculty. Paper presented at the 10th International Conference on University Learning and Teaching (InCULT2021). [Virtual]

InCULT2021 was organised by

  • the Asian Centre for Research on University Learning and Teaching (ACRULeT) at the Faculty of Education, Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM); together with
  • the Faculty of Educational Studies, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM);
  • Department of International Affairs (DIA), UiTM;
  • Office of Global Affairs, Ohio University

View the recording below:

Abstract

A major focus of the work of a university education faculty relates to pedagogy – both undertaking research and scholarship into it, and teaching about it. Often the primary imperative is to support teaching and learning in the schools. It should be expected that the instruction offered in an education faculty would be informed by the claims about good teaching practices that it generates. Yet, at the same time, there are clear differences between the higher education teaching context and the school classroom, and good practice in school teaching cannot simply be copied directly to university contexts.

This keynote will explore the challenges of selecting and enacting pedagogy in higher education by reflecting on two contexts. The first is working with graduates undertaking professional preparation for school teaching and who expect their lecturers to be exemplary teachers. The second context concerns giving lectures on research methods to a student population encompassing considerable diversity in terms of national and disciplinary backgrounds, dissertation topics, professional experience and previous study regimes. I will discuss examples of ways that I sought to model pedagogy through my own teaching and some of the tensions and complications involved in balancing beliefs about good teaching against student expectations of the role of a university lecturer. 

Text of the talk:

Modelling pedagogy in the university: reflections on teaching in an education faculty

Introduction

I am honoured to be asked to provide a keynote presentation for the 10th International Conference on University Teaching & Learning, and I would like to thank the committee for their kind invitation.

One initial thought I had when I realised that I was being invited to talk at a conference on Higher Education was that I was not the right person to do this – although I have been a student or teacher in higher education institutions for many years, my research expertise has primarily related to pre-university teaching and learning.

However, I realised that I did bring a perspective that might be of interest to colleagues because of the very fact that I spent twenty years teaching in a university setting as a supposed expert in teaching and learning when that expertise was centrally in teaching the natural sciences to adolescents, whereas my teaching role was working with adults in an education faculty. I think that conjunction raises some interesting issues of relevance to the theme of teaching in higher education.

It also occurred to me that my teaching experiences in higher education largely divided into two rather distinct categories.

  • For a decade the main focus of my teaching role was supporting new entrants to science teaching who were following a post-graduate course that led to a professional qualification, and was made up almost entirely of British students as the course was necessarily tapered for preparation to teach the English National Curriculum within the English school system.
  • Then there was a shift in my work, such that my final decade of teaching was mainly focusing on teaching educational research methods to students from all over the world with a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds.

I think that there was an interesting tension in my university teaching, in that I supposedly had some expertise relating to teaching, and my university students had a right to consider me as an expert who knew about pedagogy and should demonstrate this in my work: yet my expertise related to teaching adolescents in a specific school curriculum subject – and a university is not the same as a school, and teaching education is not the same as teaching chemistry or physics. Therefore I needed to both adopt and adapt principles and practices to fit into a different teaching and learning context.

I am certainly not going to claim that I responded to this challenge in any exemplary way, but I thought it might be useful to examine some of the things I tried. I think a subtext that underpins this discussion is the tension that sometimes arises from the way students' expectations about the teaching they are due may not match good pedagogical practice. This is especially significant nowadays when lecturers are in part judged by the evaluations of their students!

My background and career

As background information, here is a very quick outline of my career:

  • I studied chemistry at university
  • I then took a teacher preparation course that prepared me to teach chemistry and physics.
  • There then followed 17 years of teaching in schools and further education. Nearly all of this work concerned the natural sciences, teaching on courses with titles such as:
    • chemistry
    • physics
    • integrated science
    • science at work
    • engineering science – applied science
    • environmental science
    • For some years, however, I did also teach on a general 'access' course that provides adult students without the usual formal university entrance qualifications to prepare for university admission.

It is worth saying a little more about that, as I think it has relevance to the theme of my talk today.

Most of the students on this course were working towards entering degree courses in English literature, history, sociology or psychology. It was decided they should all learn some science, and I was approached to see if I would take this on. I was initially asked if I could put together a term's course as a kind of survey of key ideas in biology, chemistry and physics. This would have been a very broad course with no real depth, and I knew that learning was likely to be quite superficial as science concepts are often counter-intuitive and only fully appreciated with in-depth engagement.

