Tag: teaching

Teaching philosophy

The teaching philosophies of Learning Development

Lee Fallin 1 Comment

Introduction to Teaching Philosophy Statements

As part of undertaking my Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice, I had to produce a Teaching Philosophy Statement. I’m drawn to the approach the University of San Diego (2023) takes to introduce the Teaching Philosophy Statement, which I think sets the tone well:

The life of a teacher is an extremely busy one. From early morning until long after dark, teachers dedicate the better part of their day to their students. Amid the lesson planning, the snack breaks, the recess duty, grading and the myriad other daily tasks, it can be easy to lose sight of the why of teaching. 

Why are you drawn to the classroom, and what is it about your love of teaching that makes it a fulfilling career? What’s the overarching philosophy that guides your teaching practice? Even on the busiest school days, every teacher should be able to explain their “why” by returning to their teaching philosophy.

(University of San Diego, 2023)

A Teaching Philosophy Statement is absolutely something all Higher Education practitioners can reflect upon. It is not just the realm of academics. A teaching philosophy statement sets out core beliefs about the purpose of teaching, it sets out an individual’s approach and justifies why this is their approach. I found it a thoroughly enjoyable activity!

Lee – why share your Teaching Philosophy Statement now?

This is a good question! After all, I’ve technically left Learning Development. But, I have two very good reasons for sharing this now.

  1. I want to call on Learning Developers to write their Teaching Philosophy Statements and share them. Do it now! This will provide a rich discussion about the teaching philosophy of Learning Development. It will reflect the diversity of the profession, and allow further discussion around the values established by ALDinHE and how they are applied in the profession.
  2. I must acknowledge my teaching philosophy is changing. I am now a Lecturer in Education Studies. I want to share my Teaching Philosophy Statement as it stood a year ago. I promise to re-visit this in another blog post and update my statement for my new context. It will provide an opportunity to reflect on any similarities and differences. I think this is an exciting way to continue reflecting on that transition from thirdspace professional towards academic.

This is why my post is titled the ‘teaching philosophies’ of Learning Development. I think we need to acknowledge these statements will be numerous and diverse – just like the profession. Learning Development is a profession I still very much care about. While I may now work as a Lecturer in Education Studies, a core part of my scholarship and research will be dedicated to Learning Development. It’s why I am still involved closely with ALDinHE – and am a member of LearnHigher and the JLDHE Editorial Board.

So! Here it is – my teaching philosophy from my time as a Learning Developer…

My Teaching Philosophy Statement (2022)

My aspirations

As a Learning Developer, I feel my aspirations are very driven by my profession. Hilsdon (2011:14) defines Learning Development as the “teaching, tutoring, research, design and production of learning materials, as well as involvement in staff development, policy-making and other consultative activities” in support of student academic success. However, I believe student success can never be built on dependency, so for me, effective Learning Development must also build student independence and self-efficacy. As much as I aspire to help students, my true goal is for students to become self-sufficient so they do not need me.

Philosophical underpinning

The signature pedagogy of learning development is arguably academic literacies (Lea & Street, 1998; 2006). This approach acknowledges that writing, learning, and other academic practices are not isolated ‘skills’, but are complicated literacies situated within disciplinary discourses and power frameworks (Lea & Street, 1998). Acknowledging these complexities is vital for me to identify and confront what is not taught or is assumed – constituents of the null (Kazemi et al., 2020) and hidden curriculum (Hinchcliffe, 2020). As a Learning Developer, I work within the hidden curriculum to expose and challenge it. My role as a 3rd space professional (see: McIntosh & Nutt, 2022) is very much an enabler.

Teaching methods and assessment

The most established teaching method in learning development is the one-to-one appointment. As learning is both a complicated and individual process, such appointments allow students to engage in these complexities with full acknowledgement of what they already know and understand. As represented by Webster (2018), both students and Learning Developers bring knowledge to such appointments and operate with different levels of agency. Depending on the appointment, this can frame my role as mentor, listener, teacher, and coach. I often have to informally assess students to determine how to best support them, and which of those roles I might need to take.

The most significant challenge has been scaling Learning Development beyond appointments to help more students, and there are three approaches I have taken. Firstly, there is workshop-based instruction, which allows similar principles from appointments to be applied in a group situation, extending capacity. Second is the creation of self-support resources like University of Hull (2021) SkillsGuides. These allow students to access help at a time that is convenient. Finally, there is ‘integrated practice’ which involves directly teaching in timetabled sessions as part of the curriculum. Integrated practice is arguably the best and most inclusive way to increase access to Learning Development.

