Learning to Teach in Higher Education 2nd ed by Paul Ramsden

Chapter 2

This chapter briefly outlines three case studies which are an anonymous composite of teachers thinking about (conceptualising) their teaching experience and practice.  I have come to understand particularly over the last year or so that there are no easy answers when it comes to 'how to teach', at some points it has seemed overwhelming and it is certainly complex and there is not a 'set of rules' to solve all the problems.  I have enough experience now to know that the same session repeated can be received very differently.  I can relate to elements of all 3 case studies and have probably thought similarly to all of them at different times! The important thing to note is that how I experience teaching has implications for the ways in which the students will learn, what I do or say in the classroom effects what they will be able to do or understand.

The next three chapters examines these implications from three points of view:

• different outcomes of learning
• the ways in which students go about learning
• our students' perceptions of teaching

Learning to Teach in Higher Education 2nd ed by Paul Ramsden

Introducation and Chapter 1
The above book is required reading for the PgCLT, published in 2003, so there will be no mention of social learning using Web 2.0,  results of the National Student Survey or the Browne Review or coalition governments' comprehensive Spending Review 2010.  Stefan Collini provides a very good review of Browne in the London Review of Books (as recommended by Helen Power in the Law School). 

Interestingly though there is mention of much that is still relevant today, (perhaps obviously otherwise it wouldn't still be on the reading list!) pressures including a curriculum based on problem solving and customer needs, the knowedge based economy, universities as agents for social change, quantity and quality, accountability and control of public spending, cross disciplinary working, performance indicators, increasing administration, widening access, 24/7 availability, students with job and family responsibilities, pressure to undertake scholarly research and 'infinite quantities of instantly accessible information'.

I like the simple message of the book, 'to become a good teacher, first understand your students' experiences of learning.' p xii

This is a post to keep check of some interesting quotes:

p3 'It [higher eduction] is enlivened by apparently infinite quantities of instantly accessible information.'

p4 'Today's undergraduates are at once harder to teach and less indulgent towards indifferent teaching.'

p 6 '...learning in educational institutions should be about changing ways in which learners understand, or experience, or conceptualise the world around them.'

p7 'The idea of learning as a qualitative change in a person's view of reality is essential to an appreciation of my main argument.'

p7 'The aim of teaching is simple: it is to make student learning possible.'

p 12 Three main areas/problems:

• what we should teach
• how we should teach it
• how we can decide what students have learned from what we have taught them