Michael Grove, Director of the University of Birmingham’s STEM Education Centre, visited UBC in the Fall. Michael works both within the University of Birmingham and at the national level in the UK on issues regarding teaching and learning in higher education. He co-developed and served as Director of the National HE STEM Programme, which was tasked with enhancing the way universities recruit students and deliver programs of study within the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. He has also supported STEM subjects that the government deemed strategically important and vulnerable in 2005 by establishing the More Maths Grads initiative to increase and widen participation in mathematical sciences at the university level.
With a background in physics, Michael primarily teaches mathematics to undergraduate students from different STEM disciplines. Michael visited UBC on a Universitas 21 fellowship supported by the University of Birmingham. We spoke with him about why he chose to visit UBC and what continued collaborations he has planned with CTLT.
Q: I’m curious why you chose to come to UBC, and I would like to talk about what you’d like to do here.
Michael Grove (MG): The reason I came here was Simon [Bates, Senior Advisor, Teaching and Learning, and Academic Director at CTLT]. UBC is one of our Universitas 21 partners. There’s a network of 21 international universities that is a research-intensive group. And so Birmingham’s in that group with UBC. And Birmingham offers fellowship applications to fund visits to those partners. I knew of Simon in the UK through contact with a mutual colleague, which is Tina Overton [Professor of Chemical Education and Deputy Head of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Hull]. So knowing Simon was here, seeing the good things that were done through the Wieman Initiative, seeing the things that were happening through CTLT, and given some of the things that we were looking to do as a university, it seemed to be a great opportunity to come out and visit, see what was happening, and hopefully develop some collaborations.
Q: What sorts of things happening at CTLT were you interested in?
MG: Since coming out here, there’s been the work to support scholarship of teaching and learning. Andrea [Han, Associate Director, Strategic Curriculum Services at CTLT] and Ido [Roll, Senior Manager, Research and Evaluation at CTLT] were developing these seminars around Research Methods in Higher Education. And we’ve done a lot of that in the UK. Perhaps not quite at the same level. So they work really well in terms of acting as a focus for teaching and learning. Some of the things that Simon had done with the Flipped Lab group, for example, was about getting people together, getting people to look at how they can use literature to inform their practices, to change their practices, to then write it up, to share it, and there’s this great community of cross institutional sharing. But I think the one that really came through the radar was the Wieman Initiative. I’d seen the kind of things that were done there. I’d seen the sort of model of fellows working, having changed projects and departments, and we had funding in the UK to do something similar but fixed-term in a range of universities where we tried to change teaching practices. And there are elements of the models that were quite similar. And we’re in the UK, in Birmingham, trying to have a strong focus on teaching and learning, so I was quite interested in the approaches that were used in UBC that we might take and adapt and develop. Things like the teaching stream route, as well, is something that we’ve got, and how can we support staff who are on that route, as opposed to the researcher. So it was a great chance to see some of the things that were happening, to see how it all integrated together was a really key reason for coming here. Simon’s group holds everything together – it’s working on massive institutional projects, it’s sharing that kind of effective practice and seeing how that works.
Q: You mentioned some things that you would like to continue collaborating on?
MG: Yes, there are a couple things. One of the things that I’ve taken from my time here is the two-stage exam. So I’ve just been with Brett Gilley [a Geoscience Education Instructor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences and at Vantage College]. Brett’s coming to the UK in January, so we plan on getting him to give a talk. But I want to use that in my teaching this year, so I’m going to try the two-stage exams. One of the things that we’re going to work on, is we produced a book, Tina Overton and I, on getting started in educational research, which I think has been quite well received. [The book is] free, and we planned to do a second version. So that proved to be very popular. Since CTLT is developing its program around [educational research], we see the chance to develop the guide in conjunction and have that produced jointly between our institutions with maybe one or two others involved as well, use that as kind of a course guide, make some of the presentation materials available that we can share with other people. So that’s one idea that we’ve agreed upon. And then something we agreed yesterday to look at was writing something about models and mechanisms by which you can change approaches, cultures, attitudes towards learning and teaching in higher education. So taking what we know, and taking the huge amount that’s come out of CTLT, out of Wieman, putting that together in that if we were starting a university from scratch how would we build the focus upon learning and teaching? And try to write that up as a reflective piece based upon our experiences. So those are just a few things coming from the wings, but it’s been a great visit.
