Key Findings

• Practitioners often judge their performance on the emotional response they have to their learners and their perceptions of their learners’ response to them.
• Practitioners can tend to ignore (or even blame) the disengaged learners and those struggling with the learning content.
• Many practitioners have little formal training in education.
• Research into tertiary education shows that despite much being written about the importance of good teaching and learning practice based on evidence of ‘what works’ is less common than might be expected.
• There are multiple demands on practitioners in the modern tertiary education system.
• Central to good teaching and learning is ‘informed’ thinking or thinking informed by the collection and use of data.

Key Recommendations

Practitioners should:

• use evidence to review and inform their practices
• start by collecting a variety of quantitative and qualitative data with a purpose in mind
• use data to think about what works, what doesn’t work, what practices are more effective and what are less effective
• use data to identify and address things that are not working and draw conclusions.
• work with other practitioners to analyse and understand the data
• use team or faculty meetings to discuss results and the implications for future teaching practice.