The Five Ages Of A Lecturer

(via Wahroongai News, Volume 31, Number 3, March 1997)

In How Professors Develop as Teachers, Peter Kugel (TLDU Talk, Issue No.3, July 1996—Teaching and Learning Development Unit, University of Waikato quoting Peter Kugel’s (1993) How Professors Develop as teachers, studies in Higher Education) suggests five distinct stages in the development of a teacher in higher education, and the transitions between each of these stages.

Stage 1: Focus on self
At the start of their teaching career, Kugel suggests, lecturers are mainly concerned with themselves, and more specifically with their survival in front of their first few classes.

Transition 1—self to subject. Once they know they can survive, and even start to feel good about their teachings, their focus shifts rapidly to the subject matter.

Stage 2: Focus on subject
Here the lecturer rediscovers their enthusiasm for their subject, and works hard to extend their knowledge further and then to share it all with their students.

Transition 2—subject to student. After a while, the lecturer may start to notice that students are not learning all that the lecturer is teaching, and may not all share the lecturer’s enthusiasm. Why might this be?

Stage 3: Focus on student
The lecturer sees how greatly students differ one another—in approach to learning, in interest, in motivation, in competence. The lecturer starts to adopt a wider variety of approaches to engage the heterogeneous body of students before them. The lecturer’s interest shift from ‘what am I saying?’ to ‘what are they hearing?’

Transition 3—students as receiver to student as active learner. Even when focusing on the students, the lecturer was still concentrating on what she or he was doing to the students rather than on what the students were doing. The lecturer is now finding limits to what this can achieve.

Stage 4: Focus on student learning
The lecturer increasingly devises appropriate student activities and opportunities for learning.

Transition 4—student as active learner to student as independent learner. The more actively the students engage with their work, the more responsibility they take for their own and each other’s learning.

Stage 5: Focus on the student as an independent learner
When the student truly knows how to learn for her or himself, the lecturer’s work with that student is successfully complete.