All Ireland Society for Higher Education
| Name: | Damien Raftery |
|---|---|
| Email: | damien.raftery@itcarlow.ie |
| Institution: | Institute of Technology Carlow |
This paper examines teaching excellence as a contested concept and approaches to encouraging teaching excellence in higher education, including award schemes and reflective practice. This discussion is framed in the context of the sustained challenges faced by higher education, particularly of advances in information and communication technology, growth in student numbers and diversity, and the move to a `Knowledge Society'. Skelton's (2005) four ideal-type understandings of teaching excellence in higher education are used to provide a framework.
If teaching excellence is to be used as a catalyst for change, to drive policy and practice, then within institutions a shared understanding must be developed and the criteria for identifying and rewarding teaching must be transparent and fairly applied. However conceived, teaching excellence requires time and hard work, and thus needs to be valued and rewarded.
It is clear that many competing flavours for understanding teaching excellence exist and that policy-makers tend to take performative positions whilst the scholarship of teaching excellence is currently dominated by psychologized understandings. Influenced by the psychologized ideal-type, I believe excellent teaching is characterised by a continuous striving by the teacher to improve student learning. An understandable tension exists between the benefits of striving to improve through a reflective practice approach and the inherent unsettling feelings due to continuously change.
To encourage innovations in teaching and learning, the culture of institutions of higher education needs to support experimentation - innovations that may lead to improvements or efficiencies, or may in failing contribute to a growing understanding. Quality enhancement must contribute to this culture, not impede risk-taking. Within institutions initiatives such as Teaching Circles (consisting of three to four academics, from new to experienced, who meet fortnightly to share and discuss a short piece of their current academic writing, modeled after Gillespie's 2005 Research Circles) should be supported.