A Guide to Staff & Educational Development

David Baume, Peter Kahn, David Baume, Peter Kahn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781135724863
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Systematic support for improving education and learning in further and higher education, has moved to centre stage in recent years. This is reflected in the increasing membership of professional bodies. Most new staff are encouraged to engage in staff development programmes, but receive little training to do so. This book has been written to meet this need: it is a practical handbook that introduces the key issues in staff and educational development, ideal for any education professional in the early years of their career at further or higher education level.

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What is staff and educational development?

Lorraine Stefani

INTRODUCTION

The aim of this chapter is to explore the meaning of staff and educational development. In researching this chapter, I came to the conclusion that staff and educational development defies simple definitions owing to its complex and constantly evolving nature. On the one hand, the intention of staff and educational development is to offer the opportunities for all staff and students to develop their full potential. On the other hand, these same opportunities must fit with the strategic goals of the institution in the rapidly changing context of higher education (HE). Managing the complex relationship between an individual’s development and institutional strategy and planning presents a major challenge.

This chapter seeks to provide some insight into the nature of staff and educational development as it is generally understood at the beginning of the 21st century. I have attempted to do this by examining the current context in which it occurs, the status given to it within institutions. I offer a broad-brush view of the remits of developers and development units, and consider whether staff and educational development as a field of study deserves now to be recognized and valued as a worthy profession in its own right, crucial to the achievement of goals in HE.

THE HIGHER EDUCATION CONTEXT FOR STAFF AND EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

As a starting point, the term ‘staff and educational development’ can be considered to mean the systematic and scholarly support for improving both educational processes and the practice of educators (see, for instance, Webb, 1996). If used separately within HE, the term ‘educational development’ would then focus on the improvement of educational processes, while ‘staff development’ would refer to working to improve the capabilities and practice of educators. These definitions, however, belie the complexity of the role of the staff and educational developer and the multiplicity of activities encompassed within the term ‘development’ as applied both to staff and to education.

Indeed, this complexity is in part reflected in the range of terms that are used to describe this role. In Australia, for instance, the term ‘academic development’ is often employed, while in the United States the key term is ‘faculty development’, alongside ‘instructional development’. Both these terms make it clear that we must go beyond a generic consideration of staff development to address concerns that are particularly relevant to the specific context of HE.

In broad terms, it is reasonable to suggest that within a large and complex institution such as a university, the staff and educational development and training needs are vast and multifaceted. Higher education globally is undergoing unprecedented change (Barnett, 1997). Staff are coping with shifts to mass higher education, lifelong learning, diversity of student population, ensuring access to higher education for disadvantaged groups, the information revolution which requires that we equip learners with different skills, and quality assurance and accountability agendas. Global competition for students increases and there are currently drives towards making universities more entrepreneurial. It is no wonder, then, that the staff and educational development agenda has become so complex and wide-ranging, with staff developers having to respond to unexpected demands from a clientele hoping for and expecting answers and solutions to a wide variety of questions and problems.

What, then, within this context is staff and educational development? There is no simple, all-encompassing answer to this question. Potential answers come from a variety of sources. It has often been a cause for concern that there is not a defined educational development discourse (Andresen, 1996), and this may well be for the very simple reason that the agenda has become so vast and unwieldy. In addition, as Webb has articulated, ‘development is a site for contestation, it is not a unitary concept which we will one day provide a model for’ (Webb, 1996). Perhaps it is this issue more than any other that in fact causes the difficulties of definition. People’s understandings of the term ‘development’ are likely to be very broad, with its having both positive and negative connotations for some staff. Some colleagues outside what might be called the staff and educational development community may have vague notions of what we do. Because development as a concept can be intangible, attention might more fruitfully be paid not so much to what we do as to why and how we do it and what we achieve.

