Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning - What is a good teaching department?

Departments of the University recently completed ‘Ensuring Teaching Quality – best practice pathways’ documents and currently decisions are being made about which department will receive the inaugural Distinguished Departmental Teaching and Learning Award.

So what is a good teaching department? The attributes listed below, and many more, could be considered when attempting to come to terms with the concept of ‘the good teaching department’. It may be that all of them have some place in the determination. However, if you had to choose, which would you see as the most critical attributes and how would you judge a department’s performance against your chosen attributes? The first half of this question may appear relatively easy. The latter half of the question is much more challenging for some of the attributes. On a scale from ‘very important’ to ‘not at all important’, how would you rate the significance of the following in identifying a good teaching department?

1
Very
important

Key
3

5
Not at all important

The department...
1	that is recognised informally as having a strong interest in teaching.	1	2	3	4	5
2	whose staff have won the most internal and external awards for teaching or grants for teaching innovations.	1	2	3	4	5
3	that knows the theory of teaching in a higher education context, that knows the pedagogy.	1	2	3	4	5
4	where most staff have undergone training in how to teach.	1	2	3	4	5
5	that has no poor teachers.	1	2	3	4	5
6	where teaching is encouraged and enjoyed.	1	2	3	4	5
7	that can articulate a convincing case as a 'good teaching department'.	1	2	3	4	5
8	that has the structures in place to improve the likelihood that good teaching will take place.	1	2	3	4	5
9	that scores highest, relative to like departments in other Australian universities, on the national Course Experience Questionnaire.	1	2	3	4	5
10	that makes most effective use of multimedia in teaching.	1	2	3	4	5
11	that offers flexible opportunities for students to learn.	1	2	3	4	5
12	whose students learn most.	1	2	3	4	5
13	whose students are given the skills and interests to progress beyond their initial education, on a course of life-long learning.	1	2	3	4	5

You are invited to complete, photocopy and send this page to Elizabeth Santhanam, Centre for Staff Development (fax to ext. 1156). If enough responses are received these will be aggregated and reflected back to readers in a subsequent issue.