Teaching practitioners in all education sectors commonly face expectations to engage in "learner-focused" teaching, although the term is defined and interpreted in a myriad of ways. In higher education, some studies have examined links between learner-focused teaching and academic disciplines. This article reports on a study which investigates the ways in which practitioners in different discipline areas conceive of, and report, different approaches to teaching. For 344 lecturers in a polytechnic in Singapore, data from the Approaches to Teaching Inventory indicated that these lecturers, as a group, reported paying more attention to teacher-focused approaches to teaching. Further, lecturers teaching a subject in a "hard" discipline were more likely to report a teacher-focused approach to teaching for that subject. Conversely, those lecturers teaching a subject in a "soft" discipline were more likely to report a learner-focused approach. The implications of this for staff development will be discussed.