The course aims to:

• provide professionally relevant teaching and learning informed by research;
• extend and deepen students' subject knowledge and develop their understanding of specific ideas, pedagogical practices and learning theories;
• encourage a commitment to intellectual challenge and evidence-based teaching informed by the latest conceptual and theoretical knowledge;
• develop students' intellectual, practical and transferable skills related to subject specialist teaching;
• help students to critique and evaluate current pedagogical practices in their subject area and to conduct systematic research relevant to their professional practice;
• encourage critical thinking related to subject specialist knowledge, pedagogical practices and theories of learning;
• encourage students to develop as reflective practitioners in terms of subject specialist knowledge, skills and pedagogical practices.

Learning Outcomes

Knowledge and understanding

1. To enhance the students’ knowledge and critical understanding of recent developments in their subject specialism most relevant to their present and future teaching role.
2. To develop students’ knowledge and understanding of teaching and assessment strategies, including the application of new technologies in areas such as e-learning, to assist in the teaching of new and complex subject concepts and themes.
3. To deploy new subject knowledge in the development of curricula and public examination syllabuses which reflect contemporary scholarship and research.
4. To update and extend students’ research practices to demonstrate knowledge, abilities and skills to engage in focused, professionally relevant, independent learning through the production of a dissertation.
5. To promote an understanding of the links between schools, colleges and universities at a subject-specific level in terms of, for example, pedagogical practices, knowledge transfers and assessment practices.

Skills and other attributes

By the end of the course students should have acquired:

1. The skills necessary to locate, read, interpret and analyse primary and secondary sources of material enabling the development of a conceptual and theoretical understanding of recent developments in the specialist subject;
2. The ability and skills to undertake small-scale classroom research to assess the efficacy of developments in teaching and/or assessment strategies;
3. Skills to critically evaluate current scholarship and research in their own subject and to place this knowledge within the context of their own situation and practice as teachers;
4. The ability to formulate a research topic relevant to their teaching context, to collect and analyse primary and/or secondary sources of data, and to undertake professionally relevant research;
5. The facility to communicate the results of their ideas, research and its conclusions in a written form acceptable as a work of scholarship potentially publishable in a professional or academic journal.   

Continuing

Students wishing to continue from the MSt in Advanced Subject Teaching to a PhD are required to achieve a mark of 70 or higher for the dissertation.  

Departments

This course is advertised in the following departments: