Quality teaching - who knows?

Look, this is how I've always taught. Nobody actually showed me how to do it. I'd had my own 'good' and 'bad' lecturers and I guess I learnt from them, at least some of what they used to do I found myself doing. Sometimes this was because I thought what I had seen worked well (I had learnt from being taught that way). Some of it was pure survival.

I was appointed as a tutor and the first couple of years of my career were very isolated and lonely. Now they're just isolated. I've made adjustments (but no one told me how isolated an academic career would be). Our department corridor was a doors closed affair (aren't they all?). Ask a 'colleague' (worth looking at the definition of that word) about aspects of teaching? You've got to be joking! Ask a colleague anything? Talk to a colleague? Even sight a colleague between your own classes, their classes, those closed doors? No tea room. No tea time. Staff meetings with an unspoken code of conduct that minimised real communication while allowing the occasional lurch into conflict.

Back to quality in teaching. Now that I reflect on it, as I changed from being a student to a lecturer my opportunities to observe teaching declined dramatically. I used to observe at least a half a dozen academics and I had the opportunity to discuss their performance with other students. Now the only person I see is me. Sometimes I have that out of body experience as I tutor. I can stand back and observe myself in action. And is it 'quality teaching'? Who knows?