The Educational Development Interview: a guided conversation supporting professional learning about teaching practice in higher education

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the qualitative research interview, the authors propose the Educational Development Interview is an important but understudied form of significant conversation and educational development practice. By summarizing types of interviews from educational development literature, and describing our recent use of interviews for producing videos and podcasts about teaching practice, we contend that the Educational Development Interview can be used to: elicit reflexive practice about teaching and learning, increase academics’ self-confidence, influence their sense of identity as educators, and may increase capacity for and visibility of collegial conversations about teaching and learning.

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© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

KEYWORDS:

• Interview
• educational development
• podcast
• teaching practice
• higher education

Introduction

Improving instructional quality in higher education is a key role of educational development work. While facilitating workshops, learning communities, and SoTL inquiry are commonly used and studied educational development activities (e.g. Amundsen & Wilson, 2012; Miller-Young et al., 2016), the interview has received less attention in the literature. In this theoretical paper, we ask: How might an individual interview, conducted by an educational developer with a faculty member, support reflexivity on and enhancement of teaching and curricular practices in higher education? We turn to the literature and our own recent experiences to propose how and why an individual interview – that we have named the Educational Development Interview – is a specific form of significant conversation (Roxå & Mårtensson, 2009), which elicits important professional learning about teaching.

The purpose of this paper is to integrate theoretical and practice-based literature to frame the Educational Development Interview as an important form of conversation for educational development practice. The paper is organized in four sections. First, we identify the context of our theory-forming work, define key terms, and articulate a problem statement to connect the theory to the broader context of educational development research in higher education. Second, we describe recent educational development initiatives in the published literature that use interviews as their primary method to facilitate learning, and the associated outcomes for the interviewees. Third, we share our own recent educational development initiatives that used interviewing, and describe the interview structure and outcomes. In our closing section, we offer future-oriented suggestions for research and practice.

Context and terminology

Educational development

In our current context, ‘educational development’ is most commonly used for the field of work that aims to support and enhance evidence-based teaching and curricular practice and strengthen the quality of learning in higher education (Mooney & Da Rosa dos Santos, 2017) and, more broadly, foster a culture of teaching excellence in academia. Beach et al. (2016) assert that the breadth and purposes of educational development vary considerably by context depending on faculty members’ needs, institutional mission and values, and external pressures. However, the facilitation of activities that promote instructor reflection is a common area of focus in educational development practice, with the intent to develop deeper, more complex conceptions of and identity in teaching and learning (Amundsen & Wilson, 2012). An area of more recent exploration is found in opportunities afforded by technology and social media (e.g. McPherson et al., 2015), which have proven critical during COVID-19 pandemic times. Arguing that the field is more than a professional development service for faculty members, Lieberman (2011) contends that educational development holds important strategic and leadership functions with regards to the pedagogical and curricular impacts of postsecondary institutions. In this paper, we use the term ‘educational development,’ acknowledging that in some contexts the field is known as ‘faculty development’ or ‘academic development.’

Reflexive practice

Reflexivity is ‘explicit self-aware meta-analysis’ (Finlay, 2002, p. 209). Reflection becomes reflexivity when this informed and intentional thinking leads to changes in practice, expectations, and beliefs. Dialogue acts as a catalyst for deeper critical analysis of one’s knowledge, perspectives, actions, and experiences (Bray et al., 2000). This deeper level of reflexivity or meta-reflection, facilitates critical thinking about one’s own processes for meaning-making.

Hibbert (2012) proposed a four-step approach to teaching reflexivity among undergraduate students, which involved (1) creating space for reflection in context, (2) evoking critical analysis through dialogue, (3) unsettling established perspectives through reappraisal of ideas and resources, and (4) supporting multi-perspectival understandings. Swan (2008) also contended that context and socio-cultural location are essential to critical reflection. Clegg and Stevenson (2013) described how the reflexive process can occur spontaneously during research interviews with instructors, citing evidence that interviewees engaged reflexively with pedagogical topics and, consequently, considered making changes to their curricula. They speculated this outcome arose because such conversations were not occurring elsewhere. They described their research as ‘covert academic development’ (Clegg & Stevenson, 2013, p. 14).

Instructors are not always as reflective as they could be about their teaching. In interviews with faculty, Kreber (2004) found many more declarations of reflection than actual indicators of reflection about teaching. Building on Mezirow’s (1991) framework, Kreber (2004) described content reflection as answering the question, ‘What do I know?’ She captured process reflection with the question, ‘How do I know whether my method of problem solving is effective?’ The essence of premise reflection was encapsulated with, ‘Why does this problem matter? and ‘Is there another perspective I could take?’ We apply this framework for reflexivity to our understanding of the three types of Educational Development Interview discussed in this paper: the decoding interview, the disrupting interview, and the storying interview.

Problem statement

In an era of accountability and evidence-based practice in higher education (Beach et al., 2016) and under pressure to improve the quality of educational outcomes by pairing meaningful reflection on teaching and learning with a practice in scholarly teaching (Mooney & Da Rosa dos Santos, 2017), educational developers are challenged to promote and facilitate reflexive practice and significant conversations (Roxå & Mårtensson, 2009) among postsecondary academics, to scale up their work, and to provide evidence of value. Recent research into the impact of interviewing as a process for both developing insights and enhancing teaching practice, and our own recent use of interviews for the purposes of creating videos and podcasts about teaching, compelled the authors into conversation about how interviewing as a form of educational development could meet these challenges. Preliminary work identified a need to investigate possible connections between interviewing academics about their understandings and philosophies of teaching and the outcomes of these interview conversations, such as changes to their conceptions and identity related to teaching and learning and impacts on their teaching practices (Mooney, 2019).

Theoretical perspectives on interviews

The qualitative research interview can be employed as ‘a site of interpretive practice’ (Holstein & Gubrium, 2011, p. 152), in which social interaction and knowledge co-construction occur between the interviewer and interviewee (Holstein & Gubrium, 2011); such emergent, jointly constructed meaning holds rich value (Mishler, 1986). Underpinned by a hermeneutic understanding, the qualitative research interview allows the interviewee to share their situated experience, the interviewer to ask both guiding and probing questions, so that, together, they may interpret and make meaning of the experience (Yeo, 2017).

Qu and Dumay (2011) highlighted challenges to conducting effective research interviews, arguing that power imbalances between the researcher and interviewees may lead to biased and unreliable data. In our experience, power imbalances are less likely to exist in the Educational Development Interview, compared to a traditional research interview, because the interdisciplinary nature of the Educational Development Interview facilitates co-inquiry through a process of collegial and conversational questions and answers. It resembles the empathetic interview, (Fontana & Frey, 2005), which is deliberately and ethically oriented to benefit the interviewee, with the goal of improving their experience or situation. Thus, the educational developer role is understood as a supportive, and non-evaluative colleague, in service to faculty members’ professional learning. Ultimately, the Educational Development Interview aims to prompt reflexivity, make tacit knowledge explicit, and facilitate changes in thinking about teaching and learning.

Three types of Educational Development Interview

The Educational Development Interview provides an important venue for transformational conversations, where reflexive practice is intentionally prompted through guiding and probing questions and in conversation that elicit the interviewee’s beliefs, blind spots, and stories of experience in teaching and curricular practice. Through this interview process, whether decoding, disrupting, or storying, tacit teacher knowledge can be exposed and examined for its influence on a teacher’s ways of thinking, being, and practicing their teaching craft.

In what follows, we describe three types of interviews being used for different educational development purposes: (1) the decoding interview used to uncover expert tacit knowledge, (2) the disrupting interview used to uncover settler complicit knowledge, and (3) the storying interview used to conceptualize teacher experiential knowledge. Common to all three is the role of the interviewer(s) as an outsider to both the discipline and teaching practice of the interviewee, which positions the interviewer to ask questions without seeming judgemental, but rather probing to help reveal the unseen, for inquiry and reconsideration.

