Understanding Staff Development (Routledge Revivals)

Graham Webb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135099060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1996, this book charts the philosophical landscape of staff development at a time when the subject of 'quality' in university teaching and learning was under examination. Graham Webb considers three main issues in his research. He focuses on what the basis for educational and staff development actually is and looks at the weaknesses of the then current practices, as well as deliberating over the future of informed staff development.

This book will be of interest to staff developers of all kinds and more generally, to anyone concerned with education and human development.

1

Introduction

The trouble is that the phrase ‘staff development’ is so all embracing that to say one favours and practises it has little more meaning than to say that one favours virtue and opposes sin – it could be anything and everything.

(A respondent quoted in Greenaway and Harding 1978: 12)

This book is about staff development. There are many definitions of staff development, but there is also a reasonable degree of convergence. Staff development is normally considered to include the institutional policies, programmes and procedures which facilitate and support staff so that they may fully serve their own and their institution’s needs. Despite differences in their origins (and perhaps their destinations), ‘staff development’ and ‘professional development’ are currently read as one. In tertiary institutions such as universities, staff and/or professional development has mostly been concerned with educational development – the development of teaching and learning. Centres and units have grown up in most tertiary institutions to promote this development. Their titles are various but often contain words such as educational, academic, professional, research, advisory, teaching and learning.

This book maintains the traditional focus of educational development as a primary area for staff development. In so doing, it ignores some recent trends. Many development units are presently taking on wider roles concerning the professional development of staff with regard to research, management and a range of generic or human resource areas. Many are also merging with the institutional staff development provision for non-academic staff in order to provide staff development across the board. However, educational (teaching and learning) development is still a major concern of development units and their staff; it is the one upon which this book will concentrate.

Educational and staff development

I am an educational and staff developer working in higher education. Prior to this I was a ‘normal’ academic, teaching courses, publishing research, counselling students, taking on administrative tasks, and so on. My life nowadays is not entirely different, but neither is it the same. Like most educational and staff developers, I organize workshops, seminars and symposia on various topics, conduct teaching consultations with individual teachers or with course teams (I watch people teach) and carry out research and evaluation projects for my institution concerning academic and related matters. Educational and staff developers (such as I) tend to teach student courses in order to ‘maintain our credibility’ and increasingly we offer certificate, diploma or master’s courses in tertiary teaching. Also increasingly, we participate in the ‘quality’ and ‘audit’ concerns of our institutions.

We can have an impact at many levels. We may consult with individual staff members having serious problems with their teaching. As we help them to improve their teaching, we might have a profound impact upon their academic careers, their confidence and well-being generally, and even their personal lives. We may assist in the provision of a well-designed and integrated system of initial workshops, mentoring and subsequent certification which ensures that new staff members are properly inducted into their work as teachers and researchers. Whether it be at the individual or institutional level, there is little doubt that educational and staff development now has a greater opportunity to make an impact and to be taken seriously than ever before. In a relatively short time, we have moved from cottage industry to institutional necessity.

Over the last 20 years, staff developers and others have been commenting about the place of development in higher education: the changes they believe should occur, as well as those that have occurred.¹ Recently, Warren Piper (1994) has attempted to trace the future of staff development units. He argues that in the past they have tended to be concerned almost totally with teaching and learning improvement, usually at the level of the individual academic. This is what he calls ‘Model A’, and it is predominantly an ‘educational’, ‘teaching’ or ‘academic’ development role. He sees this changing to ‘Model B’ as institutions become more conscious of the need to support organizational change and policy development. ‘Model B’ units will thus become more management- and policy-orientated and will serve a ‘staff’ rather than a narrowly ‘educational’ development role.

Throughout this book I will use the terms ‘educational’ and ‘staff’ development in conjunction, despite their somewhat different interpretations. Educational development is a subset of staff development, for, as we have already seen, staff development can include areas such as research, administration, management, community service and policy formation. Very many of the concerns and approaches raised in this book spring from educational issues, but have wider implications. There are also implications for staff development and training in settings other than higher education.

There are many ramifications for staff developers to consider if we are to follow the policy and management role realignment which Warren Piper predicts. However, it does not mean that there is an unbridgeable chasm between what we have been doing and what we will be doing. Nor does it mean that the institutional policy role will last for ever.

