My own work on what makes students trust teachers was inspired by an interview that I did with Rachel Forsyth (in the botanical garden shown in the featured image, and half of it was inaudible on the recording due to wind!) for her and other’s study on what teachers do to build trust with students. They published first results in Felten et al. (2023), and now in Sutherland et al. (2024), which I will summarise below.

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Quality assurance at universities is often oversimplified: Single events, captured in indicators that rely on one facet, are met with quick interventions, without any understanding of the complexities of the situation or longer term strategies. This leads to flip-flopping between states, for example getting rid of student group works because students report to not like it, only to reintroduce it when employers note a lack of team-working skills later. Instead, the focus should be on enhancing university culture as a whole, and this relies on understanding a complex system and carefully adjusting variables over time. In this, quality improvement of universities is a wicked problem, i.e. an extremely complex problem that does not have a clear cause or formulation, that will never be “solved”, only dealt with better or not as well, where there is no way to test any of the infinite possible solutions before implementing them, and where the many representations and approaches are all valid depending on underlying norms, values, perspectives, …

Hamshire, Barrett and Forsyth (2024) present a concatenated approach to quality improvement. Continue reading →