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How to Prepare Academic Staff for Their New Role as University Teachers? Welcome to the Seminar “Academic Teaching”

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Abstract

The basic university teacher training at RWTH Aachen University is the 2-day seminar “Academic Teaching” which addresses the qualification needs of (mainly) doctoral students who are short on teaching experience. The target of the training is to set a starting point for the development of the participants’ teaching competence. The orientation on a five-stage development model of teaching competence serves as the content structure of the seminar, suggesting that different topics are important for the participants at different stages of their teaching competence development. The didactical method to convey these contents is the constructivist ExAcT training model based on current findings of pedagogical psychology and neuroscience. In the following sections it will be described how the goal of teaching competence development for new university teachers is attained by considering development stages of teaching competence through the content structure and by using the training model as didactical method in the seminar “Academic Teaching”.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Federal Republic of Germany consists of 16 federal states, the so called “Länder”.

  2. 2.

    For further information visit the project website: www.exact.rwth-aachen.de.

  3. 3.

    The ZLW heads various central projects and institutions for teaching and further education: It coordinates the Centre for Further Education with the aim to develop excellent and highly qualified teaching staff. Together with its partners from the Technical University Dortmund and the Ruhr-University Bochum the ZLW runs a national Competence and Service Center for Teaching and Learning in Engineering Sciences called “TeachIng.LearnIng.EU”. Also the student laboratories of the RWTH, RWTH Education Labs, are located at the ZLW und are organized jointly with partners from university and industry. In the context of E-Learning, the ZLW ran the projects BlendXL and Role. Other notable projects are KISSWIN, CSP or HTBP. For further information visit the ZLW-website: http://www.ima-zlw-ifu.rwth-aachen.de/en/institute_cluster/institutes/zlw.html.

  4. 4.

    As far as personal designation in the content is only given in male form, it equally refers to women and men.

  5. 5.

    For further information see http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/hrg/BJNR001850976.html.

  6. 6.

    Academic competence relates to the accomplishment of academic performance requirements.

  7. 7.

    Teachers should be able to position themselves with their own profile and their role as university teacher.

  8. 8.

    The teachers hast to see themselves as a facilitators of student learning through transparent learning and competence goals orientated towards the Learning Outcome.

  9. 9.

    A paper on the development of the ExAcT competence model is contemporary in progress.

  10. 10.

    The presented development models do not explicitly regard the development of the construct teaching competence, but the parallels are clear since they regard the (further) development of university teachers.

  11. 11.

    It has to be acknowledged that the development of teaching competence is not necessarily connected with time. Some university teachers do not develop teaching competence at all or do not teach accordingly though they would have the competences to do so.

  12. 12.

    Some of activities - like the introduction to the seminar, the getting acquainted, activating games as well as the feedbacks are not included in this description. They are not specific for Academic Teaching, but for all trainings.

  13. 13.

    Learning goals are important for the evaluation, because evaluation is concerned with the achievement of the defined learning goals.

  14. 14.

    Didactics is a term describing the study of the relationship between learners, teachers and educational subject knowledge.

  15. 15.

    Problem-based learning is special case, because it is rather a mixture of task-related and cooperative teaching.

  16. 16.

    Surface learning “[…] indicates the use of routine memorisation to reproduce those aspects of the subject matter expected to be assessed” [26, p. 595]. In contrast, the deep approach describes “active engagement with the content, leading to extensive elaboration of the learning material while seeking personal understanding” [26].

  17. 17.

    It has to be acknowledged that neurodidactics are criticized for its oversimplification of findings from neuro-science [30, 31]. Despite this critic, several prominent researchers from neuroscience and education believe that bridging the gaps is possible, leading to a fruitful mutual interaction, i.e. synergy [30–34].

  18. 18.

    Empirical findings have shown that some group of persons have different learning preferences, e. g. Eschner [43] states that technically orientated individuals tend to favor grasping theoretical knowledge before going to practice.

  19. 19.

    Most instructional design models differentiate between summative and formative evaluation. The primary purpose of formative evaluation is to ameliorate the quality of the program being developed in the ongoing process to assure the objectives for which it was designed will be achieved. In contrast, summative evaluation depicts efforts that assess the effectiveness of completed interventions in order to provide suggestions about their future use [45, p. 952].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IMA/ZLW & IfU, RWTH Aachen University, Dennewartstr. 27, 52068, Aachen, Germany

    Meike Bücker, Esther Borowski, René Vossen & Sabina Jeschke

Authors
  1. Meike Bücker
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  2. Esther Borowski
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  3. René Vossen
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  4. Sabina Jeschke
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Meike Bücker .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. IMA/ZLW & IfU, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany

    Sabina Jeschke

  2. IMA/ZLW & IfU, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Ingrid Isenhardt

  3. IMA/ZLW & IfU, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Frank Hees

  4. IMA/ZLW & IfU, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Klaus Henning

Link List

Link List

ExAcT, ed. www.exact.rwth-aachen.de.

Hochschulrahmengesetz. www.gesetze-im-internet.de/hrg/BJNR001850976.html.

ZLW.www.ima-zlw-ifu.rwth-aachen.de/en/institute_cluster/institutes/zlw.html.

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Bücker, M., Borowski, E., Vossen, R., Jeschke, S. (2014). How to Prepare Academic Staff for Their New Role as University Teachers? Welcome to the Seminar “Academic Teaching”. In: Jeschke, S., Isenhardt, I., Hees, F., Henning, K. (eds) Automation, Communication and Cybernetics in Science and Engineering 2013/2014. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08816-7_19

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