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

22 ❘
Teaching, supervising, learning
higher education must engage with and take considerable responsibility for their learning.
It is important that learners structure information and are able to use it (Biggs, 1999). The
teacher cannot do all the work if learning is to be the outcome; congruently, the teacher
must ensure that course design, selection of teaching and learning opportunities and
assessment help the learner to learn. As designers of courses and as teachers, we want to
‘produce’ graduates of higher education capable of critical thought, able to be creative and
innovate at a relatively high level. Learning requires opportunities for practice and
exploration, space for thinking or reflecting ‘in your head’ and for interaction with others,
and learning from and with peers and experts. These imperatives, coupled with those of
our discipline, should affect our view of how we teach (and design courses) in our
particular higher education context (see also Chapter 15). Case study 3 (opposite) shows
three teachers creatively exploiting technology to assist learners to grasp the symmetry
of molecules.
Turning theory into practice
Selection of teaching, learning and assessment methods should be grounded in and
considered alongside an understanding of theories about learning. Notable among the
precepts that emerge from what we understand about how students learn are the
following:
• Learners experience the same teaching in different ways.
• Learners will approach learning in a variety of ways and the ways we teach may
modify their approaches.
• Prior knowledge needs to be activated.
• Learners have to be brought to ‘engage’ with what they are learning so that
transformation and internalisation may occur.
• Learners bring valuable experience to learning.
• Learners may be more motivated when offered an element of choice.
• Learners need to be able to explain their answers, and answer and ask ‘why?’
questions.
• Learners taking a discipline that is new to them may struggle to think in the
appropriate manner (an important point in modular programmes).
• Teachers need to understand where learners are starting from so that they can get the
correct level and seek to correct underlying misconceptions or gaps.
• Teachers and learners are both responsible for learning happening.
• Teachers need to be aware of the impact of cultural background and beliefs on learner
behaviour, interpretation and understanding.
• Feedback and discussion are important in enabling the teacher and learner to check
that accommodations of new understanding are ‘correct’.
• Formal and informal discussion of what is being learnt in a peer (small) group can be
a powerful learning tool.