How, then, can we get closer to conceptualizing staff and educational development? In 1995, Elton put forward a vision of the future for staff and educational development in universities. He suggested that:

staff and educational development will have a primary function as an agent of institutional change. While one of its concerns must always be to meet the legitimate personal needs of staff, its main concern in difficult times will be to meet the needs of students, in their learning experiences, in the services provided for them and in the environment in which they spend three or more important years of their lives. It will be concerned in different ways with changes in knowledge, skills and attitudes of all staff and at every level right up to that of the most senior administrators and the head of each and every university. (Elton, 1995)

Only a few short years have passed since that optimistic statement was published. In those few years we have seen dramatic, continuing and global change in higher education, with far greater emphasis on student learning, as we come to understand more about the impact of teaching on learning and engage with research on student learning strategies (eg Ramsden, 1992; Schon, 1995). But has Elton’s vision actually materialized? Is staff and educational development the valued concept that this statement suggests? Does this vision encompass the diversity of approaches, activities and people associated with staff and educational development?

Answers to these questions can be found within institutions themselves, among senior managers who co-ordinate the institutional agenda, among staff or clients who request the ‘services’ of educational developers and academic practice units, and among the currently practising educational developers. Professional organizations associated with staff and educational development and developers will also have a view as to the definition of our practice. For the purposes of this chapter, it was decided to seek answers to these questions by exploring the literature on staff and educational development, by viewing the Web sites of several HE institutions both nationally and internationally to determine the remits of educational development units and how this remit was presented, and by asking colleagues responsible for managing these units what their definition would be. In carrying out this work, it was highly encouraging to find that a remarkable level of consensus is building up and a growing level of coherence in our understanding of the nature of our field is developing.

THE STATUS OF STAFF AND EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE INSTITUTION

A contributing factor to the problem of clearly defining staff and educational development may be that among faculty, in this case meaning academic and related staff within HE institutions, there may well be very different understandings of the concept of development. There may well also be different views on the value of development activities to the institution, or to the different constituencies within the institution.

The success and the status of educational development activities depend on the skills of educational developers in initiating effective partnerships and constructive collaborations with their client base in such a way as to fulfil perceived development needs for staff while at the same time working towards the overarching goal of enhancing the student learning experience in HE. Indeed, Hicks (1999) links academic development clearly with student learning. He suggests that ‘academic development can be taken to mean: the provision of pedagogically sound and discipline relevant development for academic staff across the broad spectrum of disciplines present within a university so as to impact effectively on student learning’. Hicks elaborates on the three key issues that can be drawn from this definition.

First, he refers to pedagogical soundness, without which there is little point in academic development. To be compatible with the purpose and meaning of HE and the expectations of what one might term those to be developed, academic development must have a theoretical basis.

Second, Hicks suggests, relevance across disciplines is crucial if staff are to value academic development. Indeed, it has been not at all unusual to hear anecdotally of disquiet that the development opportunities for staff are too generic in nature and not necessarily transferable to different disciplines.

The third issue arising from Hicks’s definition is the impact on student learning. The current plethora of changes in HE include the shifts towards mass higher education, increasing diversity of the student population, and different routes into higher education through various schemes to widen access to higher education to previously excluded groups of students both in the United Kingdom and further afield (Longworth, 1999; Watson, 2000). This will inevitably mean that staff involved in supporting students through their programmes of study must reassess and reconsider their conceptions of student learning and of facilitating student learning (Gibbs, 2000). To ensure the best possible student learning experience, institutions must ensure that staff and educational development does impact positively on the student experience. This resonates well with the statements of Elton (1995) and Hicks (1999).

Hicks provides an interesting definition of staff and educational development. But does it go far enough? Would all staff involved in staff and educational development be able to identify with this definition, or would they conceivably see it in broader terms?

Professor George Gordon, Director of the Centre for Academic Practice at the University of Strathclyde, provides the following definition:

I see staff and educational development as providing support to individuals, departments/programmes and institutions in relation to academic practice (teaching, learning and assessment, research and scholarship and academic management and institutional research).
Ultimately, all of these endeavours are directed towards enhancing student learning and the student experience and extending understanding and knowledge. Classically, staff and educational development has tended to focus either on individual development or on educational development.
External policy drivers have greatly sharpened the institutional focus.
That, largely, must be welcomed because it offers important opportunities to connect individual and institutional objectives, departmental and individual etc (personal communication, 2002)

In common with the above-quoted statements of both Elton and Hicks, this definition firmly positions the overarching purpose of staff and educational development as being to enhance student learning, enhance the student experience and to extend pedagogical understanding and knowledge. However, this definition does stretch the remit more widely than Hicks’s definition implies, by including the notions of scholarship, academic management and institutional research.

