Can I teach? I think so. Should I aspire to publish papers telling other people how to teach? Probably not. This is me showing students how to estimate tree height.

In my last job I was employed on a teaching-track position*. For many years this worked reasonably well for me. I enjoy teaching, I think I’m quite good at it, and I didn’t mind a slightly higher load as the price of not needing to satisfy arbitrary targets for research grant income or publication in high-impact journals. That’s not to say I stopped doing research, because obviously that didn’t happen, but I accepted that there was a trade-off between the two and that I was closer to one end of the spectrum. It still left me three clear months every summer to get out into the field and collect data.

Many UK universities developed teaching-track positions in response to the national research assessment exercise (the REF**) which incentivised them to concentrate resources in the hands of a smaller number of staff whilst ensuring that someone else got on with the unimportant business of running the university and the distraction of educating undergraduates. Such is the true meaning of research-led teaching.

A problem began to arise when those staff who had been shuffled into teaching-track positions applied for promotion. The conventional signifiers of academic success weren’t relevant; you could hardly expect them to bring in large grants, publish in top-tier journals or deliver keynotes at major conferences if they weren’t being given the time or support to do so.

Some head-scratching took place and alternative means were sought out to decide who was performing well. It’s hard enough to determine what quality teaching looks like at an institutional level***, and assessing individuals is correspondingly even more difficult.

The first thing to turn to is student evaluations. These largely measure how good a lecturer is at entertaining and pleasing their students, or how much the students enjoy the subject. Evidence suggests that evaluations are inversely proportional to the amount that students learn, as well as being biased against women and protected minorities. In short they’re not just the wrong measure, they’re actively regressive in their effects. Not that this stops many universities using them of course.

What else is there? Well, being academics, the natural form of output to aim for is publications. It’s the only currency some academics understand. Not scientific research papers, of course, because teaching staff aren’t supposed to be active researchers. So instead the expectation became that they would publish papers based on pedagogical research****. This sounds, on the face of it, quite sensible, which is why many universities went down that route. But there are three major problems.

1. Pedagogical research isn’t easy. There are whole fields of study, often based in departments of psychology, who have developed approaches and standards to ensure that work is of appropriate quality. Expecting an academic with a background in biochemistry or condensed matter physics to publish in a competitive journal of pedagogical research without the necessary training is unreasonable. Moreover, it’s an implicit insult to those colleagues for whom such work is their main focus. Demanding that all teachers should publish pedagogical research implies that anyone can do it. They can’t.

2. Very few academics follow pedagogical research. That’s not to say that they shouldn’t. Most academics teach and are genuinely interested in doing so as effectively as possible. But the simple truth is that it’s hard enough to keep track of the literature in our areas of research specialism. Not many can make time to add another, usually unrelated field to their reading list. I consider myself more engaged than most and even I encounter relevant studies only through social media or articles for a general readership.

3. A lot of pedagogical research is junk. Please don’t think I’m talking about the excellent, specialist work done by expert researchers into effective education practice. There is great work out there in internationally respected journals. I’m talking about the many unlisted, low-quality journals that have proliferated over recent years, and which give education research a bad name. Even if they contain some peer review process, many are effectively pay-to-publish, and some are actively predatory. I won’t name any here because that’s just asking for abusive e-mails.

Why to these weak journals exist? Well, we have created an incentive structure in which a class of academics needs to publish something — anything — in order to gain recognition and progress in their careers. A practice which we would frown upon in ‘normal’ research is actively encouraged by many of the world’s top universities. Junk journals and even junk conferences proliferate as a way to satisfy universities’ own internal contradictions.

What’s the alternative? I have three suggestions:

1. Stop imposing an expectation based on research onto educators. If research and teaching are to be separated (a trend I disagree with anyway) then they can’t continue to be judged by the same metrics. Incentivising publications for their own sake helps no-one. Some educators will of course want to carry out their own independent studies, and this should be encouraged and respected, but it isn’t the right approach for everyone.

2. Put some effort into finding out whether teachers are good at their job. This means peer assessments of teaching, student performance and effective innovation. All this is difficult and time-consuming but if we want to recognise good teachers then we need to take the time to do it properly. Proxy measures are no substitute. Whether someone can write a paper about teaching doesn’t imply that they can teach.

3. Support serious pedagogical researchers. If you’re based in a large university then there’s almost certainly a group of specialist researchers already there. How much have you heard about their work? Have you collaborated with them? Universities have native expertise which could be used to improve teaching practice, usually much more efficiently than forcing non-specialists to jump through hoops. If the objective is genuinely to improve teaching standards then ask the people who know how to do it.

If there’s one thing that shows how evaluations of teaching aren’t working or taken seriously it’s that universities don’t make high-level appointments based on teaching. Prestige chairs exist to hire big-hitters in research based on their international profile, grant income and publication record. When was the last time you heard of a university recruiting a senior professor because they were great at teaching? Tell me once you’ve stopped laughing.

* This is now relatively common among universities in Europe and North America. The basic principle is that some staff are given workloads that allow them to carry out research, whilst others are given heavier teaching and administrative loads but the expectations for their research income and outputs are correspondingly reduced.

** If you don’t know about the Research Evaluation Framework and how it has poisoned academic life in the UK then don’t ask. Reactions from those involved may vary from gentle sobs to inchoate screaming.

*** Which gave rise to the Teaching Evaluation Framework, or TEF, and yet more anguish for UK academics. Because the obvious way to deal with the distorting effect of one ranking system is to create another. Surely that’s enough assessment of universities based on flawed data? No, of course not, because there’s also the Knowledge Evaluation Framework (KEF) coming up. I’m not even joking.

**** Oddly textbooks often don’t count. No, I can’t explain this. But I was told that publishing a textbook didn’t count as scholarship in education.