Running with the wind of change

Teaching assessment focuses on stars, but it must also reward the hard slog of the majority, argues Caroline Bucklow

It came as a bit of a shock when, along with other associate lecturers for the Open University, I recently rec-eived a questionnaire asking me to reflect on how I could become an excellent teacher.

I had never consciously thought about being an excellent tutor. Aspiring to excellence means focusing on improving your own performance in the chosen area, often to the exclusion of other interests. Achieving excellence takes time and, as a part-time teacher, I have many other equally pressing demands. I suspect that many of us have been content to do a good job and let others strive for excellence - just like many students are content to get a respectable degree and let somebody else scoop the first-class honours.

At first sight, this attitude rests uneasily with my role as director of accreditation at the Institute for Learning and Teaching. After all, the decision to establish the ILT grew out of a commitment to excellence. But on further reflection I feel more comfortable.

As a professional body for all those working in teaching and learning support in higher education, the institute exists first and foremost to act as a catalyst for the development of good professional practice throughout the higher education community.

To meet this objective the institute needs a vision of the pursuit of excellence more on the lines of the London Marathon than the Olympic Games. The London Marathon provides a place for serious athletes - those who are there to break records and to strive for excellence in that sense - but for the majority of the runners, excellence is achieved by completing the course in a respectable time, preferably without too much pain, with the aim of supporting a charitable cause.

The character of the London Marathon is as much supportive as competitive and this approach enables all participants to achieve more than they could hope to on their own. In the same way, teaching needs its stars - practitioners with an international reputation in their subject, but excellent learning environments are also created by teachers without such a high profile, who struggle to balance the conflicting demands of teaching, administration and research with limited time and resources. The efforts of both groups are essential to advance teaching and learning.

As a professional body governed by a council elected by its members, the institute will be well placed to support and respond to the needs of all those seeking to create excellent learning environments, whether they are mainly engaged in teaching, research or learning support.

In February 1998, a nationwide consultation was held to give the sector the opportunity to express its views on how the institute should develop. The consultation showed a consensus on a number of ways in which the institute can work to create a climate of excellence.

First, the institute can encourage interaction between the research and teaching aspects of professional practice, ensuring that research informs all teaching in higher education and stimulating research activity in emerging areas. The institute can disseminate good practice and encourage experts in any discipline to learn from developments in their own and other disciplines. For many academic staff keeping abreast of research developments in their own field is a time-consuming activity and finding out about innovation in teaching and learning can be difficult.

Through its publications, conferences and seminars, and by working with other professional bodies and subject organisations, the ILT will provide accessible information on innovation in teaching and learning.

A particular focus will be on the transfer of ideas and practice between and across disciplines.

Second, the ILT will help to raise the status of teaching as a professional activity in higher education so that excellence in teaching and learning support can command as much respect as excellence in research.

Already many universities and colleges have in place, or are developing, programmes that encourage reflective practice and develop the teaching skills of their academic staff. It is encouraging that many established academics, as well as new staff, are enrolling on such programmes.

By accrediting staff development programmes and encouraging established staff to undertake continuing professional development in the field of learning and teaching, the ILT aims to support the universities' and colleges' own efforts to promote the importance of teaching alongside research.

The ILT will also play an important role in stimulating public debate about learning and teaching in higher education.

The institute is keenly aware of the importance to society of the quality of learning and teaching in higher education. Higher education is a global activity, with developments in learning technology allowing students to choose to study in many different ways.

The ability of the UK to compete internationally depends on maintaining high-quality learning provision in higher education. As the diverse student population becomes more discriminating, academic staff in universities and colleges need to be aware of the potential for innovative teaching and learning methods to satisfy students' needs and expectations.

The institute's most recent consultation document, focusing on membership and accreditation criteria, has stimulated considerable debate, both about the scope of teaching as a professional activity and about how academic staff should be expected to demonstrate their professional expertise in teaching.

Clearly excellence in teaching is distinct from the ability to satisfy the membership criteria of a professional body. A national framework that reflects the scope and diversity of activities encompassed by teaching and learning support in higher education will, however, provide a sound basis for developing standards of good professional practice for the institute's members and potentially for all those with teaching and learning responsibilities.

A common understanding of requirements for professional practice across the range of teaching and learning activity can provide a healthy stimulus for developing good practice in areas that may have received little attention in the past.

Those of us who are responsible for getting the ILT off the ground have a clear vision of what the institute should be like.

Our vision is of a membership organisation open to all those engaged in teaching and learning support in higher education who share its objective of improving the status of teaching as a professional activity. It will be an innovative organisation that encourages diversity in approaches to learning and teaching and is responsive to the needs of the whole of the sector. Most of all it will be shaped by the concerns and experience of practitioners.

Like the participants in the London Marathon, ILT members will bring to the institute diverse expectations and concerns but working together towards a common goal they will achieve more to create excellence in learning and teaching than any individuals, however talented, can hope to do on their own.

Caroline Bucklow is director of accreditation at the Institute for Learning and Teaching.

HOW TO TEACH WITH EXCELLENCE

Don't try to develop excellence through money or position - it will not work."

Phil Race Independent consultant

"Set up structures and strategies to encourage, recognise and reward."

"Advertise successes locally, nationally and internationally."

Gina Wisler Anglia Polytechnic University

"The discipline specialist and the educational developer - like the farmer and the cowboy - should be friends."

Lewis Elton University College London

"Enabling staff to focus on this activity and require effective training and development."

K. Mason O'Connor Cheltenham and Gloucester College

"Promotion through giving staff the opportunity to reflect on how and what they deliver, providing the support to give them new ideas."

Alison Holmes University of Northumbria

"If we wish to promote excellence we need to know:

* What we mean by this so we can recognise it

* Reward it appropriately at institutional and individual levels

* Recognise the expertise of educational developers

* Put in place structures and systems that offer appropriate support and are promoted as legitimate by senior managers."

Sarah Holyfield University of Wales, Bangor

WHAT IS EXCELLENCE?

"Excellent teachers enthuse students towards high-quality learning."

Phil Race Independent consultant

"Ask practitioners how to define excellent teaching, learning and assessment - 'truly enables good quality learning'."

Gina Wisler Anglia Polytechnic University

"That which leads to life-long learning - for students and teachers."

Lewis Elton University College London

"Excellent teaching starts people learning by providing enough information, confidence, ideas, enthusiasm and vision."

Ian Hewes University of Essex

"Excellent teaching is whatever leads to excellent learning. It cannot be described only in terms of what the teacher does."

Graham Gibbs Centre for Higher Education Practice, Open University

"Enabling students to fulfil their learning potential."

K. Mason O'Connor Cheltenham and Gloucester College of HE

"Excellent teaching stimulates interest (and hence learning), excellent learning excites further learning, excellent assessing is fair, appropriate and promotes more learning."

Alison Holmes University of Northumbria

"Excellence in teaching, learning and assessment is the benchmarking of standards, which demonstrate effective activities that have empowered people to learn."

Lesley Moore University of the West of England

"At a personal level teaching is an activity involving personal exposure, a risk of public failure, a need for competence in one's academic area - it is safer to stand in the shade of an OHP and hide behind one's role as an 'expert'."

Sarah Holyfield University of Wales, Bangor