The decoding interview: uncovering tacit knowledge

The Decoding Interview is one of several steps in the decoding the disciplines model (Middendorf & Pace, 2004; Pace, 2017). The decoding process seeks to support instructors to identify learning bottlenecks (or trouble areas) faced by students, and to make tacit expert knowledge explicit, in order to then develop a more learning-centred teaching practice that is cognizant of novice experiences with disciplinary knowledge (Middendorf & Pace, 2004). This interview is conducted by colleagues from different fields, in which two interviewers deeply and persistently probe the interviewee about a particular concept within the interviewee’s discipline. This type of interview is underpinned by cognitive assumptions as it focuses on helping the interviewee uncover their own thinking process related to the concept (Middendorf & Pace, 2004). Once recognized, the instructor can make this thinking process visible to students and devise new teaching strategies accordingly. Decoding interviews have also been applied to emotional and epistemological bottlenecks that students experience. In these instances, the Decoding Interview addresses areas where interviewees may have strong personal beliefs and preconceptions, such as race, class, and privilege (Middendorf et al., 2015).

While much of the original Decoding work focused on changing teaching strategies and therefore facilitating student learning, recent work has described how the interview gives rise to changes in the instructor’s thinking. In addition to helping make tacit ways of thinking explicit, the Decoding Interview can also elicit new awareness of expert ways of practicing and being (Miller-Young & Boman, 2017). For example, interviews of instructors from professional fields generated insights about how their approaches to a particular concept required not only expert knowledge but also confidence and agency, which only came with years of experience. Thus, in addition to tacit knowledge, the interview can provide a number of perspectives for instructors to reflect upon, such as the role of lived experience and embodiment in one’s practice (Currie, 2017), and the importance of well-structured curriculum (Yeo et al., 2017). Finally, application of the Decoding Interview in a community service learning context, where instructors were not experts in the pedagogy, demonstrated the utility of the Decoding Interview, followed by critical reflection, to generate new learning and influence teaching practice. Participants in this study specifically commented that the purpose, structure, and probing nature of the interview gave permission for the interviewer to push the interviewee’s thinking and not settle for superficial answers, in service of the interviewee’s own learning (Miller-Young et al., 2015).

Using Mezirow’s (1991) reflective practice categories and Kreber’s (2004) questions to frame the Educational Development Interview, the Decoding Interview emphasizes content and premise reflection. At the heart of the Decoding Interview are the questions: ‘What do I know?’, ‘Why does this problem matter?’ and ‘Is there another perspective I could take?’

The disrupting interview: uncovering complicit knowledge

Some of our colleagues involved with using Decoding to uncover ways of thinking, practicing and being (above), have joined with other academics to modify the Decoding Interview for the purposes of disrupting colonial structures within the disciplines and unsettling curricular practices (Easton et al., 2019). They developed the Disrupting Interview to uncover complicit settler-colonial knowledge in their disciplines in order to enter Ermine’s (2007) ‘ethical space’ and make visible how colonial ideologies function in their disciplines and in curriculum development processes.

Easton et al. (2019) describe the Disrupting Interview as a process whereby two academics on the research team interviewed a third colleague about a bottleneck that reinforces colonialism in their discipline. The interviewee was asked to share a detailed explanation of their bottleneck issue, including the colonial complicity within it. Pushing the interviewee to a point of surprise or resistance aimed to help the interviewee gain insights into their disciplinary and personal complicity in the settler-colonial project. For the settler scholars, discussing the results of the interviews with their Indigenous colleague helped to highlight the extent to which complicit disciplinary knowledges reinforced settler-colonialism (Easton et al., 2019).

The Disrupting Interview exposed deeply embedded colonial ideologies within the interviewee’s discipline, and led Easton et al. (2019) to moments of unsettlement. When asked the key probing question in the Disrupting Interview – ‘Can you imagine an alternative?’ (Easton et al., 2019, p. 157) – interviewees reached an uncomfortable realization of epistemological, ideological, bureaucratic, or material lines they did not wish to cross, even when they felt ambivalent about such attachments. Experiencing and acknowledging this discomfort and resistance to alternatives and uncovering their personal limits in the process was understood as an important step in decolonising their disciplines, their curricula, and themselves (Easton et al., 2019). While decolonising depends on finding common ground and building reciprocal relationships, Easton et al. (2019) also recognized the limitations to transformation imposed by differences and thus, the importance of the Disrupting Interview to support academics with the challenging personal work needed in decolonising the academy.

