Can you be taught how to teach? Is this something that can be reduced to Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs) on a PG Cert? Can “experts” in learning and teaching equip novices with the skills they need to be successful teachers?

Well, maybe. But we would like to suggest another way of thinking about this. During a particularly lively LTHEChat, the three of us realised that learning how to teach might be both more complicated and more simple than it had first seemed to be.

We started to think about how we had learned, and what that might tell us about how we might teach. We also recalled times that we have helped others to learn, and thought about how these experiences might help us to talk about learning how to teach. We don’t claim to be experts – far from it – but we hope that the questions that we think are important will also strike a chord with you.

Tonight we are asking six questions, but we also hope to start a larger debate.

Biographies 

Steve Rowett is Digital Education Futures Manager at UCL. He leads a small team exploring the potential for new technologies in teaching and learning across the university’s 75+ departments. Most recently he has been working to promote active learning classroom tools, introducing a new blogging platform for UCL and conducting a review of the institution’s digital learning environment through interviews with staff and students. 

Twitter: @srowett

Santanu Vasant 

Santanu Vasant is the Head of the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, at the University of East London.

Leading the team of three Academic Developers and three Learning Technology Advisers plus an administrator within the University, Santanu has a research interest in how staff are developed and empowered to use technology in their practice but also to make better use of the physical learning space as a result. He also has an interest in how we motivate and engage those staff that don’t engage with CPD activity. Santanu has worked in Learning Technology since 2004 and has worked on projects as diverse as the issues of transition and induction into higher education (the subject of his MA Dissertation at UCL’s IOE (2012)), deploying PebblePad and developing activities for reflecting writing in BA Education, PGCert in HE and Business Studies (writing a chapter on this topic in Pebblegogy, 2011). More recently he has written a chapter on Bring Your Own Device Policy and Practice in Smart Learning: teaching and learning with smartphones and tablets in post compulsory education (2015) edited by Andrew Middleton and contributed to the UCIAS Learning Spaces Toolkit (2016). In June this year, he had his latest chapter published entitled ‘Attitudes, Practices and Outcomes Explored through the Use of Social Media’ in Social Media in Higher Education: Case Studies, Reflections and Analysis, edited by Chris Rowell. 

Web: www.santanuvasant.com | Twitter: @santanuvasant | LinkedIn: /santanuvasant 

Sarah Honeychurch @NomadWarMachine is a Fellow in the Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, where she is investigating ways of making learning, teaching and assessment less stressful and more meaningful for staff and students. She is currently also writing-up a PhD in Education which considers the effects of online peer interaction on learning, and this has led to her interest in lurkers in online communities. Sarah blogs at http://www.nomadwarmachine.co.uk/

To view the Wakelet for this chat, please click here