I also suspected that many of the students on the Access course with its humanities emphasis, people who may well have experienced failure or disengagement in their schooling and had now made the brave step to re-enter education, would not want to study science; would lack self-efficacy in the subject; and may even resent being told they had to learn science.

So, I declined to develop a course along the lines requested, but offered to instead put together a course in 'science studies' – a course that would give students a taste of the nature of science. This was accepted by the course management, and so the course was focused on the nature of science and its human aspects using a limited number of topics and cases that I thought might be engaging. As I had suspected, some of these students were initially resistant to (and in some case probably nervous about) learning science – but they generally engaged well with the course where both its subject matter and teaching was more aligned with their specialist subjects than a straight science course would have been

I enjoyed preparing and teaching this course, and I think the experience proved useful later when I came to teach educational research methods to diverse groups of students.

Whilst I was teaching in schools and further education I undertook a number of additional post-graduate qualifications. The first was a Diploma in the Practice of Science Education that involved a series of small projects, then an M.Sc. degree based on dissertation research into girls' underrepresentation in physics in a large secondary school, and then a Ph.D. exploring students' developing understanding of a chemical concept. During this time I also had some modest input into work supporting preparing and in-service teachers.

When I moved to Cambridge to join the Faculty of Education I was initially largely working in teacher preparation and development, but was also encouraged to become involved in higher degrees work. Over time my workload shifted, and eventually I re-invented myself as a research methods lecturer.
Before I talk about that work in more detail, I need to say something about pedagogy and what is known as constructivism.

Constructivist teaching

Constructivism is one of the most referenced notions in educational theory, yet it also means different things to different people – which is perhaps why it is sometimes seen as innovative and progressive, sometimes as simply obvious good practice, but sometimes as dangerously trendy. Of course, the kind of constructivism I favour is the good kind!

Constructivism, at least in educational contexts, is in effect a theory of learning. It suggests that learning is an active process located in the learner.1 This certainly does not mean the teacher is superfluous or irrelevant, far from it, but it does mean the best teacher in the world might not be successful if the learner is distracted, uninterested, unprepared, scared, confused, hungry and so forth. Of course, part of a teacher's role is to motivate and engage learners – but sometimes that may not happen for reasons outside of the teacher's control.
Moreover, constructivism suggests that academic learning has particular characteristics. Learning is interpretive, incremental, and iterative.

Learning is interpretive

That learning is interpretive means that what the learner understands may not match the teacher's intentions because what the learner perceives depends upon the teacher's communication being interpreted in terms of the fund of interpretive resources the learner has available.

An obvious example is language. A migrant learner that has recently arrived in a country where they do not have the language of instruction at even a basic level will learn little by sitting in lectures and looking at the text in textbooks – no matter how exciting the lecturer or engaging the text.

This much is obvious.

But teaching uses examples, analogies, metaphors and so forth, and these may refer to things outside the learners' experience. Let me give you a simple example. When teaching about sound, a physics teacher may refer to compressions and rarefactions in the air. Now compression is a common word in English – but what is a rarefaction? It is not terminology commonly used these days. Francis Bacon wrote a (natural) history of density and rarity in 1623, but that was somewhat before my time.

I do recall that when the football world cup was played in Mexico in 1970 there was a lot of commentary about the challenge of playing at altitude due to the rarefied air. When I became a school teacher I wondered if that might provide a useful cultural reference to help explain the idea of rarefactions. Yet, I then realised that I had been 10 years old at the time of that World cup, so sadly my students would not remember anything about it. Unfortunately, popular culture references that can engage learners – pop stars, soap opera story lines, the latest hit Hollywood film – often have a limited shelf-life for use in teaching.

There is a concept in education called prerequisite knowledge – what one already needs to know to understand something new. A teacher teaching a topic to 16 years olds may assume the students will already have learnt essential background in earlier grades – at least when that background is set out in the curriculum. In practice this is not always so. A teacher may have skipped a topic. More often perhaps, learners may have missed classes, misunderstood, or simply forgotten earlier teaching – in which case new teaching may not be effective if this assumes related anchor points in prior knowledge that are not there.

In science education we find something even more problematic. Learners often come to class already having their own alternative conceptions of scientific ideas which may be quite inconsistent with the canonical accounts, and if so they will tend to mis-interpret teaching in terms of their existing understandings.

