ABSTRACT

Bad teaching is teaching which presents an endless procession of meaningless signs, words and rules, and fails to arouse the imagination.

(W.W.Sawyer)

THE IDEA OF GOOD TEACHING

The dominant theme of my argument so far has been that the quality of student learning in higher education should be improved and can be improved. How can it best be improved? It is unnecessary, and it may be misleading, to appeal to expensive instructional technologies and sophisticated ‘learning skills’. The answer is nearer to home: it lies in the connection between students’ learning of particular content and the quality of our teaching of that content. Through listening to what students have said about their learning, we have observed how real this connection is. Good teaching and good learning are linked through the students’ experiences of what we do. It follows that we cannot teach better unless we are able to see what we are doing from their point of view.