ABSTRACT
The word ‘teaching’ means very different things to different people. In higher education it is still, sadly, often interpreted in the narrow sense of giving a formal lecture to students. This tends to consist of a monologue, perhaps with elements of audiovisual illustration, rather than a dialogue. In lectures the lecturer does the talking and the students do the listening and note taking. There are, of course, ways of making the lecture more interactive (Bligh, 1998; Horgan, 1999). Essentially, however, lectures are largely about the performance of the teacher or ‘lecturer’ rather than about the learning of the students. This is more than a pedantic point. It represents an assumption about what constitutes ‘good’ teaching which fails to take full account of the impact on student learning. It has led to a strong emphasis on peer observation of lectures as a means of evaluating teaching practice (see Chapter 6) and is also reflected in the traditional assumption that the aim of teaching is to transfer expert knowledge from the teacher to the student.
