What makes great teaching?

In preparation for my module on facilitating groups next term, I have been doing a bit of digging around to try and find out what makes a great lecturer. I think the basics of how to train are fairly well documented, but I'm trying to go a bit further and identify the factors that distinguish between a good and a great session.

This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study which asked a bunch of award-winning academics to talk about their sessions. The authors identified five themes:

1. First and foremost, the academics talked about connections. The connections described were either between the students and the teacher, or between the student and the topic. The relationship between the teacher and students was helped by lots of interaction and something they call audience-performer effect which is what happens when the teacher actually changes their behaviour in response to the students' reactions. Connections between the student and the topic were the result of the teacher's efforts to make the topic relevant to the students.
2. The second theme was excitement and interest. The teachers were aware of the students' interest either in what they were saying or in an activity the students were asked to do. Teachers often used anecdotes and humour to get the students engaged.
3. The third common theme was the flow of the session, which was illustrated by clear links between topics, activities and sessions. The academics also talked about the pace of the session and being aware of the energy in the room.
4. The fourth one was to do with clarity. The academics interviewed felt that it was crucial that the students really understood the messages, and seemed very aware of the students' levels of understaning.
5. Finally, the academics talked about the relationship between control and spontaneity in the sessions, keeping to a clear structure when needed, but also being able to go off on a tangent when it serves to keep the students engaged.

I really enjoyed reading this paper as it seemed to strike a chord with my experiences as a student.

Pollio, H. R., & Lee Humphreys, W. (1996). What award-winning lecturers say about their teaching: It's all about connection. College Teaching, 44(3), 101-106.

Girls, boys and computer science

I'm really interested in how we make career decisions. It's clearlu hugely complex, and I don't think we really understand how it works, and what factors are the most influential.

I've come across this paper by Rommes and colleagues who did a really interesting study on adolescent girls in The Netherlands. The authors were exploring something called self to prototype matching theory. This theory suggests that we make our career decisions (in part) by comparing our selves to a prototype of a typical person who might do a particular job. The best match is the one we plump for.

Matching theories are very out of fashion in the world of career reseach these days, for a range of reasons, but mostly because all the evidence seems to suggest that we just don't make career decisions that way. But I think this one is different. 

Traditional matching theories advise us to systematically compare our career interests, values and skills to the kinds of things we might expect to do in a particular job. Self to prototype matching involves an assessment of the type of person they imagine to work in that role, rather than the job itself. According to this idea, decisions are made on all kinds of features of the prototype including their appearance and their interests.

The traditional matching approach would suggest that someone who was interested in computers would choose a job where they could work with computers. The self to prototype matching approach, in contrast, might lead to someone who was interested in computers to decide against a job with computers because they didn’t want to be seen as the kind of person who works with computers

So, this paper explored this exact thing, and their findings indicate that the girls in their study chose not to pursue a career in computer science because they thought that girls working in computer science were not sexually attractive to boys.

What was particularly curious about this study was that how the girls said they made their decisions didn't seem to tally with how they actually made their decisions. 

The two reasons cited by the girls were 1) they had no interest in computers and 2) they were more keen on people than things. This particular group of girls were all really enjoying the computer module which they had chosen to do, and had a really clear idea that computer scientists work in teams and deal with clients. But for some reason they reported, and seemed to believe that they were making sound career choices on the basis of their career interests.

The authors suggest that the girls felt the need (either consciously or more likely unconsciously) to find a reason which seemed acceptable within the modern liberal individualistic culture of the The Netherlands. Being explicit about rejecting computer science because they feared it would make them look unattractive to boys would not go down well within their culture, so they came up with something which sounded more credible (not choosing to work with computers because they weren't interested in them) despite this flying in the face of the reality.

For me the two key things here are that career choices are about identity (who do you want to be?) and not just the job itself (what do you want to do?) , and that asking people how they make their decisions is not always a reliable guide for how they actually do.

Rommes, E., Overbeek, G., Scholte, R., Engels, R., & De Kemp, R. (2007). ‘I'M NOT INTERESTED IN COMPUTERS’: Gender-based occupational choices of adolescents. Information, Community and Society, 10(3), 299-319.

What's the future for careers work?

I was asked today to produce a summary of the changes I anticipate in career practice in the next 5 - 10 years for a university in Finland. Here's what I came up with:

Changes in the world of work

The pace of change. The nature of the changes we have seen in the world of work over the last twenty years have been the subject of some debate. Ideas such as the demise of the ‘job for life’ and the rise of the ‘boundaryless career’ have been much discussed but the consensus which has emerged lately seems to indicate that average job tenure has not changed significantly in the last generation, and that bounded careers are as common and desirable in many fields as they ever were. One thing which does seem to have been widely accepted is the notion that change within the workplace is inevitable and the pace of this change is considerably faster than it once was.  This I imagine will continue, and individuals as a consequence will need to develop the skills to manage and take advantage of these changes in order to be employable throughout their working lives. Qualities such as resilience, adaptability and a commitment to lifelong learning therefore need to be fostered and guidance practitioners can and should play a part in encouraging and engendering these attributes.

Older workers. The aging population and challenges with pension provision mean that workers are having to delay their retirement and are working, either through choice or necessity until well into their 60s or 70s. Despite legislation outlawing discrimination on the grounds of age, research and practice indicate that older workers find it more challenging to secure appropriate work and career practitioners in the coming decades should be specifically equipped to support this cohort of potential clients.

Agency of the individual. One change which has been noted in the psychological contract between workers and employers is that the responsibility for career management now seems to rely on the individual more than on the employer. Increasingly we are seeing that individual workers need to take control of their professional training, put themselves forward for the opportunities they want and craft their own jobs to raise their levels of job satisfaction. Career practitioners increasingly will be working with individuals in organisations to help them develop career management skills.

Meaning . An interesting development which we have seen recently and which to my mind looks set to continue is an increased focus on meaning in work. This is related to the blurring of work and non-work identities and links with the new focus on career as identity which I highlight below. Clients are increasingly looking for work which allows them to ‘be themselves’ and through which they can develop a life purpose. A focus on vocation and meaning in work will become more central to career practitioners work in the future.

Developments in career theory

Career as identity The prevailing paradigm of career theory is in constant flux, but the one theme which seems to be emerging most strongly at the moment (to my mind at least) is the notion of identity. This links closely to the emerging value placed on meaning in work which I mentioned above.  Guidance practitioners will no longer be encouraging clients to ask ‘Which jobs are going to suit me best?’ but rather ‘In which environments can I become who I want to be?’. Career theories are emerging which can support guidance counsellors as they help their clients to address these issues of identity. This ties in with an increased understanding of the holistic nature of careers and career choices seen in recent literature.

Individualisation Career research seems to be going away from a ‘one size fits all’ approach and encouraging practitioners to get their clients to define their own terms. A focus on cross cultural practice acknowledges the different experiences of particular client groups, and an emphasis on guidance as a mechanism for promoting social justice highlights the experiences of different sections within our society. An emerging practical emphasis on narrative approaches to guidance provides practitioners with a mechanism for exploring clients’ experiences as individuals and I believe this individualised approach to guidance will prevail in the years to come.

Changes in Guidance Practice

Diversification Guidance practitioners in the future will need to practice in diverse ways. First, service provision is likely to diversify. In the UK, each school and each University now has its own model for practice with practitioners working variously with groups, one to ones and via technology, and practitioners specialising as guidance practitioners, counsellors, teachers, trainers, coaches or consultants. Some practitioners are becoming more generalist and others, more specialist.

Our client body is diversifying too. Twenty years ago, most practice in the UK focused on first career choices of school and university leavers. We are now increasingly seeing clients at all stages of their careers, and (as I mentioned above) in future there will be more older workers who may seek support. Empirical evidence too is leading us to consider working with children in primary school (ages 5 upwards).  

The theoretical approaches which guidance practitioners will be using will diversify, as we learn from other disciplines. Approaches such as solution focusing counselling, motivational interviewing and coaching will become more mainstream.

