Key questions in learning to teach

The title to this blog post is a little misleading. I do not, alas, have an exhaustive list of the key questions that one needs to answer to successfully approach teaching. However, it does have one additional question that I found helpful in developing my thinking when I first started teaching.

I remembered this when reading Cathy Elliot’s great blog post this week ‘Learning how to teach?’. In the post, Cathy refers to a moment where a teacher education tutor said to trainee Teaching Assistants: “What you need to ask yourself is: what sorts of relationships do I want in this classroom?”. Cathy writes in her post about how impactful that question was for her practice and I wasn’t surprised – this is a great question.

It reminded me of a question that I was asked when I was learning to teach. When I was doing my PhD, I was really, really keen to get experience teaching. However, my department didn’t routinely use Graduate Teaching Assistants and so there were very few opportunities to get experience. There was also no teacher training to engage with. 

Fortunately, the staff in the department were extremely supportive of my enthusiasm for teaching and let me sit-in on some of their classes and lead parts of workshops. Afterwards, we would take some time to talk over why I had approached aspects of teaching in the way I had (I could, should, and probably will write another blog post about how vital the support of a few key individuals can be in developing one’s teaching practice!). 

In these conversations, I initially relied on what I would think of now as a reactive approach to pedagogy: “I did that because when I was a student I thought it was good/ bad when the lecturer who taught me did that”. This was useful in getting going but it was only going to get my practice so far. 

One day, in one of those post-class teaching practice chats, a great academic asked me: “How do you understand what makes good or bad teaching, beyond your experiences of being taught?”. 

It was a question that I had not consciously taken much time to consider, having spent the bulk of my time thinking about how I would adopt or tweak the approaches to teaching that I had experienced during my own studies. It was a question that put me properly on the path to thinking about what it means to teach and to exploring different approaches to teaching. It was a small question that made a big difference to me as someone who was making my first steps into the world of university teaching.

So, having read Cathy’s post and remembering my own ‘key question’ in learning how to teach – I’m wondering if anyone else has similar questions that were pivotal in developing their teaching practice. I would love to hear more!