Don Houston and Cassandra Hood, Flinders University
Flinders, like many other universities has provided an
induction to teaching at university program for many years: ours is named the
Flinders Foundations of University Teaching (FFOUT). The participant feedback
had almost always been good, senior staff familiar with the program had been
confident of its many benefits, and once upon a time it won an AAUT Citation.
However, the program’s impact had not been
formally evaluated.
To move past anecdotes of value to evidence, we undertook a
formal evaluation in 2015. We surveyed and interviewed participants who had
undertaken FFOUT between 2011 and 2014. The data confirmed our confidence in
the value of the program. The participants generally agreed that the program
has positive effects on their knowledge about university teaching, their
practice and their conversations and thinking about their practice. The results
reinforce other research indicating that such programmes do have
beneficial effects on individual academics and that those benefits also
extend to work groups and have value to the institution.
One very prominent pattern in the results was that staff
who had participated in FFOUT more than two years prior to the evaluation had
even more positive views about its value than more recent participants. We
speculated that this group had had more time and opportunity to try things from
the program to enhance their teaching –particularly in areas like topic and
assessment design –than more recent participants caught up in doing teaching to
survive!
We observed that the transfer of learning by academics to
practice takes time and is mediated by many factors. Nevertheless, where it was
seen that institutional and local departmental cultures value teaching, programs
such as FFOUT, provide a useful strategy for quality enhancement in higher
education.
Of particular note was that a critical mass of past FFOUT
participants in a workgroup was needed to positively influence both attitude to
teaching and practice. FFOUT participation allowed respondents to contribute to
existing conversations around teaching as well as to initiate them, in settings
where teaching is valued. Unsurprisingly, local cultural factors and practices,
as well as academic leadership impacts how teaching is viewed and supported.
Beyond influence on individuals’ practice, participation
adds to that critical mass who appreciate and work toward improving teaching.
Given the impact of academic leadership on departmental
culture, it will be interesting to see how the current restructure of our
university’s academic groupings to colleges from faculties impacts on the
culture of learning and teaching within various workgroups. With many
educational leadership positions recently filled, we hope that those staff
committed to teaching maintain and are supported in their focus on quality
teaching that FFOUT encourages and supports.
The key take away messages from our work are: programs like
this do have benefits to participants and to the wider institution; those
benefits can be optimised where participants receive support from colleagues
and managers in their day to day workplaces; and the full benefits need time to
accrue.Two publications from the research so far are:
Our HERDSA 2016 conference paper:
http://www.herdsa.org.au/publications/conference-proceedings/research-and-development-higher-education-shape-higher-10