
Newsletter September 2024: BORROW A BRAIN - Get a grip on your pedagogical development
In this month's newsletter you can learn more about pedagogical development and how small adjustments can create big changes.
What is educational development?
Pedagogical development can take place on a very large scale, but also on a very small scale. As a teacher, you sometimes experience external pushes that require you to adjust something in your teaching and in your students' learning and well-being in the teaching situation.
Changes in individual courses or at study level are often due to your own and your students' wishes to improve specific conditions or external pressure to make changes.
As part of your Lecturer Training Programme or in one of the courses from SDU CTL, you have probably tried to design, implement and evaluate a change or focus point in your teaching. It's a good feeling when something you want to optimize gets better.
When is something development as opposed to a minor, necessary adjustment to a practice?
The difference may be where it is relevant to investigate whether ‘it works’!
In reality, we should probably think in terms of teaching-development-thinking about many of the adjustments and changes to practice that are made in teaching and look a little more systematically at whether the initiatives have the intended effect. A systematic approach with a description of existing practice and a description of the new practice allows us to say more precisely ‘what worked’ and ‘how it worked’ and it doesn't have to be crazy long-winded or time-consuming. Take a look at the newsletter from August about evaluation.
Causes (or pressures) that leads to development
Development often takes place in interaction between the different levels illustrated below. This is due to the complexity of teaching, progression plans in education, ideological, strategic and political contexts.
Your motivation to develop teaching is driven by forces such as:
Your own desire for and need to change practice - typically a desire to promote active learning in teaching
Student retention and pass rates
Quality development of your teaching and the study programme
Implementing topics such as specific digital competences, openness to online students, multiple campus teacing, etc.
Forces at other levels that push for and lead to development. For example, necessary savings, the desire to reduce time used for preparation of lessons, changes in strategies and laws. Examples of this are the master’s degree reform (society level), a university strategy (university level), changes in pedagogical frameworks at faculty level, etc.

Let us also help you draw the landscape of who else is involved and can support great outcomes of change in your practice. Finally, a quotethat emphasises that change doesn't just depend on you:
Moving from theory to practice demands adaptability, fearlessness, flexibility and the acknowledgement that teaching-learning should be a collaborative enterprise and partnership among institution-instructor-student. From: Layne and Lake (2015) (1) part V page 361.
Literature for inspiration
(1) Chapter 21 Moving the Field Forward (2015) by Prudence Layne and Peter Lake in Global innovation in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, transgressing boundaried. Prudence C. Layne and Peter Lake Editors, ISBN 978-3-319-10481-2, ISBN 978-3-319-10482-9 (eBook), DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-10482-9 Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London.
The book is very nuanced with many interesting examples of teaching development. I especially suggest reading section V, chapter 21. You can find the book via SDU Librarys website.
(2) Lars Ulriksen (2014) Kapitel 13.4 Udvikling af undervisning og underviserkompetencer. I: God undervisning på de videregående uddannelser, Frydenlund, 2014.
This chapter very nicely reviews not only the factors that motivates teaching development, but also inhibitors of teaching development.
(3) Deslauriers L, McCarty LS, Miller K, Callaghan K, Kestin G. Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2019 Sep 24;116(39):19251-19257. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1821936116. Epub 2019 Sep 4. PMID: 31484770; PMCID: PMC6765278.
This article analyses the differences in students’ actual learning compared to their personally experienced learning in difference learning scenarios.
(4) Kember, D., Douglas, T., Muir, T., & Salter, S. (2019). Umbrella action research projects as a mechanism for learning and teaching quality enhancement. Higher Education Research & Development, 38(6), 1285–1298. https://doi-org.proxy1-bib.sdu.dk/10.1080/07294360.2019.1638350.
This article discusses among other things how multiple initiatives can support each other. The article may inspire you to see how a broader thinking with multiple examples of the same initiative within the same genre of teaching development can provide new perspectives on learning and conclusions.