National Teaching Fellows (NTFs) in the UK are celebrated individuals who have made a successful claim for teaching excellence to the Higher Education Academy. This paper reports the results of an empirical study of NTFs with expertise in online learning, which measured their pedagogical beliefs and online teaching practices, using a…

The emergence of academic development in Anglophone higher education was linked to post Second World War massification and concerns about student failure. These concerns were driven by increasing statistical investigations into student attrition and degree times to completion, particularly in Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand. There was a…

Academics in an engineering school at an Australian university participated in peer observation of a teaching program using a partnership approach. The present case study explains and discusses program aims, design, process and outcomes. The success of the program was dependent on four critical elements: educational leadership; a staged,…

This paper reports an investigation of "transformation narratives" emerging from early career academics' reflective writing. The pieces of writing analysed describe self-initiated teaching development activities embedded in the early career academics' practice. Using a transformative learning framework, the analysis reveals the following changes…

Students and peers who nominate academic staff for teaching excellence awards unwittingly invite them to reflect on their work, and explain their practices to other academics. What is an effective system of academic support for these applicants and should academic developers be doing it at all? Is it possible that academic developers and academic…

Language can provide an entree into an academic discipline, but can also serve as a barrier to exclude newcomers. How does this apply to academic developers trying to promote teaching and learning on their campuses? Using an online survey, academics at two institutions in the UK and USA were asked to describe their typical and ideal reading in…

There is increasing pressure toward professionalisation of university teaching, through the attendance of academic development courses and programmes. This is based on the expectation that such courses lead to more student-focused perspectives on teaching and learning and more effective teaching and learning practices. In this study we interviewed…

Educational development over the last 35 years has progressed from an informal set of instructional improvement activities to a scholarly field of study and practice. At the same time, its scope has evolved to include a broad range of services, resources, programs and initiatives (e.g., curriculum development, action research, mentoring) designed…

A key component of academic development is the improvement of teaching with the express purpose of improving student learning. To achieve that end, we work toward helping faculty members develop increasingly sophisticated and complex conceptions of teaching so that they might more readily think about teaching in new ways. Models of learning and…

One aim of student evaluation of instruction is the improvement of teaching quality, but there is little evidence that student assessment of instruction alone improves teaching. This study tried to improve the effects of evaluation by combining evaluation with individual counselling in an institutional development approach. Evaluation was…

Academics employed on non-standard contracts are a numerically significant part of the labour market in higher education. Concerns about access to formal academic development for this staff group have been articulated in many countries in the context of increasing emphasis on teaching quality assessment and employment regulation of "non-permanent"…

There is one account in the literature of the application of a solution-focused approach to individual teaching development at university level (Devlin, 2003). The solution-focused approach is based on solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT). The current paper elaborates on the existing account, further outlining and illustrating the techniques that…