I was surprised recently to read a tweet (or whatever they’re now called) on X suggesting that all university lecturers should be required to receive formal teacher training and an appropriate qualification. Just as teachers of schoolchildren must complete the Postgraduate Certificate in Education (or PGCE). Not that the PGCE automatically makes everyone a good teacher. Far from it. But the training must surely provide or hone the skills needed to teach better.
Well, whoever it was who tweeted that comment is behind the times. Many (most/all?) universities here in the UK now require incoming, probationary staff at least to take courses, such as the Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education (PGCHE, a Masters level qualification) and also offer various teaching support modules to more established staff, that cover topics such as small/large group teaching, curriculum design, supervision, and many more.
But when I joined the University of Birmingham as a lecturer in the Department of Plant Biology (School of Biological Sciences) in April 1981 there was no such requirement for teacher training, nor do I remember much if any support being provided. You simply got on with it – for better or worse. Furthermore, teaching loads or commitments, or ability never counted much towards promotion prospects. Research (and research income) was the be-all and end-all.
I’d never aspired to be an academic. Before joining the university, I was working in the Americas over the previous eight years. In November 1980, I had just returned from a five-year assignment in Central America to the headquarters of the International Potato Center (CIP) in Lima, Peru while waiting for my next assignment in the Philippines. I had, however, already applied to Birmingham.
In January 1981 I flew to the UK for an interview and was offered the position immediately. So I returned to Lima knowing that my wife Steph and young daughter Hannah and I would be resettling in the UK before long.
Initially I had no teaching commitments, and I was able to get myself settled and oriented as a faculty member. I knew my way around the Birmingham campus since I was awarded my MSc degree in genetic resources there in 1971, and PhD in botany in 1975. But being a faculty member was very different from being a graduate student.
Come the beginning of the Summer Term in May however, I found myself facing a group of about 35 second year plant biology students for the first time to teach them some aspects of flowering plant taxonomy (along with my colleague Dr Richard Lester, at right, with whom I didn’t always see eye-to-eye over many aspects of course content and delivery).
Anyway, until then I had never taught a class in my life, although I was quite comfortable with public speaking, even enjoying it. I think I must have inherited my ‘love’ of public speaking from my father. Anyway, getting up in front of an audience never particularly fazed me, talking to my peers about my work, and the like. Nevertheless, I always had ‘butterflies in my stomach’ before facing a class for the first time.
Fortunately during the decade I spent at Birmingham I never had to teach any first year classes. Much of my teaching focused on graduate students (many from overseas) attending the 1-year MSc course on Conservation and Utilisation of Plant Genetic Resources (the very course I had attended in 1970-71). I taught a semester long (10 week term) course on crop evolution, two lectures and three hour practical classes per week, principles of germplasm exploration and collection (also with a 
practical component using a synthetic population made up of many different barley varieties), and a small module on agroecosystems. I also helped my colleague Professor Brian Ford-Lloyd (right) in some aspects of his data management module.
Then, during the summer months (when undergraduates were on vacation) we would supervise the dissertation projects of the MSc students. I guess I must have averaged two or three each year.
Brian and I jointly taught a five week undergraduate course on plant genetic resources, with at least one lecture per day, for final year undergraduates who would graduate with a Biological Sciences (Plant Biology) degree. I guess we must have between 10 and 15 students on average each year, who also had to complete an independent research project over the same period. It was always a challenge to devise projects that could be completed in the time available and that would (generally) generate positive results. Each student would take four of these five week modules.
I also gave a lecture on potato diseases on the third year plant pathology module taught by my colleague Dr Gillian Butler.
Around the mid-1980s I was asked to become chair of the Second Year Common Course, one that all biological sciences students had to take and which was taught by staff from all the four departments (Plant Biology, Zoology and Comparative Physiology, Genetics, and Microbiology) that made up the School of Biological Sciences. I contributed five or six lectures on agriculture and agroecosystems, based on my own experiences of working with crops in the Americas.
To some extent I agree with American novelist Gail Godwin that Good teaching is 1/4 preparation and 3/4 theatre. When you get up in front of a class of students, whether you feel up to it or not, whether it’s a topic you are enthusiastic or not, you have to ‘perform‘. Engage with the class.
The feedback I had from my students was that I was quite an effective teacher. That was gratifying to know. Back in the day, there was no Powerpoint or other digital props. Just the blackboard and chalk (which I hated as I had a slight allergy to chalk), the overhead projector with acetates, and 35 mm slides.
The tools which are available today permit a much more dynamic use of information, provided that there isn’t information overload. Less is often more. And you don’t try to use all 56 million colours in the Powerpoint pallette (as I have seen some speakers attempt to do!).
I think I became a more effective because I had to teach many graduate students who did not have English as their first language. We worked closely with a unit in the English department who assisted these students, to make their Birmingham experience better and help them through the rigors of graduate study. Lecturing to these students, I learned how to pace myself, and also how better to explain, often in different ways, aspects of the topics I was teaching. And working with the English unit staff (who would analyse our recorded lectures) I came to realise (as did my colleagues) just how often we use colloquialisms in everyday speech, and which are not easily translated for someone who is not a native English speaker.
Anyway, that experience of a decade’s worth of teaching overseas students stood me in good stead when I moved to the Philippines in 1991 and often had to give talks to diverse groups of visitors.
But returning to the opening premise of this post, about teaching qualifications for university staff, I think I would have welcomed much more formal feedback. Nowadays, there are mechanisms in place in universities to provide feedback. After all, the students are the clients who are paying handsomely for their education, and are not shy about denouncing poor teaching (and value for money) when warranted.
A balanced diet . . . 