In November, Charles University will host the 2nd International Paedagogium Platform Conference, providing a valuable opportunity for academics and practitioners in higher education. This year’s conference is focusing on the roles of Teaching and Learning Centres, including those newly-established at Charles University. The event will feature eminent guest speakers, such as Sarah Leupen, who teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and is a Principal Lecturer and Fulbright Scholar closely involved in educational innovation.
Forum spoke to Dr Leupen ahead of the event to get a sense of what participants can expect as well as how much she was looking forward to taking part.
We are only a few weeks away now, you must be looking forward to being here soon?
I have to say I am very excited about the upcoming conference. It represents a chance for me to reconnect with some of my Czech colleagues that I have worked with in the past, and to meet in person some colleagues that I have been working with virtually (on a course leading to a microcredential in educational development). I am so pleased to be there in person this year, which also means that my talk will not be at 3:00 in the morning!
It's an unusual topic, isn't it?
As far as I know, it is the first conference on this subject in the Czech Republic, which represents the efforts from many dedicated people at CU and the rector’s leadership. Not too long ago, no one I knew in the ČR would have known what a teaching and learning center was. The pace of change and dedication to supporting quality teaching and communities of teachers is wonderful to see.
Teaching and Learning Centres are increasingly at the forefront at many universities today but I imagine there are differences in what they do, depending on the school. Do their roles vary?
They do, they vary a great deal. Some institutions leverage their T&L Centres to create huge changes in the culture of teaching, and at others they are little islands that are often ignored by higher administration. Institutions have many priorities, and despite what we all think of a university as fundamentally being, the quality of teaching is often not one of those priorities. In fact, many institutions take a position, without evidence and perhaps almost magically, that their teaching is already universally excellent. The most prestigious institutions are the worst for this, which makes it even more impressive that the most prestigious educational institution in the ČR is moving boldly toward these changes.
The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).
What would you say is the main aim of the conference? To share best practices or news of the latest developments?
In general, that is the aim, but this conference (and some others, particularly the smaller ones) have the additional aim of developing community, in this case among the Czech academics who will be attending. This is particularly critical at this moment, when Charles University has just opened its Teaching and Learning Centers at its faculties. Most of the people who work at such centres will not know many others who work in educational development (sometimes called academic development); in fact there is not yet really a Czech word or phrase for such work. So it is critical not just that they can learn from each other, but also feel that they can openly share their challenges (and solutions), and get to know each other well enough to feel they are part of a community of Czech educational developers.
Do you have such a role at UMBC?
I don’t officially work for my university’s teaching and learning center; so far, I have been unwilling to give up teaching! However, I am very involved with educational development work at UMBC. Some of the most important aspects of this work include Faculty Learning Communities, which I will talk about at my workshop at the conference, and in leading change at the level of my own department (Biological Sciences), where for example we have a monthly Teaching Circle in which we discuss a paper published in one of the STEM education journals. Just as important is my work in conducting research studies with my colleagues about pedagogical practices (often called the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning). Right now I am conducting a study in collaboration with Anna Malečková from CU’s medical school in Pilsen (LFP), who is here in the USA on a Fulbright scholarship, of an alternative testing practice in my Human Physiology class.
Outside of my university, I train faculty at different universities in various evidence-based teaching techniques, but mainly the pedagogy called Team-Based Learning, which is particularly common in health professions training in the USA and elsewhere. No part of UMBC, not even my own department, has benefitted me more than our T&L Centre. I have attended probably hundreds of workshops, conferences, read countless research papers on teaching as part of our reading groups, participated in a Faculty Learning Community almost every year since 2014, and on and on. I have learned a tremendous amount from my colleagues, and there is a very close community of us who have worked and learned together about teaching and learning, across departments, for many years.
Charles University Rector Milena Králíčková and her team are pushing strongly to improve higher education teaching and learning.
If we focus on what centres do, the influence can be broad but also in-depth: what are aspects or approaches that you consider more important?
A lot depends on the role of the Centre, whether it is intended to be more or less targeted to some of these goals. For example, at many universities here in the USA, helping instructors integrate technology into their classes is the “job” of another unit rather than the T&L Centre. But no matter what the “charge” is, there is just one really important thing: that Centres help instructors achieve their goals for their students. Perhaps the instructor wants their students to be more productive in group work, or to read the provided materials more effectively, or to gain more practice in the “real world” problems that professionals in their field work on. Maybe they simply want students to come to class! The Centre’s staff should be able to help faculty think about their goals (if needed) as well as to provide direct assistance in achieving them, whether it is from suggesting evidence-based techniques to achieve that goal, directing the instructor to research papers on teaching that address the question they are interested in, providing a structured classroom visit and follow-up, or another method is appropriate to the instructor’s goals.
What are some schools abroad or outside your state that also opened your eyes in terms of their approach?
Teaching and Learning Centres have done innovative and sometimes surprising and exciting things at universities around the world, but not surprisingly I am more familiar with work done at US T&L Centres. One exciting example is Miami University’s Top 25 Project, in which they targeted the university’s 25 highest-enrollment classes for increasing inquiry-based learning and student engagement. Departments were specifically directed to increase active learning and use of class time for complex tasks in these courses, and the results especially in overall culture change around teaching at Miami, have been really impressive.