Q: Could you talk a bit more about the last publication you mentioned?
MG: We’ve got to sort of think about how we focus it, but in my mind it’s a bit more about, if you were a provost or a vice-chancellor and you were looking to improve your teaching offering, what would you set up, what would you do, how would you approach it? So for us, I think it’s more of a change piece. It’s not saying, “This is how you change your teaching,” because I think there’s tons out there, but [it’s more] around how can you go about setting up a university, and how can you build the profile of teaching and learning and support people to develop through to improve your educational experience? So what things do we know work? What things have been successful here? The Wieman model of using fellows works really well, but then there’s something about having a very senior champion. Wieman took that role. Simon takes that role in CTLT. And so having that recognition, how does that link in with departments? So it’s thinking, quite conceptually, if we were able to start again, how would we build the structures in a university to recognize, support, champion, drive forward teaching and learning.
Q: And do you have success stories or results that you’d like to look at?
MG: Yes, I think [that’s] what’s going to come from here. So there are the various examples of impact that have come through the work, and then there’s data that exists. There’s the evidence that we’ve got from some of the things we’ve done in the UK. We did a lot of work that led to the development of the guide, of how do you build this culture of getting people to engage in improving practice, evaluate that, develop it into research to collaborate to form part of a community. And so I think there’s lots of bits and pieces, but I don’t think anyone’s ever sat down and thought how do we put these together to do something that improves the university? I think almost you could write this as a case study on UBC. But I think there’s a few things that hopefully we can add based on our experience that bring it all together. So I think it’d be a really nice conceptual piece. It might be a bit challenging to write, but I think it’d be really interesting to influence what all the universities do.
Q: So universities could look at that and get some ideas?
MG: Yes, get some ideas and look at how they develop their own approaches towards this. You know, how is the best way of using educational projects? Lots of universities offer educational projects. We offer small grants, medium grants, departmental grants. It’s very, very similar to here. So what’s the best way of using those effectively to bring about some sort of change in teaching practices?
Q: I was curious how much of your interest lies within the things that might fall into the realm of what we’re calling flexible learning activities at UBC, where people are trying to employ better pedagogical techniques and perhaps use technology, and how much of it falls within improving things that are perhaps more traditional?
MG: I think it all comes together. I think what I sort of like to look at, is the whole experience that we offer. We do have students that in the UK enroll as majors, they choose their major when they come in. So what I like to think about is how we improve the totality. So it isn’t just about saying well, we’ve got a component that could be flexible learning, what do we do? It’s actually thinking about program design as a whole. So it’s thinking about what are the best ways of delivering our programs, what are the techniques that can be used. And I think the problem is, in some institutions, here’s a great example of where it’s thought through, but in some institutions it’s a case of, well, we need to use a new approach, here’s the latest thing that emerges, the latest fad, we’ve got to use it. Where I like to think in terms of where do we want our students to be? What do we want in terms of our graduates? What are the skills, what’s the knowledge, what’s the ability, what do we want them to know, do, and understand? Where are they when they come in? We want to know, clearly, what the learning goals are. Where do we want them to end up at the end of each year and the end of their programs, where are they when the come in, so what can we assume, what can we expect, what skills do they have, what things do we need to develop? And then, in between that, you then figure out the best way of doing that. And that might be using flexible technologies, it might be through more problem-based learning, it might be that traditional lectures are another route. Traditional lectures doesn’t mean someone just sitting there, someone at the front standing there and just presenting, and the students never say anything. You’d like to think it’s far more interactive than that. But it’s thinking about where they are when they come in, where do you want them to be at the end, and what’s the best way of getting there? And I think the best way of getting there is where we need to do things like the research. So, you know, we have these initiatives, but if we don’t understand how they work, we don’t understand how they impact upon student learning. We can’t be certain that they will achieve the learning goals that we’re aiming for. So I think all of this fits together as a spectrum. I think all of these things form part of what we offer as a student experience, and it’s how we build our programs, how we deliver those programs, and then how we as practitioners make sure that we’re delivering the best experience. How we cross check and balance that, is really quite key.
Q: Are a lot of these sorts of things happening at Birmingham?
