Burden, Penny and Page, Nigel (2019) How should teaching observation schemes adapt to meet students’ demands of what high quality teaching is expected to be in the STEM subjects? In: Horizons in STEM Higher Education Conference : Making Connections and Sharing Pedagogy; 03 - 04 July 2019, Kingston-upon-Thames, U.K.. (Unpublished)

Abstract

Higher education (HE) appears driven by a thirst for metrics as the sector decides on those most appropriate for measuring the quality of teaching. However, there can be issues and variations with using metrics as a measure of teaching quality including in their interpretation. Overall, there needs to be an understanding of how what is being measured is perceived between different groups of students and academics in order to bring closer alignment in expectations. The introduction of tuition fees and concomitant removal of public funding has focussed attention on the competitive nature of teaching quality. It has also shifted the onus of determining what good teaching looks like from practitioners to students. That is from mechanisms such as the Teaching Quality Assessment (TQA) in determining a quality teaching score to student evaluation through the National Student Survey (NSS) with these scores now being used to feed into the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) results. With attention now focussed on student perceptions of the quality of teaching and what this means for their overall student experience, we have considered how this may impact on the delivery of teaching observation schemes and the training of observers in facilitating excellence in teaching. In this workshop, will set the scene by discussing the results of student and staff focus groups in determining what high-quality teaching means to each group, how it can be evaluated/measured and what the necessary improvements are to achieve high quality teaching and fulfilment of our students’ potential. We will demonstrate through an activity the use of a dialogue sheet developed and subsequently implemented in our continuous professional development programme to aid these discussions. We will also highlight differences exposed in subject level specialist teaching as revealed from a lecturers’ perspectives between STEM, and business, music and arts subjects as well as how we have started to develop a taxonomy of ‘high-quality teaching’ from both an academic and student perspective. We will finish with an interactive discussion with delegates about the various attitudes, values and methods that could be evolved/implemented in developing teaching observation schemes to match the changing HE landscape and the demands of students.

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