Postcompulsory Education Centre

Researching your own teaching

All effective teachers collect feedback on their teaching, reflect on that feedback and use it to improve their teaching. That's why one of the Capabilities of Victoria University Teaching Staff is "Teaching staff regularly reflect on and critically evaluate the quality of student learning, with their students and peers". This capability statement makes it clear that critical reflection on learning and teaching should involve peers.

Collecting feedback, thinking about it and using it to improve your teaching in isolation, while essential, is not enough. Collecting feedback and reflecting on it is a form of research and it's a form of research that all teaching staff should do. And because it is research, it's like any other sort of research - it needs peer input to make the most of it. It works best when colleagues are involved. This is reinforced in the next capability statement: "Teaching staff contribute to the development and maintenance of communities of practice that support their ongoing development as teaching staff". A "community of practice" here refers to a group of practitioners who share similar goals and interests.

This whole business of doing research into your own teaching and sharing your findings with other practitioners is sometimes called the scholarship of learning and teaching. It sounds a bit pompous but it simply means an approach to improving student learning by practitioner inquiry into learning and teaching and the sharing of the results of this inquiry within a community of practice. This community of practice may be at the level of the course team, the department, the school, the University, Victoria , Australia or internationally. Thus, teachers may start off sharing their research findings with colleagues down the corridor, presenting at Learning Matters, presenting at a local conference, publishing in an Australian journal and/or publishing in an international journal.

Our job is to support Victoria University staff as they move along this trajectory. This support is available to staff in both higher education and TAFE.

For further information contact lisa.milne@vu.edu.au