So it begins. The Art of Teaching: Best Practices from Master Educators.

The first lecture sets the scene and Professor Allitt talks about the changing nature of education and his own career as a student, a lecturer and as Director of the Emory Centre for Teaching and Curriculum. All very interesting. It’s the second lecture, ‘The Board Range of Learners’ that where the course really starts. Why does everything really start in the second lecture? He argues that we are all teachers in one way or another and that teaching is one of the fundamental human activities. In addition, if you want be a good teacher, you have to be a good learner. To that end he thinks that one of the best ways of learning is to teach and that we should give our students every opportunity to teach each other. Several students are interviewed to say how much they have gained from doing this. Peer teaching? Peer marking? All very MOOCy form the Old Skool Prof :-).

There are various interviews with lectures and students throughout the course who talk about their various experiences in a wide range of disciplines. This makes the watching experience a bit more like a documentary than a traditional lecture and gives viewpoints other than Professor Allitt’s. Professor Allitt's philosophy (his inner teacher?) seems to be to help every student to be their best whereas one lecturer in Business marks on a curve, making marks a competitive process in an attempt to mirror the business world.

Prof A, as I shall now call him, argues that one of the key elements is building a rapport with your students and then inducing them to think in new ways. Teaching is not just about transmitting a body of knowledge but also a way of thinking. For example students need to know about being an historian as much as they need to know about history itself. Also, as a teacher you need to know when you don’t know and a capacity for self-criticism is an essential part of professional development.

This lecture, and to an extent the one before, made me think about teaching, which is I guess the aim of any lecture. Prof A and the other lectures interviewed seem to care about their subject, teaching and their students. So far all of them seem to see teaching as way of passing their excitement about their subject onto others. The key themes that have come through to me so far are that teaching is a vital component of being an academic and the role of reflection on their professional development. All things that are at the heart of the HEA Fellowship scheme that I’m involved in setting up and in the Post Graduate Teaching Certificate we are about to rewrite.