Labour market and occupational information Our traditional role as information broker, providing insights into various aspects of the world of work will become less important as the internet and social media become the information providers of choice. Career practitioners instead will need to work with clients to hone their research skills, ensuring that they can manage, synthesise and analyse the vast quantities of information so easily accessible to them now.

Technology As an adjunct to face to face work, career practitioners are going to need to learn to capitalise on the opportunities available to us through new technologies including social media and online learning.

The Virtue Existential Career Model

I've just come across a new career theory. I find myself quite excited by this as I haven't found anything very new in the last decade or so. 2005 I think was a bit of a bumper year for career theories - Savickas published Career Construction, Ibarra further developed her Identity Theory, Patton and McMahon published a book on Systems Theory and Maniero and Sullivan introduced the Kaleidoscope Model. But I'm not sure that I've come across anything very new since then.

 

So this is a theory from Taiwan, and although it's been around for a few years, most of the papers published which look at this are published in Chinese and this is the first time I've heard of it.

 

The model is grounded philosophically in the Classic of Changes which is an ancient Chinese text. I had a brief look to find out what this was and didn't get terribly far with it, but the theory is interesting and potentially quite valuable even without an understanding of the underpinning philosophy.

 

One of my repeated frustrations with career theories is their tendency to focus on one narrow element or angle. Perhaps this is inevitable, but given how incredibly complex career choices and paths are, it makes the theories less applicable. New theories often seems to be developed in opposition to other theories, rather than building on them, which then leaves the practitioner (and client) with the huge challenge of trying to integrate those which seem to be most relevant in any context.

 

The Virtue Existential Career Model (VEC) brings together two broad paradigms of career theory (modern and post-modern) and also proposes four key elements of career practice.

The authors describe the modern theories as the Yang theories, and suggest that they are focused on using rational strategies to develop career plans which lead to high levels of person-environment fit. The focus for these traditional theories is on choosing and controlling, and the main virtue is striving for self-improvement.

The Yin theories then are the post-modern ones. These focus more on being open-minded and creative, and within this paradigm, career development relies on appreciating and adapting to change. The virtue here is embracing all aspects of humanity.

 

The VEC model incorporates both aspects. The authors agree with current criticisms of PE fit which highlight that matching approaches tend to assume stable individual characteristics and a stable world, but point out that matching can still be a valuable part of career thinking as long as it acknowledges the fluid nature of humanity.

 

The model suggests that career interventions should focus on two essential existential questions: our reason for being and our action for being and this focus on the fusion between experience and meaning is a core aspect of their model.

 

In terms of what this might mean for us in practice, the authors have four goals which will facilitate career development:

1. Having versatile views of reality and using this to construct various career possibilities

2. Appreciating and mastering both rational and intuitive cognitive decision making processes

3. Treasuring serendipity and making good use of curiosity and flexibility

4. Managing inevitable change and uncertainty.

 

This seems like a great framework for career education or employability takes the strengths of traditional career theories but applies them with an understanding of the contextual factors which influence our career paths today.

Liu, S. H., Lu, Y. J., Deng, C. P., Wang, C. H., Keh, F. B., & Tsai, Y. C. (2015). Social Practice of a Career Guidance Project Based on the Wisdom of the Classic of Changes. Journal of Pacific Rim Psychology, 9(02), 50-64.

Matching people to jobs. Does it work?

I've always had a slightly ambivalent relationship with matching in careers. On the one hand, it seems very intuitive - we are surely all of us looking for a job which suits us (whatever that may mean). On the other, it seems very out of favour in career research at the moment. It's criticised for being rigid, for assuming that individuals and jobs are stable, and for not conceptualising career decisions as holistic. 

I've tended to make sense of this by believing that the concept of matching is still a good one, the problem is just what we've been trying to match. Matching as a concept doesn't need to be rigid - you can only make a decision on the basis of the information you've got right now - none of us can predict how we our our jobs are going to change in the future, but decisions still need to be made. 

And the criticism that matching doesn't acknowledge the holistic nature of career decisions could be countered simply by choosing different elements to match. Most matching exercises are based on career interests, values or personality, but there's nothing to say that you couldn't match people with jobs on the basis of flexible working arrangements, stress levels or the shoes you'd need to wear. 