In the Disrupting Interview, some of Mezirow’s (1991) content reflection, asking, ‘What do I know?’ is involved, however, premise reflection is foregrounded, primarily asking, ‘Is there another perspective I could take?’ (Kreber, 2004).

The storying interview: conceptualizing experiential knowledge

Shadiow (2013) encouraged reflection on teaching through the exploration of stories in one’s educational biography. She suggested significant stories in one’s teaching experience hold multiple layers of meaning that can be revealed through a practice of returning to reconsider and critically re-analyse the same significant story over time. Although it is not intended as research, to some extent the Storying Interview resembles a Narrative Inquiry research conversation (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), which also returns to re-explore one’s significant stories of experience. We use the term ‘storying’ rather than ‘narrative’ or ‘storytelling’ to a) acknowledge the importance of story (King, 2003; Lessing, 2007), and b) emphasize the active co-construction of meaning that happens when story is shared and explored together (Phillips & Bunda, 2018). The term ‘story’ aligns with the oral nature of the interview; it is an invitation to speak openly and spontaneously about experience, whereas a ‘narrative’ invokes the idea of writing and formalizing (Phillips & Bunda, 2018). The Storying Interview involves two colleagues, rather than three (as is the case in the Decoding and Disrupting Interviews), exploring and making sense of the oral story together.

Drawing on our recent practitioner experience, the Storying Interview is conducted by an educational developer with one faculty member invited to consider their significant stories of experience as an educator, to examine what assumptions and beliefs underpin their teaching stories, and to explain why, from their understandings, a particular teaching practice leads to intended student learning outcomes.

Each interview is designed by an educational developer for the local context and individual who will be interviewed. The process invites local educational leaders (whether formal or informal) into a guided conversation to elicit reflexive examination of their teaching philosophies and practices. The external prompts provided by the interviewer’s questions help to nudge the interviewee beyond taken-for-granted knowledge, to probe more deeply into their teaching practices than they might when reflecting alone. The questions follow a deliberate conversational arc intended to support reflection, to draw out the essence of the interviewee’s teaching practice, and to have them articulate it in a way that may be useful to colleagues. Appendix A provides a template for developing guiding questions. The Storying Interview deals predominantly with premise reflection (Mezirow, 1991), asking Kreber’s (2004) questions, ‘Why does this problem matter? and ‘Is there another perspective I could take?’ Some content reflection may arise, responding to, ‘What do I know?’ Much later in the process, perhaps well after the interview is complete, process reflection may occur around the question, ‘How do I know whether my method of problem solving is effective?’ and may prompt further conversation between the educational developer and the faculty member.

Recently we conducted an anonymous, online questionnaire sent to all the interviewees (n = 25) from two podcast and video series projects in which Julie was the interviewer. We received 13 responses to the questionnaire. When asked to describe any changes to their teaching and/or self-confidence, which resulted from their participation in the interview about their teaching, responses were mixed, depending to some extent on their stage of development as educators. Some indicated no improvement to their self-confidence or their reflective practice, since, according to them, those were already well-developed prior to their interview experiences. Others indicated a decreased sense of ‘imposter syndrome’ and that they were better able to discuss their teaching topic with others following the interview conversation. One respondent indicated that, since the interview, they had implemented video interviews into their course assignments to improve student learning, and they are planning to collaborate with a colleague on a podcast project. This respondent specifically indicated the value of the interviewer’s role and the increased motivation to reflect in preparation for the interview because it would be recorded. Some indicated that having a ‘product’ (video or podcast episode) to share served as a ‘conversation starter’ and encouraged dialogue with others about teaching. One respondent shared that,

I had asked if I had been randomly selected for the interview or if someone had actually suggested me, and it was the latter. Nobody had ever cared to really ask me anything about my experience or style before, so I think for me it was a confidence booster just to feel like somebody cared about what I do in the classroom. It was like people were actually going to listen to something I had to say, and I was not someone with tenure or even a PhD. That’s what I remember most about the experience, was feeling like I actually did have good experience and value as a teacher and I did have something to share. I think most of my students felt that but now I knew it, too.

