Training to teach in higher education: a research agenda

Abstract

Unlike schoolteacher training, there has, until recently, been no agreed set of outcomes for initial training for higher education teachers in the United Kingdom. The voluntary but widely adopted Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) Accreditation Scheme has provided a common set of outcomes and in 1999 the Institute for Learning and Teaching announced its standards for professional accreditation. Research reported here suggests that trainers have widely divergent views about what their training is attempting to achieve, even where they operate within a common accreditation framework. They also have multiple goals within the same programme. Trainers' views about outcomes are mapped on to available conceptual frameworks about what developing as a higher education teacher involves. Measures of many of these outcomes are readily available but rarely used. A research programme to evaluate the actual outcomes of training in higher education is outlined.