In effect a teacher's presentation always assumes certain background knowledge. We might suggest in this regard teachers fall into three categories:

  1. those who are not even aware that their presentation assumes particular background knowledge;
  2. those who are aware of this but do not think it is an issue because they have been careful to only rely on what learners are supposed to already know;
  3. those who are aware of making an assumption, and that they may therefore be wrong, and so seek to check using diagnostic assessment methods.
Learning is incremental

The second characteristic is the incremental nature of learning. Due mainly to the severe limitations of working memory, people can only hold a certain amount of information in mind at any moment, and this is an especially limiting factor when the information is (or seems to be) all novel and unrelated to their existing thinking. By definition, what a teacher (as a subject expert) can cope with at one time, is likely to be far beyond most novice learners.
So, teaching has to be organised into manageable learning quanta – only so much new information can be introduced in any class or seminar if we want the learners to take it away from the session. Moreover, permanent memories are laid down sometime after the event, and not everything will be recalled. So important ideas not only need to be emphasised during teaching, but also revisited in successive classes, and applied in different contexts, if we want learners to master and retain them.

We might ask how this relates to that traditional form of university teaching, the lecture, where a teacher spends an hour or however long, presenting material to students.

What we know about the apparatus of learning and memory in human beings suggests that any lecturer who spends an hour presenting a great deal of new material should not expect the learners to retain much of it – the human brain has simply not evolved to work that way! The best that such a lecturer should expected is that students come out of the sessions with good enough notes that any who then spend considerable time reviewing, reading around, and rewriting those notes will come to learn the intended material. 2

Several hours of follow-up work would then be required for each lecture – which does not sit well with the traditions of science degrees in some contexts where students have several lectures every morning and are in labs most afternoons, as they would simply not have the time to work up all their lecture notes sufficiently.

There are two ways in which a lecturer can give a lecture where the students generally come away with a good understanding of all the essential information.

One way is by pitching the work at too low a level. I am in danger of doing that today. I assume my audience will largely be those teaching in higher education, including many very experienced lecturers. Perhaps you will go away from this presentation today having understood everything and remembering all my key points simply because I am telling you nothing new, but just pointing out things that are already obvious to you all. Of course, I do hope you will get some insights from this talk, even if that may mean just making explicit some things your teaching experience has already led to you being tacitly aware of. But, if I am only telling you what you already know only too well, then the talk will be neither challenging, nor useful.

The other possibility is that the lecturer, being aware of the limitations of human cognition, has arranged the presentation around a modest number of new key ideas and has structured the talk so that these new ideas are supported by material that draws upon the audience members' existing knowledge and understanding, and which illustrate and exemplify, and reiterate, these key points. We might say it is that type of approach that allows lecturing to become teaching.

Learning is iterative

Learning is iterative because it is taking place in small steps, and is always based on the learners' interpretations of the new in relation to prior learning. Someone who has a bias or a misconception will use that as a starting point, and is most likely to interpret new experience in terms of that bias or misconception – and therefore reinforce it. Teachers know what they are teaching, but cannot be sure how it will be perceived by the learners.

Now, constructivist teaching is simply teaching that is designed to be effective given these basic features.

This probably does mean such teaching is more likely to be inquiry-focussed, learner-centred, dialogic and so forth – BUT it does NOT mean (as has been wrongly suggested) that there is minimal guidance from the teacher. For although it does mean that standing up and talking for an hour giving a presentation dense with new ideas and details is not likely to be useful; it does not mean the teacher does not try to teach their subject – but rather that they appreciate teaching involves more than telling.

In schools this may be straightforward.3 The teacher may present some basic ideas for 10 minutes, then set the students a structured activity – perhaps initially individually, then in groups – and then lead a review exploring students' responses and guide them towards the canonical account. Then there may be another activity which is designed to reinforce those key points that the teacher has highlighted in the class discussion, followed by some related homework.

In a school classroom, then, frequent shifts in activity between the teacher leading classroom dialogue and a range of other forms of organisation is often the norm.

Perhaps that is how many university teachers also work, even if most university lecture halls are not designed to facilitate such shifts. But that is some way from the standard lecture where students (often today sadly seen as customers or clients) often expect the teacher to spend the time communicating their expertise. Expectations, and student perceptions of what a teacher's job involves, may pressure the university teacher into doing all the talking, presenting for long periods, even though that is not good pedagogy.

As has often been recognised if a lecture is just about passing on lecture notes there are much cheaper approaches – indeed nowadays the notes could be transferred digitally in a way that avoids the need for the university to provide and heat lecture halls, allows the lecturer to get on with their research, and lets the students to stay in bed for another hour, which all parties may welcome.