In my talk at the conference last year I highlighted the teaching-culture changes at two other U. S. institutions, Boise State University in Idaho and, the University of Colorado, where a large-scale Science Education Initiative was set up by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Carl Wieman. All these examples show us that large-scale change is possible.
This kind of support and willingness to change up sounds invigorating.
Absolutely. For me it has changed everything. In the beginning I did not even know that there were best practices in university teaching, or that there was a literature about it, or which other people in my university were doing interesting things in their classroom. Being connected to all these ideas but especially, to all my colleagues who are also interested in improving teaching, has been the most rewarding aspect of my teaching career.
Are there any downsides - or areas where kids’ gloves are needed?
Definitely. First of all there is often the idea that such a Centre exists to “tell people the right way to teach,” as if there were a single correct way, or to “correct” the practices of poor teachers, so that being told by, for example, one’s department chair, to visit the Center can feel like an insult or a punishment. We all take pride in our work, and put a lot of time and effort into it, so no one likes feeling that they are being told that the way they are teaching is ineffective or incorrect. Partly for this reason, many of the instructors who perhaps could benefit most from the information, perspective and community provided by Centres, will not participate in a centre’s activities. They don’t believe there is any problem with their teaching. So often a problem with Centers is that they “preach to the choir,” so that a faculty or university may have some people who are doing amazing work in pedagogy, but 90% of the instructors are just doing what has been done for the past seven hundred years. For that reason, it is helpful to consider mandatory pedagogical training for new faculty members, as CU is indeed doing. At least those instructors will know more than I did at that stage.
How do you otherwise formally gauge improvement or success in this area?
It can be anything from “yes, more students are attending class now that I added this daily reflection activity” to a full-scale social science research study published in an education journal. Often there is a specific target to measure: scores on a final exam or other assessment, success in the course that follows (e.g., I am a successful Calculus I teacher if a high percentage of my students succeed in Calculus II), etc. Surveys, focus groups, interviews, and the other tools of social science are all frequently used. Technology has really helped here; our data analytics system can directly tell me whether my students have (for example) done better in Calculus II than before or than other students, and creating a survey with e.g. Google Forms takes just a few minutes.
To come back to your personal experience, could we talk about changes you yourself implemented?
In my own classes, I typically give students about 5-10 problems to discuss each day in teams, after which they vote on the best answer and we discuss the problem as a class. I was concerned that sometimes student teams had robust discussions, but at other times seemed to quickly decide on their choice and then go buy shoes on their phones, or whatever. So, with permission, the associate director of our Centre and I recorded student teams’ discussions over the course of the semester, and used a discourse analysis methodology (in which the Center staff member was an expert—not me!) to determine which characteristics of the questions I asked during class were relevant. It turned out that the questions that produced the best results were the ones that were complex and “messy,” whereas questions that could be solved by calculation or factual knowledge were the worst for producing high-quality discussion. [Due to those findings] I rewrote my questions in all my classes in response, and now my students spend more time in class thinking and learning and, (almost?) no one buys shoes.
if we turn to other developments running concurrently, AI is playing a greater and greater role in how we learn, process and work with information. Because that angle, including our relience on a non-thinking tool will only grow more important, I imagine that too is something that educators have to account for.
There is no doubt that AI will change teaching and learning – it already has. There are many ways to think about this, but this makes it more important than ever that we teach our students using the best methods we have available, because if all we have taught them is to memorise facts, summarize an essay, develop an outline, etc. they are no better, and much slower, than an AI chatbot at the same tasks. We also need to teach our students to work with AI. And imagine a world in which your physician had an AI assistant to take notes, order the lab tests, call in the prescription, etc. (this is in the very near future now)—then that physician would have double the time to actually listen to and examine you. (Or maybe they would simply be assigned more patients…)
On the other hand, we always imagine more change than there will be. Remember when MOOCs were going to change the world and destroy traditional universities? For that matter, when books became cheap enough for students to purchase, people said there did not need to be lectures any more. And during COVID everyone said we did not need live lectures any more. Yet as I write there are thousands of people lecturing around the planet.
Is there anything ‘old fashioned’ that remains from before: the joint reading of a text perhaps, debates, venturing outside the classroom in a social studies class?
Yes, of course, good teaching was not invented 20 years ago. There have always been great innovators like Jan Komenský, who said (what has been translated as) “Craftsmen do not hold their apprentices down to theories; they put them to work without delay so they may learn to forge by forging… therefore in schools let pupils learn to write by writing, to speak by speaking, to reason by reasoning” and even more simply “Let the main object be… to find a method of instruction, by which teachers may teach less, but learners learn more.” A debate is a good example of something old that remains—but what is nice now is that we now have more study of these methods, so that we might be able [to make more precise decisions] to say, “Yes, a debate will be an effective learning tool here—but more so if you assign students to a side of the debate rather than letting them choose.”