Boud and McDonald (1981) suggested three models which ‘educational consultants’ (i.e. developers) might adopt.² These were: professional service, counselling and colleagual. The professional service model casts the consultant as a provider of specialized services such as audio-visual aids, computer-assisted learning or multimedia. This being the case, it tends to marginalize the consultant as ‘specialist expert’ with a purely ‘technical’ orientation.

The counselling model sees the consultant as providing conditions ‘under which academics can explore the nature of their teaching problems, and … help teachers reach an understanding of how they might be able to deal with problems which they have identified’ (Boud and McDonald 1981: 5). The consultant provides a safe place for teachers (or students in student counselling centres) to discuss their problems and look for solutions. The main problem is in people being deterred from using a service which they see as being ‘remedial’.

The colleagual model operates when developers and teachers collaborate on a joint research project to improve practice (e.g. an action research project). The strength of the approach is that it approximates activities with which academics are familiar, and the main weaknesses are that it lacks a service orientation and tends towards ‘reinventing the wheel’. So Boud and McDonald (1981: 5) suggest that the best approach for educational and staff development is ‘an eclectic approach’ because ‘in practice the educational consultant needs to draw from each of these models’. In a perceptive passage, they provide an outline which remains relevant today:

It is necessary to work flexibly and eclectically in order to respond to the unique demands of each situation. The skills which need to be developed are those of each of the practitioners we have described: both technical competence and interpersonal skill are necessary, and the consultant’s presentation to the rest of the educational community needs to be that of a colleague and fellow academic. At particular times and for particular teachers the consultant may need to adopt one or other of these roles exclusively, but if one approach takes over completely then effective development is likely to be hampered.

The three dimensions which Boud and McDonald identify find corollaries in various chapters of this book, in particular the areas of positive knowledge for technical expertise; human understanding; and collaboration for practical and social improvement. The eclectic approach advocated by Boud and McDonald also finds voice in the partial and fractured nature of our work as it is interpreted in the postmodern condition. In all of this, educational and staff development can be seen to reflect broader areas in the theory of knowledge and the world of ideas.

Where Warren Piper sees a clear movement from Model A to Model B, Boud and McDonald’s ‘eclectic’ blending of the dimensions of staff development allows for greater continuity. Moving towards an institutional, policy-linked role does not necessarily take us out of our more customary practices; rather, it changes the landscape. For example, in Chapters 3 and 6 of this book I will consider the human face of understanding, empathy, Being and various kinds of staff development relationships. Developers may be comfortable with much of this in the context of working with a teacher to improve their teaching, but uncomfortable in the context of working with senior managers in the development of policy initiatives. But in this new situation the understanding and experience of the staff developer may be no less important. For example, in working with senior managers a developer may well be talking to a different set of human beings, but human beings they remain. The skills the developer may have acquired in terms of facilitation, communication, human understanding, empathy and the ability to act as confidant or counsellor, may be appreciated none the less in the different context.

In short, although I believe staff development is changing, and changing in a direction similar to that outlined by Warren Piper, this does not mean that we should feel overly disorientated or threatened. Some of the ways in which we are already prepared for the change have to do with our experience of human understanding and empathy, others concern our orientation towards human dignity and social justice, and still others concern our abilities in criticism of the status quo and the indeterminacy of modern development practice. Each of these areas contributes to our understanding of teaching and learning development, as outlined in the following chapters. In short, there are ways in which we operate at present which will help us to prepare for change in the various orientations, positions, demands, roles and directions which will confront us in the future.

Staff developer/teacher … teacher/student

Throughout this book I will be talking about education and learning. An immediate consequence is the need to refer to ‘teacher’ and ‘student’. I make an underlying assumption that the educative relationship between teacher and student is reflected in the educative relationship between staff developer and teacher. Much has been written on metaphors which people use to encapsulate their ideas about teaching and learning, and the relationship between teacher and student (e.g. Fox 1983; Kloss 1987). There is also much to be learned from the teacher education literature with regard to teachers’ stories and the ways in which their views concerning education come into being and change over time (e.g. Letiche 1990; Elbaz 1991; Calderhead and Robson 1991). Many of the differing metaphors which encapsulate the teaching of students find their corollaries in staff developers’ views of their task.

But there are also some important differences. The normal relationship between teacher and student is partly defined by an acknowledged ‘academic’ difference between the two. The teacher is assumed to be at a higher level and to know more about both the subject and the teaching of the subject. Attempts to effect more participatory or emancipatory teaching bear witness to this. However, the relationship between developer and teacher is somewhat different as, for the most part, both have academic status.

