This document provides an overview of a presentation on metrics and measuring teaching excellence given by Tansy Jessop at the Business Librarians Conference on July 5, 2017. The presentation discusses the limitations of metrics for defining and measuring excellent teaching, and argues that some of the most important aspects of academic culture, like inspiring learning, resist simple quantification. The presentation also provides strategies for sparking learning through academic reading and writing, research-informed teaching, and developing personal connections with students.

1. Sparking learning in the context of metrics:
Cast Iron or Teflon?
@solentlearning
@tansyjtweets
Tansy Jessop
Business Librarians Conference
5 July 2017

2. Session outline
• Spot check on metrics
• Metrics: their power and their limitations
• The sure-fire things that spark learning
•Reading and Writing
•Research informed Teaching
•Being known

3. How would you define excellent
teaching?
Go to www.menti.com and use the code 73 40 64
Type in three words or phrases which sum up
excellent teaching for you.

4. Cool Business Librarian definitions!
(n= 53 respondents)

5. How can you tell if teaching is
excellent?
Go to www.menti.com & use the code 58 64 46
Choose the top two indicators.

6. How to measure excellence
(n=61 respondents)

7. So how does Jo Johnson describe
higher education teaching?
Teaching is highly variable
across higher education…
There is lamentable teaching
that must be driven out of our
system…
“Disengagement contract”…
There are inspiring academics
who go the extra mile, emailing
at weekends…

8. So is this
how to
measure
it?

9. How do NSS questions stack up as
excellence metrics?

11. Do students get jobs as a result of teaching
quality?
Rank Teaching (NSS)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

12. Does employability derive from teaching quality?
Rank Teaching (NSS)
1 Buckingham
2 University of Law
3 St Mary’s College Belfast
4 Courtauld Institute of Art
5 Keele
6 St Andrews
7 Bishop Grossteste
8 Harper Adams
9 Liverpool Hope
10 Aberystwyth

13. Does employability derive from teaching quality?
Rank Teaching (NSS) Graduate employability (Times)
1 Buckingham Cambridge
2 University of Law Oxford
3 St Mary’s College Belfast LSE
4 Courtauld Institute of Art Manchester
5 Keele Imperial College
6 St Andrews Kings College
7 Bishop Grossteste Edinburgh
8 Harper Adams University College
9 Liverpool Hope London Business School
10 Aberystwyth Bristol

14. Does employability derive from teaching quality?
Rank Teaching (NSS) Graduate employability (Times) NSS Rank
1 Buckingham Cambridge 20
2 University of Law Oxford 20
3 St Mary’s College Belfast LSE 155
4 Courtauld Institute of Art Manchester 87
5 Keele Imperial College 116
6 St Andrews Kings College 129
7 Bishop Grossteste Edinburgh 145
8 Harper Adams University College 102
9 Liverpool Hope London Business School 155
10 Aberystwyth Bristol 76

15. Does employability derive from teaching quality?
Gold, Silver, Bronze?
Rank Teaching (NSS) Graduate employability (Times) NSS Rank
1 Buckingham Cambridge 20
2 University of Law Oxford 20
3 St Mary’s College Belfast LSE 155
4 Courtauld Institute of Art Manchester 87
5 Keele Imperial College 116
6 St Andrews Kings College 129
7 Bishop Grossteste Edinburgh 145
8 Harper Adams University College London 102
9 Liverpool Hope London Business School 155
10 Aberystwyth Bristol 76

16. Defining
excellence
is different
from
measuring
it….

17. Some of the most precious
qualities of academic culture
resist simple quantification…
Too often, poorly designed
evaluation criteria are
“dominating minds,
distorting behaviour and
determining careers.”
(Wilsdon 2015, iii)

20. Excellent teaching is about deep learning
Deep Learning
• Meaning
• Concepts
• Active learning
• Generating knowledge
• Relationship new and
previous knowledge
• Real-world learning
Surface Learning
• External purpose
• Topics
• Passive process
• Reproducing knowledge
• Isolated and disconnected
knowledge
• Artificial learning
(Marton and Saljo 1976)

21. So what sparks inspiring learning?
•Academic reading and writing
•Research informed teaching
•Being known

22. Academic Reading and Writing

24. Academic reading: what students say
A lot of people don’t do wider reading. You just focus on
your essay question.
I always find myself going to the library and going ‘These
are the books related to this essay’ and that’s it.
You anticipate the questions coming up, and you learn the
materials that will definitely come up. It’s definitely a way
to focus your studies and to get a good mark, perhaps. But
is it is really the way to learn?

25. Your experience
Which of these
quotations resonates
and why?
Do you have any idea
why students don’t
read academic texts?
What strategies do you
have to encourage
students to read?