Of course that is a caricature, and some lectures can be engaging, exciting, and funny – but a lecture which is good entertainment and is enjoyed by students does not ensure the students come away having understood and committed everything to memory.

I should point out that my science bias is relevant here. In many disciplines much teaching is done by seminars and the like. But when I went to Cambridge, the standard term for most class sessions was 'lecture', and indeed the University published a 'lecture list' setting out all the courses being taught.

Universities are different

Of course, there is an argument that the limitations on human learning we find in school teaching should not be applied in the university. After all,

  • adults are not children, and they have longer concentration spans;
  • undergraduates, and especially graduates, are more intelligent and mature than the typical school learner, and so can be expected to be more effective learners than children or adolescents;
  • undergraduates, and especially graduates, have highly developed metacognition and so can monitor and manage their own learning much better than school-age learners;
  • university students such as teachers in preparation are highly motivated as they are learning material likely to be highly relevant to personal goals (which may not always be true of school learners).

These are fair and important points – but in terms of the basic cognitive apparatus available to learners, the differences between school children and university students are a matter of degree, not kind.

Teaching future teachers

When I first went to Cambridge most of my input related to the Post-graduate Certificate in Education programmes which offered one year courses in certified teacher preparation for graduates. I had various inputs into these courses at different times but the main two roles I took on related to subject specific provision.

There are various ideas one seeks to get across to those entering teaching. One aspect is the interactive nature of teaching. A good teachers knows about their subject as has prepared well for the topics being taught. They also have knowledge about the curriculum, means of assessment, good pedagogy and so forth. But they also know about their students. No two classes are alike – even when they are supposedly equivalent – and every learner is unique. Teaching is a kind of relating. As the old joke goes:

What do you do for a living?
I am a teacher.
Oh, what do you teach?
Students.

Another key point to get across to new teachers, especially recent graduates who may have become acclimatised to studying through attending lectures, is that an attempt to give a lecture to a typical school class will likely be a disaster. Attention spans are short, and the students will lose concentration, motivation, and in some case any sense of duty to respect someone who simply talks at them for long periods. I knew full well that as a teacher there can be an imperative to be the one in the classroom doing and talking, even when you know that learners will learn more when they are actively engaging with materials rather than just being asked to listen. At least when those student activities are well designed and suitably structured.

But if I, as an education lecturer, am telling students that as teachers they have to make sure it is the learners who are doing most of the doing in the classroom, I should set an example. Otherwise I would seem to be saying 'Do as I tell you, and not as I do'.

One of our PGCE programmes was known as the middle school course.4 Because of the nature of the English school curriculum, and the government's policies about teacher qualification, the students on this course had to specialise in one of the three core curriculum subjects – English, mathematics or science – as well as be able to teach across a range of the subjects for the younger students.

I took on the role of teaching the subject specialist course those students who were science specialists. These will have all been graduates with a science background, but from a wide range of different degree courses.

In first meeting this group each year I wanted to engage the students an activity that would set the tone for the rest of the course. It is common when a group first meets to engage in some kind of 'ice-breaking activity' to allow students to get to know each other. I decided that I would not just ask students to say a little about themselves but to also ask each student to make a brief unprepared presentation to the group.

Perhaps to appreciate this activity it is useful to know about a conceit that has been part of government assumptions undermining graduate teacher education in England for some years. This is the assumption that even though teachers are expected to have good subject knowledge, the teacher preparation courses was not expected to include time to teach any science. As these students were science graduates they were expected to already know the science and the course was to help them to find out how to teach it.

Now that logic suggests a considerable level of ignorance of education, or a high level of contempt in ignoring the actual situation.

As discussed earlier, we should never assume someone knows something just because they are supposed to have already been taught it. Moreover, the level at which science is represented, modelled in school curriculum is not that at which it is studied on degree courses. Furthermore, learning for teaching requires a much deeper engagement than learning to pass an exam. As if that was not enough, the students were expected to be able to teach across all science curriculum topics, regardless of whether their own degree was in mechanical engineering, genetics, psychology, industrial chemistry, electronics – or whatever.

So, to my activity. I would take to the class a lucky-dip box which this contained cards on which were printed terms which occurred in the science curriculum. Each member of the class would have to present for just a couple of minutes on a science topic – drawn by chance, and without time to prepare.

Now it may seem that this was a little cruel and perhaps was a good way to mortify anyone feeling under-prepared for the course – such as say the physics graduate who might draw a card labelled 'xylem'. Yet the task actually went well, and students seemed to genuinely enjoy the activity.

