The nature of good
teaching in higher
education

Bad teaching is teaching which presents an endless procession of meaningless signs, words and rules, and fails to arouse the imagination.
(W.W.Sawyer)

The idea of good teaching
The dominant theme of my argument so far has been that the quality of student learning should be improved and can be improved. How might we improve it?
The answer lies in the connection between students’ learning of particular content and the quality of our teaching of that content. Through listening to what students have said about their learning, we have observed how real this connection is. Good teaching and good learning are linked through the students’ experiences of what we do. It follows that we cannot teach better unless we are able to see what we are doing from their point of view. Good teaching encourages high-quality student learning. It discourages the superficial approaches to learning represented by ‘imitation subjects’ and energetically encourages engagement with subject content. This kind of teaching does not allow students to evade understanding, but neither does it bludgeon them into memorising; it helps them respectfully towards seeing the world in a different way. Later in the book, I shall try to show how these basic ideas can be applied to the design of curricula, teaching methods and assessment.
First, though, we must be clear about how teaching might encourage deep approaches, interest in the subject matter and changes in student understanding. Thus, I begin this chapter with a survey of what we know about the characteristics of effective teaching in higher education. How does this knowledge relate to what students say about their learning? What does good teaching mean in practice? What actually happens to students when different teachers approach teaching from contrasting perspectives, such as those described in Chapter 2? This review and these case studies lead us to six essential principles of effective university teaching. Finally, I want to look at the idea of good teaching at the level of an academic department or programme of study, and describe some work on variations in teaching performance in different courses and departments.
In the next chapter, we shall see how the essence of good teaching and that of its less effective counterparts as described here can be understood in terms of different theories of teaching. One reminder about terminology: as in the rest of the book, ‘teaching’ is defined in a broad way. It includes the design of curricula, choice of content and methods, various forms of teacher-student interaction, and the assessment of students.