This quotation from the online questionnaire results suggests that the Storying Interview supports the development of self-confidence in some interviewees, an important aspect of professional growth that relates to Fontana and Frey (2005) ‘empathetic interview,’ intended to improve the interviewee’s situation. While further inquiry is needed, this insight suggests that the Storying Interview may respond to a range of holistic educational development goals and outcomes.

In summary, the benefits of the Storying Interview were individualized, and included changes to teaching practice, increased self-confidence, and engagement in teaching conversations with peers. While we recognize that for some respondents the questionnaire was distributed up to two years after their interview experience, we were pleased to receive a 50% response rate. Thus, the results merit further investigation into the Storying Interview as a form of educational development practice.

Discussion

In this paper, we propose the Educational Development Interview as a form of educational development practice, which includes the Decoding Interview, the Disrupting Interview, and the Storying Interview. We have come to this theoretical framework through our reading of the literature, as well as our own experiences interviewing faculty colleagues about their disciplinary knowledge, teaching philosophies, and teaching practices. In what follows, we discuss some of the elements which are common to the three examples described above.

The Educational Development Interview, as we conceive it:

• attends to emergent knowledge through a relational, empathetic interview process;

• may result in different outcomes because of this relational process and the individual nature of each interview;

• is a process that draws on reflexive practice in dialogue and the methodological orientation of an interpretivist qualitative research interview;

• may be audio or video recorded, in order to share an edited version more widely with postsecondary educators;

• may produce useful research data for analysis by educational developers, higher education researchers, and could include interviewees as research collaborators.¹

The role of the educational developer

The educational developer’s interviewing role is to act as a disciplinary non-expert, establish a relationship built on trust and respect, set a tone of collegial exchange and mutual exploration, guide the interview conversation with questions, probe the interviewee to reflect more deeply when necessary, and contribute to the conversation with educational research knowledge and language that supports the interviewee to develop capacity for effectively articulating their implicit knowledge about teaching in their discipline. In all three types of the Educational Development Interview, the interviewer is from outside the interviewee’s discipline. The Educational Development Interview is especially valuable when the interviewer supports the interviewee to question their own thinking and practices, develop confidence in talking about their teaching and curricular ideas and actions, and come to realize their potential as an educational leader and change agent in the broader institution.

Recording the Educational Development Interview

If the Educational Development Interview is audio or video recorded to share as a resource for educators, the potential benefits to the interviewee are manifold. The recording for distribution may increase the interviewee’s perception of the value of their contributions, thus increasing their self-confidence about their teaching practice. The recorded interview, once shared as a digital artefact, can be added to the interviewee’s online professional portfolio, to their curriculum vitae as a creative and/or research output (depending on the nature of their interview content), shared on social media, personal and professional websites, and sent to colleagues as a way to stimulate conversation about teaching and learning.

It is important to note that the Educational Development Interview, when recorded, is not meant to be shared in its entirety. An intentional and fairly involved editing process is necessary to produce a podcast or video episode that will be useful to postsecondary educators across various contexts and disciplines.²

Potential outputs and outcomes of the Educational Development Interview

A postsecondary institution’s culture consists of its embedded patterns, behaviours, shared values, beliefs, and ideologies (Cox et al., 2011), as well as numerous microcultures (Mårtensson & Roxå, 2016). Academic institutions that seek to develop cultures of excellence in teaching and learning need all members of their campus community to engage in reflexive practice that supports student learning (Macpherson, 2007). We argue the Educational Development Interview can contribute at this level, as it has the potential to influence practice beyond the individual interviewee. The Educational Development Interview could expand the reach and scale up the impact of educational development practice by:

• Helping individual academics surface insights into their teaching practices they have not yet considered (micro level);

• Encouraging academics to engage in informal collegial conversations about teaching practice (meso level);

• When the interviews are recorded as podcasts or videos, sharing them as online resources to reach a wide audience in academia (micro, meso, macro, and mega levels);