I think this was because of the rules of the game. I would ask for a volunteer to speak first, to introduce themselves and present on a topic drawn from the box. That student would draw their topic, and reveal it to the class. But then they would have a choice.

They could proceed with the talk, or they could decide to defer their turn till later when they could have another attempt at the lucky dip – but only as long as someone else in the class would volunteer to take their place. So, our hypothetical physicist who may not remember ever having heard the term 'xylem' could offer this topic to the class, and someone with a biology background was likely to opt to take this on, rather than risk themselves later drawing a topic they knew little about.

I know the activity produced engagement, fun, and some laughter. I think it also produced some important learning about

  • how teachers cannot be expected to know everything;
  • how it is important to prepare well for class rather than work 'on the hoof'; and in particular
  • the value to teachers and student teachers of that incredible resource they should not be afraid to tap into – their peers.

At the end of the first meeting of the class there was a group of people who had already started supporting each other on the course.

One of my other roles was as the physics education specialist working with graduates who would become secondary science teachers with a physics specialism. One day a week when in Faculty the students worked in their specialist subject groups 5, and I arranged the programme so that each time the class met we considered a different physics topic, but I would feed in material on generic issues in to the different topics. At that time there was less talk about so-called 'flipped learning' which has become more common since.

The idea of flipped learning is that rather than class sessions being primarily about information transfer from teacher to student with students left to consolidate and apply learning after class, it is better to set pre-session work to enable students to familiarise themselves with the ideas of a topic, and then class time spent on applying those ideas under teacher supervision. That is, of course, a rather minimal description, but I imagine many of those in this audience are already very familiar with this notion which has had a lot of attention in higher education teaching.

The approach is more problematic when working with school children because of differences referred to earlier – most children often do not have the study skills, metacognitive sophistication or intrinsic motivation to effectively study in any depth ahead of class from, say, reading a textbook, and a key role of the teacher is to find ways to engage learners with abstract ideas and use techniques like role play, analogy, metaphor, narratives, modelling of various kinds, and so forth to 'make the unfamiliar familiar' – but those limitations did not apply to my teacher candidates. (I should note that with the increasingly availability of well-designed on-line learning resources which have more interactivity than a traditional textbook, flipped learning is becoming somewhat more viable for school level learners.)

Whilst I would prepare material for each topic, I would also set the students preparatory work working in groups. We encourage teachers to use group-work with their classes. A key reason for this is to facilitate dialogue that can support learning when learners engage in discussing ideas with peers at similar levels of knowledge and understanding. When working in a group, one is encouraged to make one's thinking explicit, and to justify it, and so open that thinking to critique. Group-work relies upon, and can develop, inter-personal skills and can encourage aspects of metacognition such as planning, monitoring and evaluating progress on a task. Our graduate students should be well advanced in such matters, but in becoming teachers it is important that much implicit knowledge they have acquired as successful learners is made explicit and reflected upon. In Vygotskian terms, group tasks can encourage working in the 'ZPD', the zone of proximal development, and what is made explicit in the inter-personal or social plane will become explicit too in the intra-personal or mental plane.

So, I would organise students into small groups, and set each group a task for the following session. Importantly, the task was preparing to present to the wider group, so, as in 'constructionist' approaches to learning, the students were developing a product for public consumption. Perhaps next week's session is on heating or electricity or nuclear physics. Different groups could be given different foci – researching common student conceptions and learning difficulties; relevant laboratory practical work; mapping out the content included in the upper secondary and advanced level curriculum; researching useful teaching resources for the topic… Groups would be asked to take on different foci for different sessions.

In this way, the students in their groups took over the teaching of aspects of the topic to their peers. This then modelled something we would be encouraging them to do in their own teaching when they went on school placements. Of course, the teacher may delegate tasks, but remains the person responsible for the class. As the tutor, I not only observed these inputs, but acted as inquisitor, provocateur, supplementary source of information, corrector, evaluator… Thus I not only modelled the use of learner-focused learning activities, but also how the teacher has to moderate such activities and retain overall direction of the process.

One of the key ideas new teachers have to learn is how students may come along to class with missing, incomplete, or distorted prior learning – and this only becomes clear if the students are given scope to express their thinking. This applied just as much with my graduate class as with their own students in the schools. Similarly, we impress upon new teachers that just because you have taught something clearly and accurately, you cannot assume students will have learned it without revisiting the ideas later in new contexts and giving them opportunities to work with the ideas. This applies at any level, and my graduates will have found us returning to the same principles in new contexts, with my eliciting their application of key ideas, feeding back on their use of these idea, and modelling how we apply them in teaching.