In all the responses received from an e-mail trawl of key international figures in the field of staff and educational development to the question ‘What is staff and educational development?’, the most common recurring theme related to the intended outcome of staff and educational development is ‘to enhance student learning and the overall student experience’. The responses given by a random sample of colleagues across different institutions in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, while not as extensive a study as that carried out by Gosling (2001), nevertheless resonate well with the outcomes of his study of the remit of educational development units in the United Kingdom.

Some respondents queried the assumption that staff and educational development ultimately improves student learning, and further affirmed the need for research and scholarship and a research culture that underpins the practice(s) of staff and educational development. Other colleagues mentioned a key issue that has the potential to alienate some staff members: that staff and educational development is about facilitating changes in people’s practice, changes in ways of thinking and understanding, as regards education and educational processes. It is seen by some that there is an element of counselling or therapy processes associated with our role. This point again emphasizes the notion of development as a site for contestation (Webb, 1996), a recurring theme in much of the research on staff and educational development.

There was remarkable consistency in the definitions of staff and educational development from the e-mail survey mentioned above. However, it could be argued that the terms of reference provided are broad-brush. The primary objective of enhancing the student learning experience is undisputed in the eyes of the developers. However, does the client group with which staff and educational developers seek to work necessarily understand our remit, or indeed recognize staff and educational development as a profession in its own right?

EXPLORING THE REMIT OF STAFF AND EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Along with this wider understanding of the nature of staff and educational development, it is also worth looking at how the overall remit of staff and educational development has expanded in keeping with the changing nature of HE, thereby contributing to the elusive, fluid and evolving nature of the field. For example, there is fast-growing interest in and emphasis on the use of information and communications technology (ICT) in teaching and learning. This means that a wider range of different skills is required of people entering the profession than were required in a previous age when ICT developments in teaching and learning were very much left to the technological enthusiasts. Today, there is much focus not only upon raising awareness of the potential educational benefits to be derived from effective use of ICT in the classroom but also on embedding it within mainstream educational development (Fallows and Bhanot, 2002; O’Hagan, 1998).

Another example: the past decade has also seen a gradual shift from generic training events being the norm in terms of delivery of staff and educational development to a demand for more complex educational development projects taking place in the classroom within different disciplinary domains (Katz, 2000). The consequences of this have been a greater emphasis on staff and educational developers working in partnership with staff and students. These partnerships have aimed to develop shared understanding, not just of generic pedagogical frameworks but also of how to turn these pedagogic frameworks into practical classroom actions compatible with the particular academic terrain within which they are operating.

This shift in emphasis has impacted on staff and educational development in very positive ways. First, it has led to a greater degree of professionalization of staff and educational development. Second, it has created more of a culture of scholarship with respect to teaching and learning (Gordon et al, 2001).

It has increasingly become the norm in higher education establishments for a central unit to exist for staff and educational development. This appears to be common to HE establishments in Australasia, the United States and Canada, and there has been considerable growth in the number of such units within higher education instituti...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• NOTES ON THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
• FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: WHAT IS STAFF AND EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT?
• 2: CARRYING OUT A NEEDS ANALYSIS: FROM INTUITION TO RIGOUR
• 3: PLANNING AND RUNNING EVENTS
• 4: CONSULTANCY IN EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
• 5: MONITORING AND EVALUATING STAFF AND EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
• 6: DISSEMINATING EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS
• 7: EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT THROUGH INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY
• 8: WORKING ON EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS
• 9: DEVELOPMENT IN THE DISCIPLINES
• 10: WORKING CREATIVELY WITH NATIONAL AGENDAS
• 11: BEING AN AGENT OF CHANGE
• 12: LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE
• 13: DEVELOPING PROFESSIONAL EXPERTISE IN STAFF AND EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
• 14: PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT: STRATEGIES FOR COPING AND FOR GROWTH
• APPENDIX: FURTHER SOURCES OF INFORMATION FOR STAFF AND EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPERS
• GLOSSARY