I've just read this paper by Tinsley which unpicks this a bit. It's from 2000, so isn't exactly cutting edge, but it sets things out more helpfully than anything else I've come across.

My take home message from this paper is that matching per se does work, but matching based on Hollands' RIASEC model doesn't. 

There seem to be a lot of studies which give us statistically significant correlations between person-environment fit and various work outcomes including job satisfaction and job involvement and negative correlations between P-E fit and absenteeism and job turnover.

But research based on Holland's RIASEC model doesn't show these links. Tinsley points out that there are over 100 P-E fit models which have been proposed in the literature, but that career literature and research has focused disproportionately on the RIASEC model at the exclusion of nearly everything else. And he cites meta-analysis after meta-analysis with tens of thousands of participants, which show no significant correlation between RIASEC and job satisfaction, stability, achievement or performance. 

Tinsley goes into some scientific detail of possible explanations for this lack of link, but (I think) suggests that it might be because Holland simplified his ideas to make them usable, but in doing so has watered down his theory, or that the RIASEC framework just isn't very good.

I guess my next move is to try and find some of the other frameworks of P-E fit which Tinsley cites and see whether they might be of more use to us in our practice.

Tinsley, H.E.A. (2000) The Congruence Myth: an analysis of the efficacy of the person-environment fit model Journal of Vocational Behavior 56 (2) 147 - 179

What's the deal with women leaders?

Whilst I'm reading a bit about female leaders, I thought it would be useful to have a reminder of the empirical evidence around this area.

There has genuinely been a lot of good work done and a lot of progress made towards a more equitable work place, and women are now participating in employment and being promoted up to middle management to unprecedented levels. But at senior levels, progress has been slow, hasn't gone far enough, and seems to have stopped. Women make up 22% of parliamentarians, 18% of SME CEOs in the UK, 17% of Fortune 500 corporate board members (mostly in HR and marketing functions) and only 5.2% of CEOs in the US.

So what's going on?

First, there's quite a lot of evidence that women make equally good, just different, leaders from men.

Female leaders do seem to lead in different ways from their male counterparts. Women are more likely to favour a collaborative and participatory approach to leadership which is less hierarchical that that which tends to be adopted by men. But these differences don't appear to be detrimental to the organisations. Women leaders are associated with greater innovation and profitability, broader consumer outreach and better CSR records. It's also been shown that having women at the top makes it more likely that there will be opportunities for women lower down the ranks.

So, women are just as good in senior positions, and yet are not getting the top jobs. The reasons for this are inevitably complex. First there is some good old basic sexism. Women are just not perceived to be capable and competent as leaders. Women need to outperform men to be rated as equal. And this is compounded by something the researchers call 'homosocial reporduction' which is the notion that people tend to want to recruit people who are just like them: if the senior leaders are all men, they will unconsciously favour men when recruiting other senior leaders.

On top of these biases in recruitment, there is also the issue that women don't get the same access to opportunities during the early part of their careers. Men are more likely to be given mentors, and those mentors are more likely to be people who can actually influence on behalf of their mentees. Men are also more likely to get access to strong professional networks, social ties to elites, workplace support and insider information, all of which can make a big difference to chances of promotion.

There is also something called 'role incongruity' which really strikes a chord with me, and which both puts women off going for the top jobs and makes others judge their leadership ability more negatively. Corporate leadership positions are gendered: leaders are conceptualised as masculine (remember Schein's Think Manager Think Male study which demonstrated that people are likely to see the characteristics they associate with good management as masculine character traits). For a man, there is no conflict between the role he is supposed to play in society, and role he is supposed to play in leadership: boosting his masculinity will boost his chances of being perceived as a good leader. 

For a woman, there is a mismatch between the social roles she is expected to fulfil and the role of a leader. A woman has to make a choice between fulfilling her  social role (ie behaving in a feminine way) and fulfilling the role of a leader (ie behaving in a masculine way). She needs to choose between being socially desirable and being successful in the workplace. As well as being a tough choice for any woman who wants to be respected and liked both in society and in work, this phenomenon seems to lead to women being more negatively rated for behaving as leaders: women are given negative ratings for dominating conversations and for engaging in self-promotion where men are given positive ratings for it.

