Aim 4:

Become aware of the variety of ways teaching methods are employed and justified within your own disciplinary setting, and discover the extent to which these either incorporate or exclude a student learning perspective.

Topic 4 and Task:

It is very rare indeed for one single method (where "method" is narrowly construed) to be used exclusively in teaching a subject. As already discussed, most subjects employ a range or repertoire of often diverse methods, and generally attempt, with varying degrees of success, to interconnect or coordinate them. Probably the best-known instances of the problems of coordination are where a lecture course is run in parallel with a laboratory or field course (as in the sciences) and where a lecture course is coordinated with a parallel small-groups program (maybe called tutorials or workshops) as in much social sciences, humanities and maths teaching; or else coordinated with a field, practicum or clinical experience (as in many professional studies programs).

Where a relatively pure "single method" is claimed to be used (as in Keller Plan or "PSI", and in Problem-Based Learning) it will generally be found to be not at all as "pure" as claimed, but rather a carefully coordinated composite of more rudimentary methods, each of which can be separately described, and that the "glue" holding them all together is some central commitment to a particular value governing the way students are to go about learning (in "PSI" the value is independence and personalisation, in "PBL" the value is inquiry or problem-solving). Each of these latter two "special" methods is, however, a composite of others: small group meetings, the possibility of lectures, one-to-one tutorials, collaborative work, private study, and so on.

The task required in this Topic is to apply this analysis and identify methods used in your own teaching, your own disciplinary situation. It may be best done by thinking through the situation at departmental, rather than individual, level. But do whatever seems best in your own situation. Think of the task essentially as an itemising, a stocktake, to identify and list the incidence of the full variety of available teaching methods customarily used.

In addition to identifying the methods, it will be necessary to also recognise (i) what those who use that method are trying to achieve by using it (since any method can be used with all different kinds of intentions), and (ii) how they are going about using it (since any method can be employed in many different ways, sometimes with very different outcomes). Finally, mention the more obvious or better-known problems associated with each method - things any teacher who uses the method would willingly admit to. Try, therefore, setting out your findings in a table under those headings:

  

 

 

• With this stocktake in front of you, start to do some of the real thinking - the educational bit of the project. Apply the meta-critique demonstrated by Ramsden in Chapters 7 and 9, to the use of these methods, either across your department or in your own teaching.
• First, take a guess at which particular "Theory of teaching" (see Ramsden Chap 7 for this) is operating behind the use of each method.
• For the better-known methods (see the list above) read again Ramsden's critique of their most conspicuous shortcomings (see Ramsden Chapter 9) and compare that with the problems you have already listed. How does the perceptions of problems on the part of academic staff who use these methods square with Ramsden's "meta-critique" of the methods? Can we account for discrepancies?
• Given the Intentions listed in column 3 of your stocktake, read Ramsden's Chapter 9 (pages 170-180) again and consider whether some other method might be equally viable but more effective in each case. Or consider whether the existing method, applied differently, might be more effective than at present. Look particularly at some of the criteria Ramsden invokes on those pages: "structure and cooperation" (170); "understanding key ideas" (172); "relevance and integration" (173); "linking goals to methods" (175); "variety and improvisation" (176); "connecting action and ideology" (178); "active learning" (179) [and lots of others - these are only samples of the values mentioned].