Staff developers usually move into the area after experience as a subject teacher. Because of this experience it is likely that they will have an academic status advantage over the younger members of staff with whom they are working. This tends to make the relationship somewhat nearer to that of teacher-student. In other cases, however, the developer may be consulted by a person with higher academic status or greater experience and thus have to establish credibility (earn respect) by his/her actions, rather than assume the respect granted by position. This mirrors the situation of the teacher confronted with mature students or students with work experience in that such teachers need to establish a credibility which is somewhat beyond the norm.

The developer may have formal qualifications in a number of domains such as the subject area (master’s or PhD), education (postgraduate certificate, diploma or master’s degree in higher education), and, perhaps increasingly in the future, a qualification as an educational and staff developer. The developer may also establish or maintain credibility as a teacher by continuing to teach (student) courses; as a supervisor, by continuing to supervise research students; as a researcher, by continuing to publish; as an administrator by heading a unit or part of a unit; as an institutional policy adviser, by demonstrating clear vision, organizational planning and review at the unit or other levels.

But it is the relationship that developers form with their ‘clients’ which is crucial. For the most part a teacher’s relationship with a student may last a semester or a year. Sometimes it lasts over three years and occasionally (as with a research student) longer than this. For a developer, the relationship with a ‘client’ is often a long-term proposition. The relationship between developer and teacher remains after a particular project or encounter, albeit in dormant form. On the other hand, the developer-teacher relationship is unlikely to be as close or frequent as the relationship between teaching colleagues within a department. The developer-teacher relationship is thus likely to be different from both teacher-student and teacher-teacher relationships. This having been said, a theme of this book is that there is still much that can be learned from the general educational (teacher-student, teaching-learning) literature which has implications for educational and staff development practice.

About this book

This book asks what educational and staff development might mean when we view the world and ourselves in certain ways. In the chapters which follow, different ways of viewing the world and our place in it will be outlined, with each view acting as a context for interpreting the task of the educational and staff developer.

As a staff developer, I know how difficult it is to find time to consider ideas from a broad range of knowledge and to think about the implications of ideas for my busy, daily practice. Writing this book has forced me to do just this, and as a result has changed my conception of the role I play as an educational and staff developer. In particular, it has challenged me to accept discontinuity in the role. At one time I would have been tempted to explain what I do and how and why I do it, in terms of a coherent theory or model. A recent book in the area attempts exactly this:

Professional development in higher education has often been criticised for lacking a sound theoretical framework. The present book is an attempt to fill this gap by building a theoretical model that integrates theory and practice, educational research and teaching in higher education.

(Zuber-Skerritt 1992: 1)

I am no longer sure that this is desirable. Writing this book has caused me to confront the various sources from which I attempt to legitimate what I do. It has also caused me to take a little further some critical thoughts concerning the theories and practices which are popular with people working in the area.

Apart from educational and staff developers within higher education, what I have to say may be of interest to educators generally, as well as to staff developers and trainers outside education. The scope of the book is more general than specific. And while I hope that the book will have an effect upon the practice of development or training, it is certainly not intended to be a ‘practical’ book. This makes it a little odd, as educational and staff development tends to lead relentlessly toward the practical. I have written elsewhere that:

[f]or development to be seen as worthwhile, for it to establish credibility in terms of the ‘market’ (the ‘practitioners’ for whom it is intended), development has needed to prove its essential and immediate practicality. The practical has been valued over (and often defined in opposition to) the theoretical, and especially the philosophical. In short, practitioners tend to want answers, rather than further questions.

(Webb 1992a: 352)

So do developers. Our conferences and workshops are lively and boisterous bazaars in which we are urged to try out new activities and new techniques with our students or clients. Our most popular books suggest ‘53 interesting things’ for ourselves and our clients to try. We demand new activities to stimulate teaching, learning or other staff development concerns, and recently there has been no shortage of vendors.

There is a formal literature, too, which gives a basis for some of these activities. That literature suggests why we should be attempting to develop teaching and learning in certain directions. It gives various conceptions of ‘the good’ in teaching, learning and educational development. For example, some of the most pervasive themes currently are of reflective practice, ‘deep’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Positive Knowledge and Progress in Staff Development
• 3 Staff Development for Understanding People and Ourselves
• 4 To Critically Go: Staff Development for a Better World
• 5 Postmodernity and Staff Development: Nowhere to Run
• 6 By Diverse Paths: Developing Staff Developers
• References
• Index