While I do not set or mark student work, I do have a role in assessment. One common task involves helping students prepare for an assessment set as part of their course. This can be as simple as demystifying the essay in an appointment or teaching a whole class the principles of public communication to help them write a wiki article. I also support students with formative feedback to help them develop their response to an assessment, or provide them summative feedback on a previously marked piece of work to help them develop further. For me, this is all about supporting student learning.

Inclusivity at the heart

Inclusivity is a core value of my practice. I have worked hard to promote inclusive practices, helping ensure students can be successful no matter their background, neurodiversity, or protected characteristics. This goes beyond legal obligation – it is simply the only ethical approach to teaching. Furthermore, I aspire to uphold the ALDinHE[1] (2018) Manifesto for Learning Development, which strives to increase participation in HE and legitimise different forms of student knowledge. As I work across all disciplines taught at Hull, I need to respect different approaches to knowledge too.

Looking to the future

For me, the PCAP is an opportunity to improve my teaching further. I now have over 10 years of experience working in HE, and I still have things to learn. I’m proud of my Senior Fellowship with the HEA and fully intend to work towards Principle Fellowship in the future. I’m also keen to maintain my professional accreditations with ALDinHE and Microsoft Education, as well as gain my accreditation with the Association of Learning Technology (ALT).

[1] Association of Learning Development in Higher Education – the professional body for learning developers

Writing your own Teaching Philosophy Statement

As I shared in my introduction, I’d love to see more Teaching Philosophy Statements shared from Learning Developers. If you want to know where to start, check out this guide: What Is a Teaching Philosophy? Examples and Prompts. Please share yours and pop the link in the comments section below.

References

ALDinHE (2018) Manifesto for Learning Development. Education, Association for Learning Development in Higher Education. Available online: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KJnC7e2l5xnA44FWsOxaKkKNx4SQKlX2/view [Accessed 19/04/2022].

Hilsdon, J. (2011) What is learning development?, in Hartley, P., Hilsdon, J., Keenan, C., Sinfield, S. & Verity, M. (eds), Learning development in higher education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 13-27.

Hinchcliffe, T. (ed), (2020) The Hidden Curriculum of Higher Education. Advance HE.

Kazemi, S., Ashraf, H., Motallebzadeh, K. & Zeraatpishe, M. (2020) Development and validation of a null curriculum questionnaire focusing on 21st century skills using the Rasch model. Cogent Education, 7(1), 1736849.

Laurillard, D. (2002) Rethinking university teaching: A conversational framework for the effective use of learning technologies. London: Routledge.

Lea, M. & Street, B. (1998) Student writing in higher education: An academic literacies approach. Studies in Higher Education, 23(2), 157-172.

Lea, M. & Street, B. (2006) The “Academic Literacies” Model: Theory and Applications. Theory into Practice, 45, 368-377.

McIntosh, E. & Nutt, D. (eds) (2022) The Impact of the Integrated Practitioner in Higher Education: Studies in Third Space Professionalism. Oxon: Taylor & Francis.

University of Hull (2021) SkillsGuides. Available online: https://libguides.hull.ac.uk/SkillsGuides/ [Accessed 23/04/2021].

University of San Diego (2023) What is a Teaching Philosophy? Examples and Prompts. Available online: https://pce.sandiego.edu/teaching-philosophy-examples [Accessed 26/01/2023]

Webster, H. (2018) How to implement effective 1:1 tutorials, Association of Learning Development in Higher Education Annual Conference. University of Leicester, 26th – 28th March. Leicester: Association of Learning Development in Higher Education.

Header photo generated by DALL-E 2 AI

…and so it begins

Lee Fallin 3 Comments

Tomorrow marks my first day of teaching in my new role as Lecturer in Education Studies, and I’m very much looking forward to meeting the students I’ll be working with over the next academic year. My classes include the research and dissertation modules at both L6 and L7, which form significant milestones at the end of the UG and PGT programmes. Research philosophy and support is one of my significant areas of expertise, having supported hundreds of students across diverse programmes during my time working as a Learning Developer. I couldn’t be happier with this allocation.

