University Teaching in Focus

A Learning-centred Approach

Lynne Hunt, Denise Chalmers, Lynne Hunt, Denise Chalmers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367442101
• eBook ISBN: 9781000395044
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Classroom Management

The second edition of University Teaching in Focus distils the knowledge and insights of internationally acclaimed experts in university teaching. It empowers university teachers and contributes to their career success by developing their teaching skills, strategies and knowledge.

Written in a clear and accessible style, it provides a sharp focus on student learning through the lens of four sections:

• Focus on subject and curriculum design
• Focus on subject teaching and learning
• Focus on students
• Focus on your career

Each of the 15 chapters targets a key teaching and learning issue referencing seminal works, current resources and practical applications using real-world cases. The 'Your thoughts' sections encourage reflection and offer opportunities to adapt international evidence about best practice to local contexts and disciplines.

This edition will be a key resource for foundational teaching development programs in higher education institutions or as a self-help manual by early career and experienced teachers who wish to enhance their students' learning.

PART 1

Focus on subject and curriculum design

This section explores the design of the subjects you teach and the curriculum context within which you work. Terminology differs across universities and countries so, in this textbook, we use the term ‘subject’ to refer to components of a degree program, sometimes called units, modules, papers or courses. Full-time students typically enrol in four subjects per semester organised in terms of year of study – or level. Good subject design is about planning and aligning what to teach, how to teach and how to assess so that students engage in a coherent learning experience. Well-designed subjects make it difficult for teachers and students to lose their focus on the learning intended while studying the subject.

The organisation of subject matter, assessment, and teaching and learning across all levels of a degree program accords with a curriculum framework that is influenced by specific disciplines and by academic or professional standards. The curriculum framework informs good subject design. Although early career university teachers are unlikely to be responsible for curriculum design, they may be engaged in reviewing the subjects they teach within a curriculum context. Accordingly, this section focuses on both subject and curriculum issues.

In Chapter 1, Martyn Stewart analyses the development of learning theories and their influence on academics’ choices about what and how they teach. He challenges early career and experienced university teachers to think about and identify the underpinnings of their pedagogy by introducing and critiquing the language and core principles of learning theory.

In Chapter 2, Tom Angelo offers practical, research-based principles and guidelines for effective, efficient subject design. The criteria and framework of key questions in this chapter provide step-by-step guidance for designing and redesigning subjects so that students learn and understand more.

In Chapter 3, Angela Hill, Kylie Readman and Katrina Strampel equip readers with the language and rationale of curriculum frameworks and the role they play in framing the overall student experience of a program of study. They provide an overview of the core principles of curriculum design that provides cohesion, constructive alignment and assurance of learning. Their chapter explores evidenced-informed inquiry and experiential models that promote active learner engagement, particularly when coupled with meaningful and sustained partnerships with industry, community, colleagues and students.

University teachers and their students are bound by a passion for the discipline they study and teach. In Chapter 4, Ray Land builds on this idea to explore ‘signature ways of thinking and practising’ in specific disciplines, noting that all have key ‘threshold’ concepts that must be understood in order to transform students’ thinking. Successful negotiation of each threshold opens conceptual terrain and provides access to new academic discourses. It is a reflective process – the very essence of a university education. To bring home the point, Land challenges university teachers to think about threshold concepts in terms of their own academic identity and community of practice.

chapter 1

Understanding learning: Theories and critique

Martyn Stewart

Abstract

Knowing what is likely to work, when and why, is important when designing teaching at university. This chapter guides you through the complex field of learning theories, the explanations of how learning takes place as a process. It introduces you to the main influential theories and how these ideas have matured and conflicted, to help you make sense of their implications for teaching. It introduces terms such as ‘constructivism’ and ‘behaviourism’ that you may encounter in teaching and learning literature, and explores developments in cognitive psychology and more recently, neuroscience, that examine how individuals process and recall information. The social influences on learning follow, before turning to important works on metacognition and ‘self’ theories that increasingly inform recent teaching designs. Contemporary theories on networked and distributed learning relevant to the internet age are also reviewed.

Throughout this chapter, the influence and implications of different theories for teachers are considered, with key criticisms of the different perspectives, theories and models summarised to help the reader make informed choices about when particular approaches might be applicable or not. While ‘theory’ is often seen as detached from everyday practice in teaching, the chapter closes with thoughts on how your enhanced knowledge of learning as a process can be harnessed to optimise effective teaching designs.

Key words

learning theories, behaviourism, constructivism (learning), cognitive development, social learning, self-theories, distributed learning, activity theory, critique

Introduction

The field of learning theory has a long and complex history, studied from multiple perspectives, from philosophical reflections to observing rats in boxes and more recently deciphering whole-brain images. The complexity of the field reflects our own complexity as thinking humans – our biological, cognitive and psychological differences, and our differing experiences as well as social, cultural and environmental exposures.