Finally, women leaders are set up to fail. They are more likely to be recruited to precarious management positions (this is the Glass Cliff I've posted about before), they are not given access to the financial resources needed to make the changes they want, and they get less support from their peers.

To sum up: women are not given the opportunities to develop their leadership skills, people recruiting them assume they're not going to be very good, and if they do make it through all of that, they're set up to fail, they are not given the credit they deserve for their achievements and they are not thought to be very likeable.

Grrrr.


Glass, C. and Cook, A. (2016) Leading at the top: understanding women's challenges above the glass ceiling The Leadership Quarterly 27 51 - 63

Female CEOs and the glass cliff

We've all come across the concept of the glass ceiling. It's a metaphor to describe the way that women often can't seem to get promoted up the career ladder beyond a certain point, even though official policies may be in place to encourage equality. There have been some changes in this over the last couple of decades, and the glass ceiling is now positioned considerably higher than it once was, but there are still particular challenges which women face when aiming for the top jobs, and progress towards equality seems to have slowed down in the last five years or so.

The reasons are complex, but one line of research from Michelle Ryan and Kim Peters sheds some light on it.

Ryan and Peters have coined the term the 'glass cliff' which describes a particular phenomenon which senior women can face in the board room. Their research was sparked off by an article in The Times a decade or so ago which showed that the share price of an organisation was likely to fall immediately after a women was appointed to the role of a CEO. The Times reported this as an indication that women CEOs caused poor performance, but Ryan and Peters looked more closely at the data and found alternative explanations.

First they found that although share prices went down after female CEOs were appointed, there was no evidence that performance decreased. Share prices are a measure of confidence, and it seems that although female CEOs were no worse (and indeed no better) than their male counterparts at actually managing the performance of their organisations, the shareholder-buying public imagined that the appointment of a new female CEO would cause company performance to dip. They sold their shares and the prices went down.

The second interesting thing Ryan and Peters did (and this is where the glass cliff comes in) was to look at the direction of travel of share prices before the appointment of new CEOs. They found that female CEOs were more likely to be appointed to organisations whose share prices were already falling: women were appointed as CEOs to failing companies. This of course means that the female CEOs had an uphill struggle in trying to make their organisations successful, and were more likely to fail.

This, you can well imagine, does nothing for these women's careers, or for more diverse board rooms. Leaders, particularly non-prototypical leaders, tend to be blamed for organisational failures, and leaders of failing organisations have a harder time getting new jobs, both of which will contribute to the stagnation in the progress towards equality in the board room.

The research seems to suggest that there are a number of reasons for the over-recruitment of women leaders in struggling organisations. First, in times of crisis we are more likely to take risks (in a last ditch attempt to save the organisation, we'll try anything to save the firm - even appointing a woman!). Then it is thought that women's typical leadership skillset might be particularly suited to dealing with organisations in crisis. Finally, the men who might trump women in leadership selection processes in other circumstances are less likely to apply for senior positions in failing firms - the jobs don't look secure so they don't go for them, leaving the field clear for women.

This glass cliff effect has been seen in a range of other arenas in the private and public sectors, and in politics: one study of Tory MPs showed that whilst female MPs tended to have secured fewer votes than male MPs, this was entirely explained by the fact that they were put forward in seats which were less safe. The same effect has been shown with candidates from BME backgrounds: a study in the US found that black basketball coaches were more likely to be appointed to failing teams.

One other somewhat dispiriting piece of research explored how members of the public explained the glass cliff phenomenon when presented with the evidence. Women were more likely to accept its existence and to think that it is a result of fundamental unfairness in the work place and in society more broadly. Men were more likely to deny it's existence, or explain it away on the grounds that women just aren't as suited to difficult leadership challenges.

Ryan, M.K., Haslam, S.A., Morgenroth, T., Rink, F., Stoker, J. and Peters, K. (in press) Getting on top of the glass cliff: Revieing a decade of evidence, explanations and impact The Leadership Quarterly