MG: Yes, we’re an institution that’s very committed to teaching. We’re a big institution, one of the major institutions within the UK. We were established around the start of the 1900’s. We’ve got a very strong research profile in many areas. Cancer studies is a big group at Birmingham doing lots of world-leading work. Particle physics, so many of the things at CERN come through our school of physics and astronomy. So we’re strong in research, but we’re also heavily committed to teaching. We invest heavily in our estates and infrastructure, so we’ve got a massive new build for a new library. We’re looking to implement central teaching laboratories, a completely new laboratory provision where we’d want to innovate with our teaching. So we don’t just want to teach in the same way, we want to bring in more problem discovery base. We want to change the emphasis of labs from just come in and do the practical and then leave or write up, to actually move the bulk of the work before the lab so that they can come in, and there’s more discovery-led learning and then this kind of follow up, the electronic infrastructure.
We are investing heavily in how we support learning and teaching. So we have a Teaching Academy which is a similar kind of model to CTLT, which we’ve only recently established. But that’s going to lead our educational enhancement offerings, so things like these seminars on getting started in research are things that I’m going to run as part of that. We’re having a new learning and teaching journal to share practice across the university. We want to build a community. We’re going to have a fellowship scheme that’s linked to the Teaching Academy, to recognize excellence in learning and teaching. That could start off with a member of the Teaching Academy, end up as distinguished fellow. So very, very clear recognition, where we have a full professorial route for teaching-focused staff that includes all of the lecture, senior lecture reader, and full professor. So exactly the same track for teaching as we’ve got for research. We’re starting the process of investing in Birmingham fellows for teaching, so people who come in focused upon teaching and learning, who will lead educational activities in the field and really drive forward the offering. And then other things that we’ve done, which is leading many national activities. We’ve led the UK program to get more math’s graduates into universities between 2006 and 2010. And then we led the national HE STEM program which sort of is the follow up from that, which tried to improve university practices as well. Those two initiatives were probably around CA$50 million dollars. So we’ve got a very strong profile, a very, very strong commitment to learning and teaching. Our vice chancellor, our senior management really see it as a core part of the institution. They champion it and they support it. I think we’re very strong on our student numbers, we have very good quality students, but we’re always trying to see and make sure that we offer the best possible experience that we can working with employers, recognizing that students go into employment or into research. It’s a great institution to be in.
Q: I was wondering how long you’ve been interested in improving teaching and learning and how or why did you get interested in this?
MG: I started back in Birmingham in 2004. We had a national network in the UK that aimed to support teaching in different subjects. So we had one in physical sciences, so that’s how Simon knew Tina Overton. She led that one. I started in the math’s one, and ended up working within that to improve teaching and learning in higher education, back in 2004. Then around 2004, 2005 I had some success writing grants, so I got about $3.5 million pounds to work on this More Maths Grad’s project, to get more math’s graduates in. That was successful. We then got another grant for I think $21 million pounds to get more STEM students in. And so I had some success in the learning and teaching things and in developing resources, supporting student learning in mathematics, my work around math support centres, supporting students with mathematics as they come into university, and it kind of developed into a career in that area. It was kind of a gradual evolution of my role, and it was just something that I was interested in, just making sure that we support students in the best way that we can, but equally that we try and support those staff who are interested in learning and teaching. There are a lot of people that really care and are really committed, but the infrastructure there isn’t quite the same as it is for research. So how do we develop that, how do we support those who are interested and committed, be they experienced teachers, be they new post graduate students.
Q: So you were interested in these areas early on?
MG: Absolutely, I think it was very much a deliberate choice to go down this route. It wasn’t an accident. It was something where you know you have some success with it, and it was just a great opportunity to work with some brilliant people, and I think that’s the key. I’ve been very fortunate to work with some great people who have really supported me and helped develop my career. And I think part of what we call “citizenship” in academia is about supporting others who then want to go through that path as well. So I think if you benefit, then you need to put something back in to help support other people who are developing their careers. And it’s just been great to come over here and talk to people who are in various different stages about what we’ve learned and how it can benefit other people, because I think we can do more to share what we do as a sector through things like evaluation and research.
This article was published in the January 2015 CTLT Newsletter, Dialogues. Below is a list of articles included in the issue:
- A Space to Learn: Reshaping the Campus Experience
- Mechanisms to Enhance Teaching in Universities: An Interview with Michael Grove (currently viewing)
- SOILx Receives Platinum MarCom Award
- Uncovering Indigenous Stories at this “Place of Mind”
