Do teaching qualifications contribute to teaching quality?

Many assumptions are required to link completion of a course of training as a teacher and 'rigour' or 'enhancement' of outcomes. Dr Stoakes must surely know from his own experience that the contents of teacher training courses are widely ignored by trainee teachers who see them just as a hurdle to overcome. This is especially so for those that have been colonised by 'social justice ' agendas to the exclusion of more technical reflections on pedagogy

Good teachers deliver good teaching because of what they are, because of who they are, and because of their academic credentials. Teaching qualifications from any source are, from my experiences, totally irrelevant. If anything they should be scrapped and replaced with collegial support mechanisms which are owned by those whose disciplines merit them. Over a relatively short period of time the sector has introduced an ILT which failed because nobody wanted it. The HEA then sought to enslave capable and dignified academics by insisting that they become members of their struggling new body. Membership of the HEA may have expanded under the threat of career stagnation without it. Indeed hoops were jumped through, but the underlying feeling has always been that a formal teaching qualification is a waste of time and resources. Now we have Advance HE, whose purpose seems to be as equivocal as all the others. The fact that this article has been written by the head of something called 'Special Projects' just beggars belief of what else is to emerge from this body. The whole national movement for 'Teacher Training' seems to have to reinvent itself just to survive. Some are passionate about teacher training ... good for them; BUT please just leave the rest of us alone. It's just NOT possible to teach teaching!!

Agree with Descartes. It is also difficult to see how HEA Fellowship is a 'teaching qualification' and even then, there is no evidence that it improves 'teaching quality' - see https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2712412

The HEA also demonstrates what it means by rigour and enhancement of student experience in its own videos, eg of 'research webinars'. This one features Dr Stoakes himself introducing the speaker: http://vimeo/66728099

Reading these comments, I'd feel pretty safe in putting money on which academics here do and don't have any educational qualifications. Because, clearly, teaching is not a skill or a science or an art, it's just something that anyone can pick up if they've been exposed to it - like medicine or engineering. If you think graduates attach so little value to the knowledge developed in a teaching course, can we assume that you think that the same thing happens in your discipline? If so, why are you teaching it?

The heavy irony used in your post really misses the point(s) being made by others. I have no doubt that educational scholars and students of pedagogic publications, share a passion for what they believe is a noble discipline. As I wrote in my initial post with regards for this passion ... 'good for them; BUT please just leave the rest of us alone', and I meant that. For good reasons teaching can be argued to be both a skill and an art but it is certainly NOT a science. Claiming that teaching IS a science enables disciples of pedagogy to beat the rest of us with a set of rules and a set of proofs which dictate our behaviour. It's this claim, and its attendant proscriptions, which lay at the heart of my objection to enforced pedagogy.

I don't know if studying education made me a better teacher, but it did make me a more confident one who is less stressed. Recently I was in a course supervisor's meeting where problems with marking rubrics were discussed. I did not understand what the problem was: you design a rubric based on well established and tested principles and it works fine. Then I realized I was perhaps the only one in the room who had completed a formal, semester long, university course in assessment design. The HEA Fellowship was okay, but only to give a tick of approval. What was working with other educators in groups, trying out techniques, getting feedback and experience being a student. The term for this is "dogfooding": http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/dogfooding_online/