Every ten years I have a reminder about the value of a PhD. When my wife and I fill in the decennial census form her qualifications count higher than mine. We both have bachelors degrees, and I also have a doctorate - but she trumps me by having a Certificate in Education (now renamed the Postgraduate Cerificate in Education or PGCE) which gives her a registered teacher number and professional status. In the list of qualifications on the census form her professional qualification lifts her to a higher box than my doctorate.
As David Willetts has pointed out, university lecturing is possibly the only 'profession' for which there is no formal requirement to undertake professional training. An individual can go straight from being a doctoral student to a lecturer overnight (indeed, that's what I did at the start of my career). But doing research and teaching are different things. Certainly today we do have training programmes of various kinds for those embarking on an academic career, and in Sheffield we have made the completion of a 'Certificate in Learning and Teaching' (CiLT) compulsory before a new lecturer can complete their period on probation. But the programme for the certificate is not onerous, and there are many new teaching staff who do not have to take it at present.
Then there is the element of continuous professional development (CPD). In most other professions individuals are required to keep updated through attendance at various training sessions throughout their careers. That is not the case for university lecturers. Attendance at research conferences could legitimately be argued to constitute a form of CPD for the research side of career development; but how many academics attend sessions to update their teaching skills, to consider alternative ways of developing learning, or to consider the potential of new learning technologies? A few years ago when teaching evaluations still involved sitting in on classes given by colleagues in other departments I was astonished at how antediluvian the teaching methods employed sometimes were, with my suggestions on alternative approaches being greeted by "I've always done it like that". Developments in learning technologies in particular should encourage everyone to try to keep reasonably up to date if only to understand the mindset of 'digital native' students (who have grown up with modern IT) in comparison to digital immigrant staff who started out in a different world.
Today at Learning and Teaching Committee we took some steps towards the professionalisation of teaching at Sheffield University, with the proposal that everyone who appears in front of a class of students should undertake some form of training, and with consideration of a CPD framework for established staff. But I know these things will prove controversial amongst those who think that 'learning on the job' is the best way forward. It is ironic to note that while David Willetts would like to see more formal training for university teachers, his colleague Michael Gove seems to be putting more emphasis on learning on the job for school-teachers (as I noted in a recent blog) . But consistency is an attribute of butter and not of governments.
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