What I am looking forward to the most is the opportunity to work with the same group of students beyond a single session. As a Learning Developer, I would see students in personal appointments, centrally-bookable workshops and in-programme lectures across every discipline. While this diversity was always fun – I would see so many people that it was impossible to learn names, see progression or develop those positive learner-staff relationships that build community. As a lecturer, personal supervisor and research supervisor, there will be opportunities for this. I know it won’t all be perfect – not everyone will engage or turn up – but there will be those opportunities! I think this is, perhaps, one of the most significant changes from working as a Learning Developer in the third space to being an academic member of staff. Time will tell if I’m right!

At the L6 induction, it really struck me that these students will be graduating in a year’s time. Over this academic year, I’ll have the opportunity to watch and support them in engaging in some pretty cool research projects. At the end of the year, I’ll get to see them walk across that stage. I want them to feel proud of themselves and what they have achieved. That, too, is something I wouldn’t see in the third space – or at least not in the same way.

I’ll leave this post as a quick one! This is all technically four days before my start date, and the early teaching is part of the benefit of an internal move. It’s also made the move from one role to the other super blurry. I am, however, VERY glad about this. I can’t imagine a hard start next week without any of the meetings, preparation and logistics (read: office move) of the last few weeks. I’m very glad the Library has facilitated this transition so well.

LEGO Serious Play starter kit for research & teaching

Lee Fallin 3 Comments

LEGO Serious Play was an essential aspect of my research method, getting participants to ‘build’ their answer, not just talk it through. I’ve also used it as a teaching facilitation tool to support critical and divergent thinking. LEGO is one of my most favourite research and teaching methods, as you can let people work through answers with the use of LEGO, and then capture the salient points when they share their build. It not only saves a lot of data processing for the researcher, but it is a lot more fun for participants. For teaching, it supports different forms of thinking and really gets ALL students involved. While LEGO Serious Play is a distinct facilitation approach and you can get trained to use it, there are also some helpful books to get you started. I recommend Blair and Rillo’s SERIOUSWORK as a good place to start.

To use LEGO for any aspect of research or teaching, you first need to buy some! This blog highlights the choices I made to build my budget LEGO Serious Play kit.

LEGO Serious Play sets are awesome! But expensive. There is a range of sets available on the official LEGO shop, but they were beyond my budget as a self-funded doctoral student. I had to improvise. This article will introduce the sets I purchased and how I think they worked for research and teaching use.

My haul

The LEGO sets I purchased for my LEGO Serious Play kit

LEGO classic

LEGO Classic sets are a brilliant way to bulk out your LEGO Serious Play kit. You get a lot of brick for your money, and the variety of colours is fantastic. I’m so jealous of children today – LEGO had about five colours when I was a child. I already had a Large Creative Brick Box (10698) – so bought a couple more to serve as the baseline of my LEGO Serious Play kit. The plastic storage boxes they come in are also the perfect place to keep the LEGO stored away between uses. In addition to these larger sets, I also bought a couple more classic sets, one featuring lots of windows and doors (11004) – the other featuring lots of wheels (11014).

Classic + more windows

11004 – Windows of Creativity

Classic + more doors

11014 – Bricks and wheels starter building set

The available sets vary over time, but I have found they usually have a classic set on offer with extra wheels and another with windows and doors. These are useful additions to any LEGO Serious Play kit so I’d advise investing in such sets. Windows and doors are not only useful in a literal sense, but they work well for metaphors. Wheels work well for movement, vehicles and more. I’ve also seen a set with extra roof tiles which I think could be useful. It’ll certainly be part of my next LEGO purchase.

Interesting bricks

Next up I wanted to add a set with some different/interesting bricks. To be honest, any set would do for this – but I wanted to avoid anything licenced. I felt items like a Star Wars brick or a Spiderman Minifigure would not serve as universal references, so wanted to avoid them. I think Minecraft LEGO sets are particularly useful as they have lots of transparent tiles and colourful bricks. At the time I purchased my kit, LEGO was celebrating its 60 year anniversary and had launched some special Building Bigger Thinking sets. I purchased World Fun (10403), which contained some useful pieces like a treasure chest, eyes, columns, helicopter and a couple of Minifigures. I also chose Ocean’s Bottom (10404) which has more eyes, wings, wheels and transparent bricks.

10403 – World Fun

10404 – Ocean’s Bottom

All these LEGO classic sets built the bulk of my LEGO Serious Play kit. This gave me lots of standard bricks, including windows, doors, wheels and more. The next pieces I used to build my collection were all a matter of choice. For example, baseplates can be useful for a lot of LEGO Serious Play kits – but they were not something I needed for my particular research. As such, I decided to forego them. If you need to facilitate collaborative builds then baseplates are the perfect way to bring this together.