• Meeting institutional goals as well as individual educational development goals (micro and macro levels);

• Producing potential research data for case studies to share as online resources, through conference presentations, or other forms of knowledge distribution (micro, meso, macro, and mega levels);

• Fostering scholarship of educational development research (SoED) studies aimed at improving educational development practice (micro, meso, macro, and mega levels).³

Closing thoughts

In this paper, we propose the Educational Development Interview as a form of educational development practice, which draws on elements of qualitative, co-constructive, empathetic interviews and the decoding the disciplines interview, with the purpose of facilitating reflexivity about one’s teaching and curricular practices. While the Educational Development Interview is not a research interview, it has the potential to generate research data because it shares the research interview qualities of producing interpretive, co-constructed knowledge, through guiding questions that elicit reflection and dialogue.

In an era of work culture change, triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and large-scale move by postsecondary institutions to online learning, the Educational Development Interview could easily be adapted to an online platform, where recording audio and video is in some sense made easier. The potential challenges of this online interview format would include technological issues (such as connectivity and recording quality), and building an informal, trusting relationship.

The Educational Development Interview is likely a process that many educational developers already employ to some extent in one-on-one consultations with faculty colleagues, perhaps without realizing it, and perhaps without applying some of its features (i.e.: recording interviews). Within the rubric of the Educational Development Interview we have identified three types of interview – the decoding, the disrupting, and the storying – each with its own theoretical underpinnings, processes, and outcomes. While much has been studied about the decoding interview, and our colleagues have recently developed the decolonising interview, we have added to this suite of the Educational Development Interview, by proposing the storying interview. Our experience and existing scholarly literature have guided us to understand the potential impacts that the Educational Development Interview may have on individual academics’ teaching practices, on both formal and informal educational leaders, and the potential ripple effects on significant (meaningful) collegial conversations and their impact on the broader institutional culture of teaching and learning.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julie A. Mooney

Julie A. Mooney is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Alberta in the Department of Educational Policy Studies, specializing in Adult, Community, and Higher Education. She is a Graduate Research Assistant at the Centre for Research for Teacher Education and Development (CRTED). During the development of this article, she served as Graduate Research Assistant at the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Alberta.

Janice Miller-Young

Janice Miller-Young, Ph.D., P.Eng., is a Professor in Mechanical Engineering. During the development of this article, she served as Academic Director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Alberta. Her research interests are teaching and learning in higher education, including both student and faculty learning and identity as a result of teaching development and engagement in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

Notes

1. Although we have not yet used our own recordings of Educational Development Interviews as research data, we see this potential in the content of the interviews, for instance, in the areas such as the scholarship of teaching and learning, curriculum studies, teaching practice and methods, teacher identity and philosophies, and the scholarship of educational development.

2. For more details on how to create and edit a podcast episode within an educational development context see Mooney (2019).

3. Here micro refers to the individual, meso to the department or network, macro to the institutional level, and mega to the higher education sector (Poole & Simmons, 2013).

Appendix A.

Template: The Educational Development Interview guiding questions

Faculty Member/Interviewee:

Date:

Time:

Educational Developer/Interviewer:

Recording by:

• 1. Warm up question: What do you love about teaching? Give a brief example of one of your best teaching experiences.

• 2. What is the teaching practice you plan to discuss today?

• 3. Tell me about the context of the teaching practice we are going to discuss today.

• •What is the course?

• •Who are the students?

• •Where does the class take place? (describe location; physical set-up of space)

• 4. Relevant, contextualized, specific question

Example: What is experiential learning?

•What are the challenges of experiential learning?

• 5. Relevant, contextualized, specific question

Example: Why have you selected an experiential learning pedagogical approach for this course?

•How are the experiential learning components of this course organized?

• 6. Relevant, contextualized, specific question

Example: What learning gains do your students demonstrate as a result of the experiential learning you facilitate in this course?

• 7. What have you learned about teaching or about your teaching practice by implementing this pedagogical or curricular approach?

• 8.Winding down question: What’s the best teaching advice you have received?

• 9. Closing question: In one sentence, what is the essence of the teaching practice you have shared with us in this interview?