School for dons

Think back to your university days - to those lectures, seminars and tutorials. Are they happy memories of enthusiastic discovery and stimulating discussion induced by great minds or, at least, great communicators? If so, you were lucky. Most people remember their higher education teachers as a mixed bag of the decent and the downright awful.

"I was taught by some of the world's best teachers, like AJP Taylor, arguably the most brilliant communicator of the 20th century," says Geoffrey Alderman, head of Academic Development and Quality Assurance at Middlesex University, who read history at Oxford from 1962 to 1965. "I was also taught by some of the worst teachers I have come across, who should not have been appointed. They were not even good at research. They were good college men and they were part of the fixtures and fittings."

Such a sweeping indictment of your average don would, it is hoped, not apply to today's academe. Modern academics, one assumes, are a dab hand at research even if they don't shine in a lecture theatre. But should we accept this idea that it is OK for lecturers to be lousy teachers; that, unlike schoolteachers, higher education teachers are born not made, and that there's nothing you can do to make them any better? Increasingly, students, academics and university administrators think not.

In fact, in the past few years a quiet revolution has been taking place as a small but growing band of universities has embraced the notion that university teachers can be taught to teach. Institutions such as Oxford Brookes, one of the leaders in the field, have pioneered a postgraduate teaching qualification for new lecturers. "Over the last 13 years, 250 staff have been through our programme," explains Carole Baume, who works at the university and chairs the Staff and Educational Development Association, which has developed a voluntary accreditation scheme for teachers in higher education.

"People who have been through the programme are more likely than those who have not to lead innovation in teaching of their discipline. They're more likely to devise new approaches to teaching and learning to reach a student body which is increasingly diverse at the end of the 20th century."

Like some other universities, Oxford Brookes runs workshops and seminars in which new lecturers are shown the methods they can use - mini-lectures, small group teaching, how to draw students out into a discussion and how to assess their work.

Young lecturers are observed teaching and are given feedback on how they're doing. They compile a portfolio of their teaching experience and their reflections on it. Altogether, they receive 300 hours' training in their first year while they're embarking on their lecturing job, which amounts to one day a week.

Similar reforms are being brought in at Middlesex University. A teaching certificate has been introduced as a pilot for new staff this year. And that university is also trying to build teaching prowess into promotion by encouraging lecturers to compile portfolios which demonstrate their achievements in teaching. "The aim is to show they don't have to rush around doing masses of research to get promotion," explains Maggie Steel, staff development manager at Middlesex. "We say we value teaching. You can get promotion on your teaching excellence."

Middlesex is also undertaking peer observation of teaching, something which has been strongly resisted by teacher unions in the past and has been seen by many academics as an infringement of their academic freedom. Students are regularly asked for their views of the teaching they are receiving - a practice which has been widely adopted in the UK. "We're moving from a culture where students are considered lucky to be where they are, and in which the lecturer is God, to one in which the lecturer is a facilitator and has to find out what real learning is," adds Maggie Steel.

It may look as though new universities are leading the way here - and the evidence is they are - but some "old" institutions are also jumping on the bandwagon. Exeter, Hull, Keele, Nottingham and University College, London, have all received recognition from the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) for their lecturer training, and Leeds, Salford, Lancaster, Aberystwyth and Bangor are in the queue. A total of 43 UK universities have signed up. In five to 10 years' time it is expected that every university in the country will have a postgraduate teaching certificate for new lecturersn

That subject is being considered by Sir Ron Dearing in his review of higher education, and SEDA has been asked to give evidence. It is thought likely that Sir Ron will want to see training for lecturers extended to all lecturers in the country, and will make such a recommendation in his report next year.

Lecturing remains one of the few professions that have no professional training. Doctors have to undergo staff development every year or so, otherwise they lose a chunk of their salary, says Graham Gibbs, Professor of Education at Oxford Brookes, and accountants have to be retrained every five years. So why not the people responsible for educating the cream of the nation's workforce?

The answer is that higher education has remained a secret garden until recently, with its practices and curricula hidden from public view and its staff accorded an unthinking respect. The issue of how lecturers taught was not addressed, because it didn't need to be. Now new demands from the Government, in the shape of the higher education funding council's teaching quality reviews, combined with students' increasing reluctance to tolerate poor teaching, have put universities on the spot.

"What has been a private transaction between teacher and student has now become much more public, so there is greater receptiveness towards taking teaching quality seriously," says Professor Ron Barnett, of London's Institute of Education.

"We're in a climate where student unions are being more vociferous on behalf of their students. We're into an age of student charters and student feedback. Moreover, some students are investing considerable sums of their own money in higher education, so they want to feel they're receiving a high quality product. If they're not getting what they feel entitled to, they're resorting to legal action."

However much things are changing, there is general agreement that universities still have a long way to go. Certainly, the students surveyed (see above) expressed the kind of complaints about their lecturers that would have been commonplace 30 years ago. Thomas Huxley's comment that a lecture is a process by which "information is transferred from the notebook of the lecturer to the notebook of the student, without passing through the minds of either" would still seem to be true in too many lectures todayn

`The younger lecturers were more committed'

For Sara Harris, 27, who graduated last summer, the teaching on her psychology degree course at Middlesex University was a combination of the extremely good and the horrendous. "I found the younger lecturers to be more committed and animated and to put a lot more of themselves into their lectures," she explains. "A couple of the others were terrible." One lecturer, in particular, sticks in her mind. At the beginning of the course module he sold all students a pack of his lecture notes. To her amazement, he then proceeded to read from these notes during the course of lectures.

Some lecturers were much more available to help students than others. "You were lucky if you got to see a tutor more than twice a semester," she says. "Degrees these days are very much do-it-yourself. You don't really get much support."

An Oxford Brookes graduate, Nicky Tarr, who got a first-class degree last summer in anthropology and sociology and is vice-president of the students' union, says her lecturing was pretty good.

"I think our standard of teaching is very high," she says. "A lot of the methods are innovative compared with how they teach down the road at Oxford University. We have sessions with students actually conducting the seminar. That way you are learning transferable skills. You are learning how to disseminate information and you're helping other students to learn."

Ketan Amin, 21, who is studying for an HND in chemistry at the University of North London, is not so enthusiastic. Only two out of five of his lecturers are very good, he reckons. The others are more interested in research. "So when they're teaching us it seems like they're trying to get it out of the way. It's not their main priority. They have read the material the night before and they reel it off. They write notes on the board and that's it."

At Glasgow University, law student Shehzaad Sacranie thinks his lecturing has been variable. "We have had some superb lecturers, people who are undoubted authorities in their field, and we have had people so far below the mark that it's a laugh," he says.

One lecturer of conveyancing was so inaudible, despite a voice-enhancement device, that his lectures ended up being virtually boycotted by students. By contrast the regius professor of law was superb, witty and authoritative.

"I think the problem is that a lot of people are very fusty and set in their ways and they have no rapport with students at all"n