Saranne Weller

Peer observation of teaching: The interaction between peer review and developmental models of practice

Teaching observation is widely promoted as a mechanism for developing teaching practice in higher education. Specifically, formative peer observation is considered by many to be a powerful tool for providing feedback to individual teachers, disseminating disciplinary good practice and fostering a local evaluative enhancement culture. Despite its widespread use, however, there are still reservations about the extent to which participation in formative teaching observation can contribute to the development of lecturers’ critical reflection and the enhancement of practice. In particular, the capacity of colleagues to evaluate and provide critical feedback that can inform a reflective approach to practice has been questioned. This paper presents a single case study of one lecturer’s experience of participating in a single teaching observation cycle, conducted with an educational expert and disciplinary peers acting as both observer and observee. Content analysis of written feedback provided after each teaching observation identified five categories of commentary on teaching practice: description, positive reflection, critical reflection, applying reflection and misconception. The analysis reveals a change in the proportion of critically reflective and applied feedback comments before and after the lecturer’s experience of participating in developmental teaching observation with an educational expert. We argue that this change in the type of written feedback signals the important role of pedagogic experts in facilitating the development of the lecturer’s capacity to evaluate colleagues’ teaching through the modelling of critical feedback behaviours. We place this within a recent theoretical framework that proposes a hybrid observation model combining linear and hierarchical discourse of teaching.

Concept mapping in the humanities to facilitate reflection : Externalizing the relationship between public and personal learning

This article discusses how mapping techniques were used in university teaching in a humanities subject. The use of concept mapping was expanded as a pedagogical tool, with a focus on reflective learning processes. Data were collected through a longitudinal study of concept mapping in a university-level Classics course. This was used to explore how mapping can be applied in the discursive context of the humanities in relation to teaching, learning and assessment. A theory was developed of how to facilitate the externalization of the relationship between public and personal reflection through combining social and psychological aspects of learning. The article concludes with suggestions for how this can be applied as a learning and assessment tool to assist the writing and reflection process in the humanities. This situates broader developments in educational theory and research in the unique character of learning and teaching in Classics.

Comparing Lecturer and Student Accounts of Reading in the Humanities.

This article reports the outcomes of an exploratory small-scale study to compare lecturer and student conceptions of critical reading at a research-intensive UK institution. Analysis of lecturer and student interviews in four humanities subjects suggests differences in the way lecturers and students conceptualize and articulate the practices of critical reading. Lecturers conceptualize reading as creative and intertextual, a defamilarization of personal experiences of the world and the development of relational ways of understanding through close reading. Conversely, students are found to conceptualize reading as evaluating different perspectives, domesticating new experiences into existing personal value schema and apprehending the text as object. The discussion considers the pedagogical implications of these differences for developing reading practices in the humanities classroom. The article also reflects on the relationship between the capacity to participate in the discourses of criticality and the capacity to enact critical encounters with texts as readers.

Who is the newer researcher into higher education? Locating ourselves in shifting terrains

ABSTRACT This article aims to deconstruct the underpinning tenets of the term ‘newer researcher into higher education’. In recognition of the ambiguities of the term, we begin by questioning the nature of the field(s) of research into higher education (HE). Secondly, we critique the policy discourses associated with the term ‘newer researcher’. Then, with a view to illustrating the over-linear assumptions of such discourses, the article articulates the biographies of practising researchers in this field through narrative reconstructions of the five authors’ own routes as researchers into HE, openly acknowledging their temporalities and serendipitous conditionalities. Finally, we consider the nature of a career in the context of the professionalisation of routes into HE research. Our concluding remarks return us to the question of the status of HE research and to suggestions of positive ways to embrace the dilemmas we face.