In the HET framework, excellent teaching is understood to comprise four principles. Excellent teaching (i) engages students, (ii) is equitable, (iii) is learning centered and responsive, and (iv) involves striving to improve.
Engaging Students
DEFINITION: Members of the professoriate engage students by creating courses and lessons that are inviting, coherent, and clearly organized. They interact with students and support their learning beyond the delivery of lectures. Courses and lessons include appropriate content, reflect scholarship about how people learn, and are designed to engage students as active participants.
This includes the following components:
- Being appropriately available to students and communicating respectfully and promptly;
- Communicating (e.g., in syllabus, course website) student responsibilities, grading conventions, and course logistics (e.g., where to find materials, how to communicate with the instructor) in an accessible, clear, and explicit way; and
- Selecting appropriate course content and designing activities that reflect scholarship about how people learn: actively; with frequent opportunities to practice and apply; and with appropriate challenge, scaffolding, and support.
Equitable
DEFINITION: Equitable teaching means designing instruction, interacting with students, and maintaining learning environments in ways that enable all students to learn. Members of the professoriate convey that all students are capable scholars and valued members of an academic community and acknowledge differences as contributions to the learning community.
This includes the following components:
- Designing learning activities to be accessible for all students, including creating and maintaining structures that allow all students to contribute;
- Incorporating student voice and choice into learning activities;
- Modeling a commitment to inclusive teaching in decisions, comments, and behaviors; and
- Ensuring that course content reflects diversity and surfaces issues of equity and social justice that are relevant to the discipline.
Learning Centered and Responsive
DEFINITION: Learning-centered and responsive teaching means members of the professoriate design lessons and courses starting with what they intend students to learn, rather than which content they will present. Assessment makes gaps between students’ current and intended learning visible; after formative assessment, feedback and subsequent instruction narrow those gaps. Members of the professoriate regularly refine teaching materials based on what they observe about student learning and feedback from students.
This includes the following components:
- Making the intended learning for courses and lessons explicit and aligning materials, activities, and assessments to that intended learning;
- Conducting frequent, low-stakes, formative assessment to make student thinking visible and adjusting subsequent instruction and giving students feedback in response;
- Designing synchronous lessons with enough flexibility and student participation that decisions and adaptations can be made in real time, in response to how learning is unfolding in a particular lesson, for particular students; and
- Asking students and observing how syllabi, assignments, activities, assessments, readings, etc. support learning, and then refining these materials.
Striving to Improve
DEFINITION: Members of the professoriate who strive to improve recognize that teaching expertise is not static, and it is always possible to learn more about teaching. Over time, there are shifts in student demographics, background learning, and interests; the social context in which we teach; what we know about how people learn; and disciplinary content (in some fields). They keep an eye out for ways their pedagogy may also need to shift, and they support colleagues to do the same.
This includes the following components:
- Reflecting on the success of current teaching strategies and adjusting them to better serve students;
- Participating in ongoing professional development;
- Observing or being observed by a colleague in order to give or get feedback about teaching; and
- Contributing to conversations about and efforts to improve teaching and learning in the department, on campus, and beyond.