"Teaching excellence is a topic of international significance, having importance for higher education worldwide, yet is generally considered to be poorly defined and understood. The current discourse of teaching excellence is narrowly framed, instrumental and performative, with an onus on measurement and quantification. Rallying against this narrowness, Wood and Su unpack the notion of excellence in higher education and argue for a rethinking, seeking to connect with ideas of the value of higher education in a democratic society and proposing an approach which promotes the inclusion of understandings from the perspectives of higher education stakeholders. They examine teaching excellence through different lenses by engaging a plurality of stakeholder perspectives, including higher education institutions, academics, students, employers and parents, and highlight the importance of engaging different stakeholders in discussions about teaching excellence in higher education. Whilst creating the conditions for public debate and stakeholder engagement is challenging, the authors argue that it is a vital task, and especially necessary at a time when performativity and measurement hold sway and detract from a focus on the processes of teaching and learning. The authors argue that through engaging with higher education constituencies to examine teaching excellence from different angles and stances that more inclusive understandings can be built."--

Looking at the practice of the UK's 'excellent' university teachers, this book draws on insightful interviews where they share their teaching approaches and development plans - the first in-depth study of teaching excellence in higher education.

This book offers inter-disciplinary, evidence-informed discussion around notions of excellence in higher education teaching. It will act as a key stimulus for institutional and sector-wide debates and a reference point for initiatives around the TEF agenda.

Developing a Center for Teaching Excellence: A Case Study Using the Integrated Readiness Matrix builds on the 2015 text, Integrating Pedagogy and Technology: Improving Teaching and Learning in Higher Education with a focus on teaching in higher education. Developing a Center for Teaching Excellence is premised on our contention in the first book that, while individual faculty members can independently begin to use the IRM to improve their pedagogical and technological skills in their content areas, an organizational structure is needed to sustain ongoing improvement. In addition, while the first book provided a primer on learning theory as it relates to pedagogy, Developing a Center for Teaching Excellence plumbs this topic more deeply from the perspective of the college instructor. Further, the second book is dedicated to demonstrating how the IRM can be institutionalized as the foundation for providing the structure and support to faculty and how they can help shape centers for teaching excellence by becoming more familiar with relevant learning theories and related pedagogical and technological approaches.

Marshall Gregory argues that teachers at the university and high school levels can achieve teaching excellence by grounding their teaching in pedagogical theory that takes into account students' abilities and the ultimate goals of teaching: to develop students' capacities for thought, reflection, questioning, and engagement to their fullest extent.

The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF)’s aims, implementation and effect on the English higher education sector remains a controversial and contested subject. This text offers a wide-ranging interdisciplinary discussion of the implications of the TEF on the UK’s fast-moving policy environment, and increasingly neoliberal higher education sector.