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Hi again Very interesting discussion. I do take the points about the richness of facilitation, but if you come from a tradition which sees 'good' education as open-ended, enquiry-based dialogue, the question is whether the teacher is a full participant in the conversation, or facilitating a conversation between others? William Pinar's work on curriculum is very interesting. He argues that teachers should be ' confirmed not as facilitators of learning but as individuated communicants in a complicated conversation that is informed by academic knowledge, subjectivity and the historical moment' (Pinar 2012, 25-26). If we're all, teachers and students, communicants in this 'complicated conversation', there's potentially a different power balance. And arguably, this makes the teacher more fully present in the moment. Lots of interesting 'teacher identity' issues... Dilly Dr Dilly Fung PFHEA Director, Centre for the Advancement of Learning and Teaching (CALT) UCL 020 7679 5939 (Internal ext. 45939) 1-19 Torrington Place London WC1E 7HB [cid:D7CDF5F1-4118-42FD-912D-FFC891D7067E] On 16 Jul 2015, at 13:40, Lawrence.Cleary wrote: Sorry, I know this conversation has moved on, but just wanted to respond to John Lea’s reference to Carl Roger’s notion of a good teacher as being a facilitator of other people’s learning. I have always preferred to call myself a facilitator rather than a teacher. I think of facilitation of knowledge as Foucault thinks about his archaeological project in The Order of Things. “What I am attempting to bring to light,” he says in his preface, “is the epistemological field, the episteme in which knowledge, envisaged apart from all criteria having reference to its rational value or its objective forms, grounds its positivity and thereby manifests a history which is not of its growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility;…what should appear are those configurations within the space of knowledge which have given rise to the diverse forms of empirical science.” As facilitator, I feel it my job to open up and critically analyse the conditions of possibility, those configurations within the space of knowledge, to invite others to do so, and to mourn a little the knowledges left in the wake of the manifestations of a given epistemological field because of their perceived lack of value, including some of those knowledges that those facilitated have left at home or buried. My job is to create a space and welcome possibilities. Best, Lawrence From: Online forum for SEDA, the Staff & Educational Development Association [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Alison James Sent: 16 July 2015 09:33 To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: TEF thoughts Without wanting to go too far off-piste with this one I am intrigued by the bad press that ‘facilitation’ or being a ‘facilitator’ has been getting recently. To me facilitation is not just empty string pulling but how you elicit learning from others, or create an environment/experience in which others do that for themselves (etc etc). I don’t see facilitation as being divorced from knowledge or love of subject because these are crucial (but not the only ingredients) wrapped up in a person’s skilful ability to move a learner or learners forward, open minds, make them curious and questioning. Good facilitators inspire a love of learning just as much as teachers do – and I’m not convinced that they are always or entirely separate roles. Lots of problematic words there for list members to take a whack at there I imagine :) All best Alison From: Online forum for SEDA, the Staff & Educational Development Association [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf OfLea, John ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) Sent: 16 July 2015 08:18 To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: TEF thoughts But what does an inspirational teacher inspire if not the love of learning? I know a lot of people don't like the Carl Rogers notion of a good teacher being a facilitator of other people's learning because facilitator sounds vacuous and seriously underplays the knowledge and love of subject, but the gift is surely in passing that baton. One of the most inspiring things a teacher said to me was to remember that everything I was being taught today will be proven to have been wrong in a few years time. That was exactly what I needed to hear because it inspired me to believe that I could make knowledge not just receive it. I had this confirmed by Rogers again - nothing wrong with a bit of dependency but the truly inspiring thing is to know that you can break free. In everyday life I never quite got that phrase 'if you love someone set them free' but it works for me in education. Back to the TEF. Helen is right, the 'English' problem is that we've lost trust in teachers which is why we keep holding them to account, and probably why the NSS questions look the way they do, because they are part of that legacy. I like the U.S. on this - why not ask a student not whether their teachers have been good at explaining things, but have you ever gone to a seminar without doing the required reading. The first question is not very inspiring, the second one just might make a difference in what it could inspire. Yaz is right, let's just have a student engagement survey. Best John John Lea Sent from my iPhone On 15 Jul 2015, at 23:44, Helen Beetham <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote: I agree with Stephen. All animals learn: only the most socially advanced animals teach. In human beings, teaching is a deeply embedded instinct as well as a conscious intention to support the flourishing of others and a socially constructed set of practices. Though I would guess that people who learn 'well' tend to be drawn to teaching, there are excellent teachers who have struggled with learning, at least in formal settings, and whose motivation is to make the experience better. So to learn well isn't necessarily to teach well and vice versa. The problem with 'teaching' was surely that it had become a set of reified practices, transmitted fairly unreflectively from teaching generation to teaching generation, and without attention either to the accumulating evidence about how people learn or to the changing world in which their learning had to make sense. The turn towards 'learning' as the measure of educational value was critical in challenging the status quo, particularly in post-compulsory settings where teachers had for too long got away with being good at a particular area of knowledge or practice, rather than good at (actually) teaching. 