Toby Bailey

During his tenure as the Director of Teaching, Dr Toby Bailey brought in many changes that define the student experience at the School of Maths today — including Maths Hub, flipped classrooms and interactive workshops. I had the pleasure of talking to Dr Bailey about his academic journey and motivations behind transforming teaching at the school.

Toby's pre-University education

Toby attended a primary school in England where the headmaster would give him problems to solve outside the classroom. “That's the first time I remember being engaged with mathematics at school,” recalled Toby. After finishing primary school, he attended a selective grammar school that soon became a comprehensive school, and he sometimes found the maths classes “rather dull.” Before heading for school, he would watch the Open University’s television broadcasts on university-level mathematics in the mornings. “I always thought the lectures on modern mathematics were exciting. Open University influenced me quite a bit, and I remember buying textbooks for their courses too.” He took some of his maths A levels early and went on to attend Trinity College at Cambridge for his undergraduate studies in maths.

His time studying at University

Toby has fond memories of his time at Cambridge, where one of his lecturers was John Conway. So, he got to experience Conway’s popularly charismatic teaching style and backgammon games firsthand. Anyone who has met Conway would have anecdotes about the charismatic mathematician, and Toby is no different. “John Conway was well-known for filling a blackboard full of something, and if it went down to the ground, he would just lie on the floor to write an extra line across the bottom. Thinking about that now brings to mind the whole issue of whether lecturers should try and add a little entertainment to lectures by tricks like that, dressing up as a rabbit, letting off a firework in class or whatever. It leads to a memorable lecture, but that is likely to be at the expense of some remembering of the actual content of the lecture. On the other hand, a bit of fun may raise morale and have hidden benefits.”

After finishing his undergraduate studies at Cambridge, Toby moved to Oxford to do a PhD with Sir Professor Roger Penrose. When asked about his experience working with the 2020 Nobel laureate in Physics, Toby mentioned that Sir Roger didn’t like micromanaging his advisees. Instead, he used to have a weekly meeting in his office, which, as Toby describes, was “packed high with piles of papers that were in danger of falling over.” All the PhD students in the department attended the weekly meeting where everyone was expected to chip in with what they were working on.

Toby entered his PhD group very interested in mathematical physics, and he attributes his interest in geometry to Sir Roger’s influence. “Roger likes things which are geometric and are quite visual. So if you have an idea — which involves algebra or mathematical analysis — and showed it to him, he would glaze over a bit and say that that's very interesting because he didn't like putting anybody off. But he was more interested in ideas with a geometric flavour.”

His work at the University of Edinburgh

After postdoc positions at Oxford and Rice University, Toby joined the school of Maths at Edinburgh as a lecturer. His efforts as the director of teaching from 2009 to 2019 have been a massive contribution to how we know maths education at the university today. Talking about his motivations for taking on the role of the pedagogy transformer at the school, Toby mentioned that it would often surprise him when final year students had forgotten things taught in previous courses.

“There weren’t as many people in the School of Mathematics who were interested in the theory of teaching at that time. The School of Physics, on the other hand, had many education-focused academics.” Toby was already involved with the school’s teaching administration, and so he had some ideas — although uninformed — about how to improve the situation. Discussions with Physics’ academics helped him formulate those ideas into practical knowledge.

“Eric Mazur, an education researcher and Physics lecturer at Harvard, has been a huge influence. I can remember the time I first heard his talk ‘Confessions of a Converted Lecturer’.” The central idea of Eric Mazur’s talk was peer instruction, which Toby implemented with colleagues in the first-year course ‘Introduction to Linear Algebra’ when he was the Course Organiser for ILA and the school’s Director of Teaching.

In 2011, a year after Toby became the Director of teaching, all first-year courses adopted Mazur’s “Peer Instruction” in a flipped classroom design. The beloved Maths Hub for second-year students and onwards dates to that time as well. “It was a bit controversial at the time,” remarked Toby. Some academics in the school believed that having a shared space for students studying in different years would encourage cheating.

When asked what he would change about Edinburgh’s current maths course structure, Toby said he would like to get rid of a high stakes final exam in favour of more coursework with a low stakes final exam. “COVID is a terrible thing, but I think it has pushed us a bit in that direction. A lot of courses are moving towards more coursework.”

It is evident that Toby knows a lot about learning strategies, so I asked him if he had any advice for students who wish to become better learners. He replied, “There are lots of things that you can do to improve learning, but they aren't necessarily very intuitive. The website learningscientists.org is a good place to go and read about that stuff.”