It was also possible to model the use of some teaching techniques that can apply across levels. So, for example, asking learners to take full notes in class can use a lot of time, and put a lot of effort into the mechanical activity of copying what is being presented.

Yet, providing hand-outs with the full notes risks students not feeling they need to engage with the notes during class. Ideally, we want student activity, mental activity, that is an effective use of time. Indeed, ideally, we want talks set in the student ZPD where they are facing a challenge, but one which they can master with the support provided.

D.A.R.T.s

In schools one approach is to use DARTS – directed activities related to text. This may mean providing text subjected to modified cloze procedures – such as blanking some words (with or without a provided list of the missing words), or only showing the initial letter of some words. Students have to actively engage to identify the correct words to enter into blanks to complete the notes. This takes time, but that time is largely spent thinking, not mechanically copying. The difficulty of the task can be differentiated depending on the number and choice of omissions made. In the original CLOZE procedure to assess reading levels every nth word is removed from a text on some familiar topic. In the modified version for teaching, omissions are made more strategically – for example blanking words that can be deduced from the rest of the provided text, but only with careful reading.

Other activities that may be used include providing diagrams (or graphs) with missing labels to be completed by reading an associated piece of text – or alternatively providing a diagram with labels that help learners identify words missing from a text. Another example would be to provide learners with instructions for some activity – but with those instructions broken-up and presented out of sequence so that the learners have to think about and understand the process they are being asked to follow in order to re-order the sequence correctly. Activities such as these can be adapted to any level of learner, and by using these kinds of activities with the student teachers they could appreciate the learner experience and logic of the approach, rather than simply being told this is something they could used in their own teaching. So again it was possible to model teaching approaches rather than simply recommend them.

The graduates on the teacher preparation course had the common aim of qualifying to teach in UK schools, and generally appreciated how the course aims, structure and content were aligned with the national standards for new teachers.

My other main area of university teaching was somewhat different in that regard. My teaching of research methods was also largely to graduate groups, but of quite different nature. Of course, graduate students at a top university will tend to be intelligent, hard working, and highly motivated, so I am certainly not suggesting these were difficult groups to teach: far from it, it was real privilege to have been able to work with both these categories of students. However, the context was very different.

For one thing these were mostly international students, and Cambridge attracts students from all around the world. That provided a good education for me! Students had very different backgrounds, norms and expectations. So, for example, a student from one country would expect to call the teacher by their first name on first meeting, whereas a student from another county might feel it is appropriate to still call you professor even after working closely with you for years – perhaps at best eventually graduating from Professor Taber to Professor Keith! Expectations about what happens in the lecture room can vary significantly especially in relation to being asked to make public contributions, and being invited to critique and even disagree with what other students or the professor presents.

Moreover education attracts students with backgrounds from across the disciplines – arts, humanities, social and natural sciences. Many of these have teaching experience or aspirations – but by no means all. Many of our students were interested in policy issues or saw educational settings as the focus of research that was historical, sociological, psychological, economic or philosophical. Some of our students were primarily interested in issues of global development, or equity, rather than with teaching and learning.

I taught on the Educational Research course which was intended to prepare students for doctoral work across education,6 as well as on the core methods component of various themed courses. In those core courses, students were mixed from across the wide range of master's courses offered. Many of our students were undertaking empirical research of one form or another, but some were doing library-based research, and some were doing philosophical or literary analysis.

This presented two issues for those teaching on these courses. The first is the diversity of backgrounds. Whilst this offers an immense and valuable resource within the cohort, going back to my point about how a group of students bring an incredible fund of experiences and knowledge which can potentially be shared, it also made it very difficult to assume any common background. All the students were graduates – but there was no set of concepts, paradigms, perspectives, or even technical terms that would be common to them all. Any particular aspect of the course content was likely to be extremely familiar to those with a certain disciplinary background, but completely novel to others in the class.

The second issue concerned relevance. On a taught course it is possible to design an examination that has questions reflecting all lectures, making all the sessions seem potentially relevant to the students. On a course where assessment is by evaluating outcomes of a personal research project it is obvious to students that not all of the sessions are directly relevant to their own project.

Our philosophy had been that students should be prepared to engage with – that is, at least read critically – research from across the educational spectrum. Some students bought into that and were always genuinely grateful for being taught something new, even if they could see it was not something they would be applying in their current project. Other students, understandably, felt that they could find more targeted use for their time than being in some classes – reflecting that at the end of the day it was the quality of their thesis that would be graded and which may be critical in getting that dream position they were working towards.

This was an inherent structural issue, that was only in part addressed by offering some degree of electives on the course. A student who was a counsellor practitioner may feel that they only wanted to focus on the traditional enquiry approaches accepted in their professional area, students working on literary sources may see little point in learning about fieldwork methods, some from arts education may have no interest in learning about quantitative approaches whilst someone doing psychological research following experimental paradigms might not see the relevance of learning about interpretivist approaches. I could not solve the problem as a teacher assigned a range of topics to lecture on, but I could do two things, neither of which, I expect, will strike the audience today as earth-shattering.

The first point was to apply my knowledge of how we advise school teachers to my own teaching. The sessions were usually 2 hours or sometimes 90 minutes, but some sessions were 4 hours. Clearly structuring sessions with changes of activity was essential. Even where a session was largely a 'lecture', it was important to build in points where the lecturer stopped talking and students were asked to undertake some individual or small group activity to either reinforce what they had just heard, or to act as an 'advance organiser' for what was to come later.

For example, students were asked to see if they could work in small groups to match the terms and descriptions of key principles in Personal Construct Theory as an introductory activity before the theory was taught. They were aware I was not assuming they would know this before being taught, but this actively engaged thinking about the terms, and primed their attention when I revealed the answers.

I also drew on the research in science education that reminds teachers that students may come to class with alternative conception of concepts or terms, or with ideas which will tend to lead to them misinterpreting new ideas they meet; and that novel ideas are seldom acquired and later recalled accurately after one presentation; and that ideas which seem fairly simple and straightforward to someone familiar with them (such as a teacher) often seem complex and extensive to someone meeting them for the first time.

In particular I sought to draw on a number of basic pedagogic principles that featured in my own writing for teachers.

Teaching models

In teaching a subject such as science, we often find that the current canonical accounts are simply too complex, subtle and abstract to make sense to learners new to a topic. So, we develop introductory curricula models and teaching models that simplify the canonical accounts, emphasising core principles, but omitting detail and nuance. Whilst this is sensible and indeed often necessary, I think we should always be explicit about doing this this and make it clear that we are teaching an introductory account that can be developed further.

Familiarisation

Wherever possible, novel abstract ideas that cannot be directly demonstrated should be introduced in comparison with something familiar that can act as a starting point for learning about the new content. Again, the teacher should be explicit that they are using analogy, metaphor or whatever, so that learners do not confuse the comparison for the target concept.

Learning quanta

Given the limited capacity of human working memory, whatever is novel in a session should be introduced sparingly and incrementally – in manageable learning quanta.

Drip-feed

Related to this, key new ideas introduced in one lecture, should be revisited and applied in later sessions to reinforce and support consolidation, and the new technical vocabulary associated with these ideas should be modelled frequently so the terms, and the way in which they can be used, become habitual.

Relevance

A key issue was to do what I could to make sessions relevant to as many of the students as possible. Time only allows a couple of examples to illustrate this.
One technique I used a lot was to introduce an idea, principle or model in teaching and ask the students to apply this to published research. In preparation I would ask students to select and briefly review 2 or 3 studies before the class and bring copies of the studies with them to class. There might be some criteria: often these needed to be empirical studies with a detailed account of the research design and methodology applied. However, I would tell students they were welcome to bring examples of studies they had accessed to read for their own projects, or to look for research on anything that interested them. In this way, even if the examples I used in class to introduce and exemplify a principle did not seem of particular interest to some in the class, they would then be applying the ideas in the context of research that was relevant and interesting to them.

When teaching about methodologies such as action research, grounded theory or case study, I would circulate titles of a large number of diverse studies claiming to use that approach and ask students to select two or three form that list or if they preferred seek out their own examples.

Of course, even when teaching about research, not everything can be taught through working with reports of published studies. So, when I devised other activities for use in class, I would use course-wide ideas as examples and subject matter, as foci for the activity.

As an example, in teaching about Kelly's triads and the construct repertory test, a data collection technique that uses a kind of card-sorting process, for one activity I would provide cards with terms taken from the research course itself, so that in sorting the cards the students were required to think about key course ideas, making the focus of the activity, if not its nature, relevant to all members of the class.