Pick a Brick

To top off my LEGO Serious Play kit, I wanted to choose a few additional bricks. To help with this, I used the Pick a Brick station at a LEGO store. I focused on extra eyes, small tile pieces and anything else small. This would allow participants to build intricate/small/detailed models – should they wish.

Minifigures

Minifigures can be a bit of a divisive topic when considering their use in LEGO Serious Play. They can lead participants to focus on people (which may not be a bad thing) when they’re building their answers. For my research, I felt participants would benefit from Minifigures. Libraries are inherently social spaces – and people are part of that. I didn’t want participants wasting time in my research sessions ‘building people’ – so Minifigures it was!

Again, I felt the best place to get these was through a LEGO shop. There are build-a-Minifigure stations in LEGO shops allowing you to build three custom figures per pack. Four packs (12 figures) covered my needs.

Preparing the LEGO

The worst thing you can do is walk into your first LEGO Serious Play research or teaching session with a load of new boxes of LEGO. It’s worth spending some time unboxing and unbagging it to ensure it is ready to use. I also spent time assembling a few elements to make them ready for use. For example, adding tyres to wheels, putting wheels on axels, putting panes in windows and adding doors to their frames. While participants are free to switch things around, it does mean the bricks are ready for use without needing to combine these pieces.

From the unboxing photo below, you can see there was a lot of plastic bags to ditch. I also wanted to find a way to layout the LEGO without getting it everywhere – so I used the cardboard box lids from printer paper boxes. It worked really well to stop LEGO falling all over the floor during my research sessions.

Ready to go!

With all the LEGO purchased, unpacked and ready to go, I was able to start using it for teaching and research purposes. I still keep the LEGO stored in the big yellow boxes that came with the larger sets. I also bring a load of those empty box lids to pour LEGO out and stop it from getting everywhere.

LEGO works as a wonderful research and educational tool. I took this snap from one of the first sessions I facilitated three years ago. I can’t wait to share some more of my reflections on this.

LEGO, the LEGO logo, and the Minifigure are trademarks and copyrights of the LEGO Group. ©2021 The LEGO Group.

The development of university teachers vs. the learning developer

Lee Fallin Leave a comment

Today I had the pleasure of starting my Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PCAP). As a learning developer, my journey is atypical to the peers on my course. This article serves as my first reflection about this. Our first reading was Kugel’s (2006) How professors develop as teachers. Kugel discusses a typical development pathway for lecturers — moving from an understanding of how to teach students towards an understanding of how to support their learning. In this, there are six stages, each characterised by the changing focus as lecturers develop their practice:

The transition from teaching to learning

This model was interesting. Kugel discussed how new teachers tend to focus on themselves as they begin to teach. They move towards solidifying their own discipline knowledge before starting to take into account students. These initial changes focus on teaching. The understanding of students develops, acknowledging them as receptive, then active learners. These later stages begin to focus on learning above teaching. Finally there is an understanding of learners as independent — with the core role of the teaching being to support students to teach themselves.

While I can see much in this model, it’s an interesting reflection for me as a learning developer.

The primary role of a learning developer is to help learners achieve that end goal — independence. While there are many nuances to this, ultimately learning developers are aim to work with students to help them develop their own autonomy and self-sufficiency. So… do learning developers really jump to the final stage of Kugel’s model?

Perhaps. At least at first. As a new practitioner starting in the learning development field 9 years ago, I feel I started from day 1 as a practitioner supporting this goal. Perhaps somewhat light in the tools I had at my disposal – but a focus on independent learning all the same. What I didn’t realise was that learning development itself had an underlying literature I needed to understand. As such, I perhaps worked backwards through some of Kugel’s model. I had to back-step and develop myself and my disciplinary knowledge to ultimately make me better at supporting that learning.

That backwards learning was important. It made me appreciate the diverse ways in which most academic tasks can be achieved. Without this understanding, there can be a focus on promoting your practices — or at least a narrow range. Inclusive higher education practices should never aim to reproduce yourself. More importantly, it required me to understand what teaching means, and how in reality, it wasn’t really that important in most learning development encounters. Indeed, it wasn’t even something I did that much. That brings me to my last reflection on this paper.

This final reflection relates to ‘teaching’ itself. The paper focused on teaching alone. However, as educations, we have more tools than teaching alone. As learning developers we are coaches. We are mentors. We are cheerleaders – and yes! Sometimes teachers. Yet, teaching isn’t everything. It is just part of the story.