Principle 2: Excellence in Teaching
Excellence in Teaching Overview
Developing modules and programmes is a team endeavour, with colleagues playing different roles and each with their own areas of expertise and professional development needs. Building up your own knowledge, and the skills in your team, will give you the best chance of success, with excellent inclusive teaching and learning support helping students and staff to thrive.
A Framework for Successful Teaching
Excellent teaching takes a myriad of forms and the UK Professional Standards Framework (PSF) is a useful touchstone here: it is an agreed, sector-wide framework setting out the components of successful teaching and learning. The UK PSF is organised in terms of:
- Areas of Activity (such as assessing and giving feedback to learners)
- Core Knowledge (for example, understanding how students learn in their disciplinary area)
- Professional Values (which focus on the importance of respecting the diversity of learners and engaging with the evidence on learning and teaching).
Reflecting on your own engagement with these dimensions – which will manifest differently according to your role and experience – can be a useful way to review your own practice and identifying any areas to work on.
👉Not sure where to get started with UKPSF? Did you know there is an online tool that helps you to estimate your alignment to Fellowship categories in order to determine your best entry level?
Core Features of Excellent Teaching
Inclusive education means being committed to the development of learning and teaching processes and practices which are inclusive, anticipatory, meaningful, and accessible to all of our diverse learners, and to the improvement of organisational procedures and activities to support this aim.
Excellence in teaching is achieved by supporting all students to meet their potential through the systematic identification and removal to barriers to learning in the curriculum, environment and organisational structures of a programme, module or learning session.
All stakeholders in education have a part to play:
Advance HE views employability as enabling students to develop “the knowledge, skills, experiences, behaviours, attributes, achievements and attitudes that enable graduates to make successful transitions benefitting them, the economy and their communities”. Reflecting this approach, the University is committed to enabling all students to develop the skills and attributes to become social, economic, and environmentally aware global citizens.
One of these ways is through the embedding of graduate attributes through excellent teaching.
Sustainability in teaching practice requires co-construction with learners to shape and develop learning experiences that draw from diverse, real-world examples. Practices support the development of long-term thinking and reflection in both students and teachers. There are four fundamental pillars to ESD teaching (Sobe 2021 UNESCO) which are;
- Learning to study, inquire and co-construct together
- Learning to collectively mobilize
- Learning to live in a common world
- Learning to attend and care
Mini Deeper Dive into Excellence in Teaching
Using Evidence Informed Approaches
Engaging with the scholarship on learning and teaching will help ensure that the choices you make are evidence-based and in tune with the ever-evolving knowledge on student learning. The literature on teaching is enormous and spans the whole spectrum from classical learning theories to practical, discipline-focussed case studies. The Learning and Teaching Academy can help guide you and quickly signpost you to reputable and relevant sources and exemplars.
In very broad terms, there has been a marked shift away from teacher-centric approaches in which students are generally expected to assimilate information through lectures and reading, towards a much wider array of designed learning activities in an information-rich environment. Example of these include inquiry and project-based learning, collaboration, making and creating or applying learning in authentic settings such as simulations or working on real-world scenarios.
For programme design, this has led to an emphasis on the importance of having a clear vision for the aims for your programme (eventually expressed as learning outcomes), a well-aligned assessment and feedback strategy and a working-backwards from there to design activities and scaffold student progress. For many, this will be a focus of their professional development as they get started with module and programme design.
Reflective Practice
The importance of reflection in the development of excellence in teaching is consistently emphasised but taking the time to unpack a teaching experience, considering what went well – or not so well – and planning for the future is not an innate skill. There are multiple models and frameworks that can help you organise reflective activities: from Rolfe et al’s (2001) simple “What? So what? Now what?” to Graham Gibbs’ six stage Reflective Cycle (1988). You can find out more about these in the Reflective Practice for Staff guide.
Support and Recognition
Undertaking professional development for teaching can be a valuable means to develop excellent teaching, whether for yourself or your colleagues. The Cardiff University Education Fellowship Programmes are our AdvanceHE-accredited programmes that equip staff with the skills that they need to become effective educators and are designed to be engaging, light-touch and practice-focussed. There are numerous routes available, aligned to the Associate Fellow, Fellow and Senior Fellow benchmarks and intakes at several points throughout the year.
A free-standing, open programme of events and workshops also runs each year and can be dipped into or pursued as part of a bespoke CPD plan which might draw on a range of in-house workshops, external provision, events and self-directed learning.