Some myths about teaching in higher education
It suits many lecturers to believe that because learning is ultimately the student’s responsibility, effective teaching is an indeterminate phenomenon. There is a cherished academic illusion, supported by abundant folk tales, that good teaching at university is an elusive, many-sided, idiosyncratic and ultimately indefinable quality. Now I take it for granted throughout this book that there cannot be one ‘best’ way of teaching. Like studying, it is too complicated and personal a business for a single strategy to be right for everybody and every discipline. So far so good. It is folly, however, to carry this truism beyond its proper territory and to suggest that there are no better and worse ways of teaching, no general attributes that distinguish good teaching from bad. The fallacy of this belief will become apparent below. A related myth in the culture of university teaching is that because the greater part of learning in higher education takes place apart from lectures and other formal classes, then teaching is not very important after all. Learning is what students do; its relation to teaching is unproblematic. This convenient illusion draws on two prevalent misconceptions about teaching at this level: that it consists in presenting or transmitting information from teacher to student, or demonstrating the application of a skill in practice; and that students in higher education must not be too closely supervised, lest the bad habits of dependent learning they are supposed to have acquired at school are reinforced. The myth argues that learning is something separate from teaching—learning is the student’s job, and teaching the teacher’s, and they should stay in different boxes. People say in support of this myth that able students understand and apply the skills and information they have been exposed to. If the rest don’t learn, they have a difficulty that the teaching cannot be blamed for; after all, they are in higher education now. This belief is associated with the view that unpopular, even dreadful, teachers in higher education are actually better than popular and helpful ones (because the latter force students to be ‘independent’, while the former ‘spoon-feed’). Other fallacies about higher education teaching include the one that teaching undergraduates (especially first year ones) is easier than teaching postgraduates; that knowledge of the subject matter is sufficient as well as necessary for proficient teaching; and that the quality of teaching cannot be evaluated. There are good reasons why these myths persist: they serve specific interests, such as administrative convenience and the dominant cultures of academic departments; and they provide excellent excuses for not doing anything much to make teaching better. Not doing things about improving teaching, making things administratively easy, and educational values often conflict with each other. The prime examples are in the area of the evaluation of student and staff performance, as we shall find in Chapters 10 and 11.
Our knowledge of good teaching The reality, as opposed to the mythology, is that a great deal is known about the characteristics of effective university teaching. It is undoubtedly a complicated matter; there is no indication of one ‘best way’; but our understanding of its essential nature is both broad and deep. Research from several different standpoints, including studies of school teaching, has led to similar conclusions. The research supports what good teachers have been saying and doing since time immemorial. Among the important properties of good teaching, seen from the individual lecturer’s point of view, are:
• A desire to share your love of the subject with students;
• An ability to make the material being taught stimulating and
interesting;
• Facility for engaging with students at their level of understanding;
• A capacity to explain the material plainly;
• Commitment to making it absolutely clear what has to be understood, at what level, and why;
• Showing concern and respect for students;
• Commitment to encouraging student independence;
• An ability to improvise and adapt to new demands;
• Using teaching methods and academic tasks that require students to learn thoughtfully, responsibly, and cooperatively;
• Using valid assessment methods;
• A focus on key concepts, and students’ misunderstandings of them, rather than on covering the ground;
• Giving the highest-quality feedback on student work;
• A desire to learn from students and other sources about the effects of teaching and how it can be improved.
Before looking at how these discrete attitudes and behaviours are interrelated, we might ask how they mesh with students’ experiences and with the more persistent academic myths. As a matter of fact, the research findings on good teaching mirror with singular accuracy what your students will say if they are asked to describe what a good teacher does. University students are extremely astute commentators on teaching. They have seen a great deal of it by the time they enter higher education. In addition, as non-experts in the subject they are being taught, they are uniquely qualified to judge whether the
instruction they are receiving is useful for learning it. Moreover, they understand and can articulate clearly what is and what is not useful for helping them to learn. The evidence from students provided in Chapter 5 is perfectly convincing on this point.
There is also evidence of the authenticity of students’ views from studies of evaluations of teaching, particularly in that they are known to be sensitive to variations in teaching processes (Dunkin 1986) and that they are associated with student achievement (Marsh 1987). Moreover, when students are asked
to identify the important characteristics of a good lecturer, they identify the same ones that lecturers themselves do: organisation, stimulation of interest, understandable explanations, empathy with students’ needs, feedback on work, clear goals, encouraging independent thought. Down at the bottom of the list are the lecturer’s personality and sense of humour. Taken together, these findings tend to undermine the widespread views that students confuse popular lecturers with good lecturers and don’t appreciate the hard work that goes on behind the scenes. Of course, students do not see every aspect of teaching, such as effort put into curriculum or web page design, directly; nor are they necessarily able to comment validly on matters such as the relevance and up-to-dateness of the content. But those aspects they do see comprise a very important part of the whole.
Why is the academic myth about students confusing ‘good performance’ with effective teaching so persistent? Maybe because it feeds on a belief somewhere deep down in certain lecturers (perhaps a little of it is in us all) that learning at undergraduate level has got to be a severe and unhappy business. Some lecturers do seem to suppose, for whatever reason, that learning English or chemistry mustn’t be made too attractive. Pleasure in learning, they appear to think, is something that comes later, when undergraduate tedium is well behind you. This belief may draw in its turn on the view that students will only come to see the true value of the teaching they received at university in subsequent years.
I assert that these beliefs are entirely wrong. If we cannot help students to enjoy learning their subjects, however hard they may be, we have not understood anything about teaching at all. It is abundantly clear from comparative studies of graduates’ and students’ reactions to courses (see, for example, Mathews et al. 1990) that anecdotes to the effect that bad teaching is ‘really’ good teaching (when students reflect on it a year or so later) have no foundation in fact. Graduates rate the same courses similarly to current students. And, in spite of attempts to popularise the view that students can be fooled into giving lecturers who are superficially attractive presenters of wrong content high ratings as teachers, it is evident from the correctly controlled inquiries that students rarely fall into the trap. They can easily differentiate the empty performer from the good teacher. (Marsh 1987 provides a ruthless critique of the studies saying that they can’t.) These conclusions are important for choosing methods of evaluating teaching as well as for understanding its nature.