A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

12 ❘
Teaching, supervising, learning
approaches to learning can be modified by the teaching and learning context, and
are themselves learnt. He has also popularised the term constructive alignment to
describe congruence between what the teacher intends learners to be able to do, know or
understand, how they teach, and what and how they assess.
Case study 1: Encouraging Master’s level students to take
a deep approach to learning through a combination of
teaching and learning methods
There are 150 students on my MSc Management course. These students come
from different countries, academic backgrounds, cultures, and teaching and
learning traditions. It is a challenge to ensure sufficient exposure and learning for
the diverse group; along with ‘information’, they need a deeper understanding
of the concepts involved. However, because the entrance criteria for this course
are high I can be confident that the students are ‘quick’ learners. I therefore include
a lot of information in the formal lecture part of the two-hour sessions. I start
from first principles, making few assumptions of prior knowledge, but go through
the material quite quickly, which, coupled with comprehensive lecture notes,
enables the whole group to be at a similar level in terms of the information they
need. I then make the second half of the session as flexible and informal as possible
so that students can work at different speeds and modes depending on their
background. I encourage group work to harness the heterogeneity of the group
and for students to learn from each other.
I am conscious that the lectures develop a surface approach to learning, which can
be contrasted with the interactive sessions that promote a deeper approach to
learning. All the students seem comfortable with the lecture part of the sessions
while many of them struggle with the more interactive sessions; however, the
group style of these sessions seems to ease this process. I find it worthwhile to
remind myself that developing a deeper approach to learning can be a gradual
and sometimes unsuccessful process.
(Dr Juan Baeza, Tanaka Business School, Imperial College London)
Interrogating practice
Consider occasions when you have wanted your students to really think about
something or take it on board in a fundamental way, but they have taken a
surface approach. Why do you think this was?