History Behind TLL’s Adaptation of the Guidelines

In this section, Dipa Shah and Leann Dobranski share the history behind MIT’s adaptation New South Wales' Guidelines on Learning that Inform Teaching.

Guidelines for Teaching @ MIT and Beyond originated from an informal collaboration between the Teaching and Learning Lab (TLL) at MIT and Professor Adrian Lee, who at the time was Pro-vice-chancellor for Education and Quality Improvement at the University of New South Wales. Professor Lee and Michele Scoufis, Director of the UNSW Learning and Teaching Unit created the original Guidelines on Learning that Inform Teaching, a set of 16 research-based statements in 2003. Professor Lee's motivation to create the guidelines was to help university faculty synthesize the research literature on how students learn, and thus better inform the decisions they make when designing student learning experiences.

Hearing about Professor Lee's effort at UNSW inspired TLL to adapt the guidelines for the MIT context. UNSW and MIT are research-intensive institutions and there was a sense that a research-focused approach to teaching and learning would work for both audiences.

MIT's first adaptation of the guidelines was published in 2007. In subsequent years, examples of MIT faculty using the guidelines in their instruction were added to help newcomers imagine how they could be implemented. Most recently, in 2014, the guidelines were updated with current references to the literature and the name was modified to Guidelines for Teaching @ MIT and Beyond. In 2015, the guidelines were converted to hypertext to make them more accessible (previously, the guidelines were a printed handbook (PDF - 2MB) also available as PDF on the TLL website and the MIT OCW site) and additional MIT examples were added.

The process of the initial adaptation of the guidelines and the subsequent updates were very useful for TLL staff. They helped us to stay current with the literature and the research-based practices implemented in MIT classrooms.