This chapter introduces the main influential learning theories and follows how the ideas have matured and conflicted to help you make sense of the developments and their implications for teaching. It introduces terms such as ‘constructivism’ and ‘behaviourism’ that you may encounter in teaching and learning literature, and it explores practical applications arising from the theories. The purpose of the chapter is to empower you to participate in conversations about pedagogy and to analyse the implications of learning theories for your discipline, your teaching and your students. An understanding of learning theories, their applications, limitations and continuing refinement, provides you with a powerful vocabulary and framework for organising thinking and making sense of the challenging demands of university teaching.

Towards contemporary theories of learning

Early theories of learning largely arose from philosophical introspection on how we acquire knowledge and grow as individuals, with Plato, Confucius and Locke, among many others, highlighting the role of observation, reflection and making sense of experience for development of complex ideas. However, towards the early 20th century most formal education was experienced as rote learning, drilled into the individual by the authoritarian front-of-class teacher.

The rise of learner-centred pedagogy that we would recognise today was advocated at the turn of the 20th century by John Dewey, perhaps the most influential educational philosopher of our time. He led the call for a more democratic model of education and a learner-centred pedagogy. In his view, education needed to be an active process, gaining procedural skills and building on experiences for learning that were authentic and meaningful. The role of the teacher was to create the active learning opportunities, make the learning interesting through discovery and listen to the voices of learners to shape a curriculum flexible to their needs. Dewey’s ideas made an incalculable impact on school education systems, and his ‘learning by doing’ philosophy influenced so many of those who went on to develop these principles further.

Dewey recognised that learning involved internal processes of acquiring both knowledge and skills but was also shaped by external factors such as culture and interactions with teachers and fellow learners. This chapter sets out the theories largely following the evolution in their development, but also follows this structure of individual-level ‘internal’ learning first, before those focused on external social and cultural influences.

Behaviourist perspectives

The application of scientific methods to the study of learning in the early part of the 20th century brought new perspectives in which understanding of the learning process was based purely on what could be observed and measured. You will probably be familiar with Pavlov’s famous 1903 experiments with dogs and bells (Pavlov 1927), demonstrating how animals could be conditioned to behave in a specified way from exposing them to a neutral stimulus. The resulting principle, classical conditioning, was extended further by John B. Watson (1913, 1924) into human learning, with association becoming viewed as a major process of everyday learning and explaining the shaping of perceptions and phobias. A fear of exams, for example, is not something you are born with but a conditioned response to previous negative experiences.

Watson, a former student of Dewey, influenced a school of psychology he referred to as ‘behaviourist’, due to this view of learning based on observable and measurable changes in behaviour. Skinner (1938) developed ideas around animal and human conditioning further by modifying and adding reinforcement stimuli, segmenting tasks and using series of positive rewards and negative sanctions to demonstrate how behaviours could be shaped and reinforced toward target outcomes. His experiments established another major principle of learning referred to as instrumental or operant conditioning.

The influence of behaviourist theories

Behaviourist psychologists demonstrated how learning occurs as changes in actions, with environmental conditioning and reinforcement through repeated action as important mechanisms causing change. Task and instructional design principles were developed and applied especially in training programmes involving staged, progressive attainment of competencies and skills. The role of learner feedback was also emphasised, as was the importance of rewards for learning. The principle that behaviour could be shaped and directed through a teacher’s intervention left a great legacy in terms of the power dynamic for the teacher as the director of learning.

Another profound influence was the importance placed on detailing target behaviours as learning outcomes that could be measured and evaluated. The language arising out of the behaviourist tradition – learning outcomes, specifications, targets and competencies – is found throughout the literature and procedures governing course design and has seen a revival in recent decades (Murtonen et al. 2017).

Ideas around mastery learning and high-level learning also emerged out of applications of behaviourist principles, developed further by the psychologist Benjamin Bloom. An expert in educational evaluation and measurement, rather than associated with the behaviourist school, Bloom explored how learning outcomes could be ordered according to levels of increasing cognitive complexity, from recall and manipulation to synthesis and evaluation. Published in 1956 as a taxonomy – essentially a classification of thinking levels – this set out an invaluable practical framework for teachers to formulate learning objectives characterised by specific verbs appropriate to different academic levels (Bloom & Krathwohl 1956). The taxonomy was later expanded to include affective and psychomotor domains and was subsequently refined by Anderson and Krathwohl (2001). This taxonomy is widely used across all levels of education and remains highly relevant for educators today.

YOUR THOUGHTS

• Where is reinforcement through repetit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of cases
• About the editors
• About the contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 Focus on subject and curriculum design
• Part 2 Focus on subject teaching and learning
• Part 3 Focus on students
• Part 4 Focus on your career
• Index