'Learning' rather than 'teaching' was (to use a phrase I think I got from Stephen once) 'good action poetry'. it was a linguistic change that made changes to practice more likely. But in recent years it seems to me that the turn towards 'learning' has been used to deny that a thing called teaching is a distinctive human activity, is professionally credible, or socially valuable, or even that it properly exists. Formal learning should be more like informal learning, we are told. Put a networked computer into a classroom, and children will learn far better than they can with a boring old teacher. At the height of this movement a few years ago, any document with serious educational intent had to have 'find/change' applied so that the word 'learning' could be substituted for 'teaching' wherever the latter might have crept in, even in phrases where 'learning' made no sense at all. The problem with 'learning' as the only measure of teaching is the one Stephen also identifies - that much of what happens when we learn is deeply hidden inside the person. It may not be expressed in the shared world for many years. It may not be expressed in any observable way at all. Perhaps I learn to be happier with myself, and other kinds of change become less important. Despite regular claims that we are only one - or three - or five - years away from understanding exactly how neurological changes correspond to changes in what we are able to do, still we aren't there yet and when we are it is unlikely we'll be able to put our students a PET scan and measure the cellular changes every time we want to assess their learning. And at the other end of the explanatory scale, much of what happens when we learn is inescapably situational, so it might only be expressed with those people, or in that place, or when that problem arose, inconveniently removed from the time and place of assessment. It would be mad to suggest that we can't test for what has been gained in learning - a lot of the time we can, if we structure the teaching/learning situation to do that. But would we want every teaching/learning situation to be designed so that the outcome can be tested? That would mean writing off any possibility of learning that we had not anticipated or the effects of which were felt beyond the short timeframe in which testing and assessment operate. It would mean writing off every pedagogy in which the outcomes of learning are negotiated, or emergent, or radically open ended. So we need to find ways of also assessing the quality of the learning/teaching interaction, regardless of whether there is an observable change and what it is. That can only be done if we bring back in ideas such as professionalism, experience, judgement, scholarship, conscious pedagogies, pedagogic design - all things we absolutely can't have if we don't have 'teaching'. Helen Helen Beetham Consultant in Higher Education [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> twitter helenbeetham skype helenb33 On 15 Jul 2015, at 20:43, Stephen Powell <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote: Personally, I think it is helpful to make a distinction between teaching and learning. Teaching is something we as teachers have control over, that is we can change what we do informed by experience, research, etc. Learning happens somewhere/somehow in the brain of the individual, we can hope to influence it in some way but it is beyond our control. Recognising this distinction helps us to understand our limitations. However, yes “A skilled teacher is at the heart of most rich learning experiences and deserves recognition and status.” I agree completely! On 15 Jul 2015, at 20:22, Brown, Ruth <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote: Hear, hear, Prof Pete. Maybe it is simply because there are 2 words – unlike in many languages? Ruth From: Online forum for SEDA, the Staff & Educational Development Association [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Boyd, Pete Sent: 15 July 2015 17:33 To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: TEF thoughts Why do the English struggle with the meaning of 'teaching' as if it does not include learning? Ironically an obsession with 'learning and teaching' units rather than vice versa may simply add to managerialist propoganda mantras associated with massification eg 'learn more, teach less' while the oxford tutorial continues for a fortunate few. A skilled teacher is at the heart of most rich learning experiences and deserves recognition and status. The metrics are the issue and if we must have an acronym then let's keep it short :-) Prof Pete ________________________________ From: Online forum for SEDA, the Staff & Educational Development Association <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> on behalf of Jo Peat <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> Sent: Wednesday, July 15, 2015 11:09:41 AM To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: TEF thoughts I’d be a taker, John. I particularly agree with positioning the focus on enhancing learning rather than teaching, which, as you say, seems to place the focus squarely on what we ‘do’ to students rather than on a partnership around learning. The divorcing of research from learning and teaching is not helpful either and just serves to reinforce the idea that research is somehow something separate and ‘different’ rather than part and parcel of the academic world with learning enhancement. One of my main concerns if that , if a TEF (if that acronym stays) is developed, will the people developing it be those we really need to see in that role? Best Jo Jo Peat From: Online forum for SEDA, the Staff & Educational Development Association [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Lea, John ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) Sent: 15 July 2015 10:48 To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: TEF thoughts Thanks Julie, Aside from the interesting points made by the respondents to this blog about the flaws in any metrics-based system, there are also those bigger issues on which I think most of us in our SEDA on-line community agree (???): 1 Particularly in higher education anything which (perhaps inadvertently) encourages people (students; their parents etc.) to focus on teaching rather then enhancing learning is a step in the wrong direction. If this exercise is to be abbreviated to an acronym, shouldn’t it be a LEF – and shouldn’t the E there be enhancement not excellence, or perhaps even better, engagement? 2 And that’s what’s wrong with the NSS as a measurement tool. Asking students at the end of their third year about whether their teachers have been good at explaining things just encourages students to see themselves as still dependent on their teachers, and just at that moment when they should be breaking free from all that, and becoming the autonomous or independent learners that the Quality Code for HE actually demands. 3 And if a TEF sits next to a REF aren’t we in serious danger of forgetting what we all learnt from Elton, Healey and Jenkins and others, that one of the most important impacts of research should be its impact on student learning. And two separate measures will probably leave that debate still hanging in the air, with the old status quo pretty much intact. Wouldn’t it be a relief for all of us if the two exercises finally came together a bit more? RELIEF; now that’s a good acronym: Research Excellence & Learning Impact & Enhancement Framework. Any takers? John John Lea ________________________________ From: Online forum for SEDA, the Staff & Educational Development Association <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> on behalf of Julie Hall <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> Sent: 14 July 2015 13:14 To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> Subject: TEF thoughts Dear colleagues I think the following is quite an interesting blog, https://derfelowen.wordpress.com/2015/07/05/the-tef-what-should-it-measure/ julie Consider the environment. Please don't print this e-mail unless you really need to. ________________________________ This email and any attachments are confidential and intended solely for the addressee and may also be privileged or exempt from disclosure under applicable law. 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