26. How much are students actually
learning in contemporary higher
education? The answer, for many
undergraduates, is not much.
Do universities reproduce or
reduce inequality among students
from different family
backgrounds?
…evidence of limited learning and
persistent inequality…

27. Research findings about academic
reading and writing
Significant learning gains
for students who
1) Read > 40 pages a week
of academic writing
2) Write > 20 pages per
semester for each unit

28. Writing heightens consciousness

29. Strategy 1: Formative blogging
• In-class
• On wordpress
• About controversial leading edge articles
• Personalised
• Comments on threads
• Digital footprints
• Weekly informal, conversational writing

30. Out of the silent seminar…
You have to evidence that you have read it compared to
a seminar reading. You are reading a lot more as well as
the set ones.
I go more in depth with the reading than with the
reading pack when I’d just highlight. It helps.
We sit in blog groups, all talk about it. Discuss the
readings. I think the discussion is more focused.

31. Into engagement…
Over the whole three years this is the most
engaged I’ve been in my readings. I really
liked doing this. I wish we had done it
more. Maybe start it in the first year.
.
…it is also a bit chatty and
informal. Even though I’m putting
in readings, it’s different. It’s a
nicer relaxed way of talking
about literature

32. Strategy 2: Developing research skills
• Year 2 module seminar
• Students bring 1 x book, 1 x chapter, 1 x journal article,
2 x popular culture articles
• All related to a particular topic: film and gender
• Students present and defend their choices to small
groups
• Reach consensus on best sources and why
• Incorporated into reading list

33. Strategy 3: Independent Directed Tasks
https://vimeo.com/214664726

34. Strategy 4: Writing in class
Use jottings and writing
exercises more in class!
Thinking power x 30
Teaching for introverts
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06ry369

35. Strategy 5:
Writing
reflectively
Stephen Brookfield’s Critical Incident Questionnaire http://bit.ly/1loUzq0

36. Strategy 6: Visual ways in to writing

37. 2. Research informed teaching:
The benefits

38. From here (circa 1100-1500)…

39. It is a peculiarity of the
institutions of higher learning
that they treat learning as
not yet completely solved
problems, remaining at all
times in a research mode…
Schools, in contrast, treat
only closed and settled
bodies of knowledge
(Humboldt's Programme for
University of Berlin 1810)
To here (1810)…

40. and back again…or maybe we never
went there? (circa 2017)

41. A framework for RIT
Teachers active
Students active
It’saboutcontent
It’saboutprocess
Research-tutored
Research-orientedResearch-led
Research-based
(Healey 2005)

42. RIT Strategies
1. Start with small tasks in first year: eg. Interviewing
one another
2. Make it as ‘real-world’ as possible
3. Link it to academic reading, eg. give journal title and
get students to brainstorm content in pairs/write an
abstract before reading it (then use as checklist)
4. Make it public: journals, presentations, conference
events
5. Use principles of choice, collaboration, curiosity, real
problems, things that are unfinished business for you

43. Research-based
https://vimeo.com/214664656

44. https://www.brookes.ac.uk/staff/pese/get-published/

45. Being known

46. Paradigm What it looks like
Technical rational Focus on data and tools
Relational Focus on people
Emancipatory Focus on systems and structures

47. Arum R. and Roksa J. 2011. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. University
of Chicago Press.
Barlow, A. and Jessop, T. 2016. “You can’t write a load of rubbish”: Why blogging works as formative
assessment. Educational Developments. 17(3), 12-15. SEDA.
Brookfield, S. (1995) Becoming a critically reflective teacher. Chapter 6. Understanding Classroom
dynamics: The Critical Incident Questionnaire. San Francisco. Jossey Bass.
Carr, N. 2010. The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we read, think and remember.
New York. Newton and Company.
Dept. for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (2016) Building on Success and Learning from
Experience. (Stern Review)
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/541338/ind-16-9-
ref-stern-review.pdf
Dept. for Business, Innovation and Skills (2016) Success as a Knowledge Economy: Teaching
Excellence, Social mobility and student choice.
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/523546/bis-16-
265-success-as-a-knowledge-economy-web.pdf
Gibbs, G. 2017. TEF Presentation at Southampton Solent University.
Healey, M., 2005. Linking Research and Teaching: disciplinary spaces in R. Barnett, ed, Reshaping the
university: new relationships between research, scholarship and teaching. Maidenhead: McGraw-
Hill/Open University Press, 30-42.
Jessop, T and Wu, Q. 2017 Debunking common myths about RIT. Dialogue Journal. 69-78.
Lemov, D. 2014. Teach Like a Champion. San Francisco. Jossey Bass.
Levy, P. and Petrulis, R. (2012) How do first year students experience inquiry and research, and
what are the implications for the practice of inquiry-based learning? Studies in
Higher Education, 37:1, 85-101.
Marton. F. and Saljo, R. 1976. On qualitative differences in Learning: Outcomes and Processes.
British Journal of Educational Psychology. 46(1). 4-11.
Wilsdon, J., et al. (2015). The Metric Tide: Report of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics
in Research Assessment and Management. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.4929.1363
References