When I first taught the sessions on qualitative data analysis this was alongside a colleague who used for an activity some (anonymised) data from a real research project. This gives an authentic activity, but one where considerable time has to be spent introducing students to the purpose and nature of the project and the logic of the specific coding being applied – when the project itself was only directly relevant to the research of a small minority of the class.

When I took on the sessions by myself I compiled a set of published interviews with researchers from a wide range of backgrounds and approaches to be treated as the data to be analysed (pointing out that this was not really raw data as we had no knowledge how the interviews had been transcribed and edited, but we could treat it as if data for the purposes of the exercise). Students could select an example they saw as most relevant or interesting. The class then sought to analyse this data in two different approaches, one of which used codes I provided based on key concepts from the research course.

Again, the purpose was to find some common ground in the activity such that even those course members who were never going to use any qualitative methods of data analysis in in their own research could appreciate that this was an activity asking them to apply the concepts they were learning on the course.

Conclusion

As I mentioned above, it may be that I have just told you what you already know – that I have, as that rather odd idiom goes, only been teaching grandmothers to suck eggs. However, I do hope I have offered some ideas, principles, examples that may be useful – perhaps drawing on your knowledge of teaching in higher education, and helping make some of your tacit knowledge more explicit.

I came into higher education having already been formed as a teacher working in schools and further education, and initially as someone being asked to use that experience to support the learning of new teachers. Therefore even though it was clearly obvious to me how teaching in University, and especially on graduate courses, was in some ways very different to teaching in a school, I was also motivated to reflect deeply on how the principles that apply in school teaching also apply in teaching other groups of learners as well, and how those same principles could inform teaching different content to very different groups.

My teaching of educational research methods presented a very different challenge to teaching chemistry and physics to children, but my experience of using pedagogy in the school classroom, and then modelling some of those techniques in graduate teacher education provided background experience I was able to apply to this new context.

Those of us who come into University teaching as trained and experienced school teachers are lucky to have that background and fund of experience to draw upon. I know most University teachers do not follow this route, and indeed sometimes receive limited support in learning about pedagogy when they start teaching in the university sector. I hope therefore that some of what I have shared today may make useful material for others to reflect on.

Notes:

1 Strictly, here I am discussing what is sometimes known as 'personal' constructivism, as opposed to social constructivism. My own view is that these are not competing accounts, so much as complementary descriptions at different levels.

2 [Edited from the final script on grounds of time] It was this empirical finding that turned me from a highly enthusiastic and conscientious science student on entering my first year of university to a highly enthusiastic and conscientious student representative and committee member on entering my second year! I needed to be doing something I felt I had some chance at being good at. That I felt a failure at being a student by the end of my first term of university was in part because I had already read a lot of books about learning and study skills and probably actually knew more about learning (but certainly not chemistry) than my lecturers, so felt I was in a position to realise how hopeless the task of mastering all my lecture courses would be. Whether that evaluation was actually correct, my period of despondency about my studies was probably a very useful experience for a future teacher.

3 Teaching is never that straightforward, and this includes school teaching. All classes are to some extent 'mixed ability', and, mixed in many other ways (aptitude, interest, motivation, cultural resources, social capital…); school teaching involves requiring people to attend regardless of their preferences, and requires the subject matter to be fitted into a formal timetable of, e.g., 50 minute slots. However, in many contexts, the teacher has freedom to divide the class up in ways (both temporally, and via grouping) that may not be feasible or acceptable when lectures are expected.

4 Later it was referred to as the KS2-3 course, which means nothing to anyone outside the English system.

5 This one day per week only applied during the period when students were not on block professional placements in schools. Later the specialist input was cut to half a day a week. Later, still, shortly before I withdrew form working on that programme, it was cut further. The amount of time available in a one-year course where the government requires students to spend 2/3rd of the time in schools is a major resource constraint.

6 When I first worked on this course it was seem as a kind of flagship course as it had to have special accreditation to allow doctoral scholar funded by the national research councils. The course included both doctoral students and masters students looking for an MPhil in Education Research (which would later allow progression to a PhD, but was also seen as a significant training in educational research fro those who did not intend to proceed to further qualifications. This was a full-time one year course which could hte the first year, or a preparatory year for doctoral study. Later the 2-year part-time equivalent course was incorporated with this course, which was a progressive move in terms of the mix of students in the group (more home-based students as part-timers had to be relatively local) but led to the obvious problem of trying to sequence a course progression that worked for both groups of students, some attending twice a week, some only attending on one day but over two years.

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