Young Interfaculty Lunch on Teaching

On Monday 13th March, the YAL organized an interfaculty lunch meeting together with the Leiden Teacher Academy (LTA) about teaching.

 More than twenty young researchers and teachers gathered and discussed what ‘good’ teaching is, and what we can do to improve teaching. Furthermore, there was a discussion on interdisciplinary teaching, mainly on the focus of what this actually entails.

The main takeaways from the meeting include: that teachers should visit each other’s courses more often to provide peer feedback (and that time for this should become available); that teachers should increase the interactivity of students in the classroom; and that more/better professional training of teachers should be provided (perhaps in the form of additional teacher training). Teaching can be called interdisciplinary if the teachers are from different disciplines, or at least the methods and ideas of different disciplines are used. Teaching from one discipline to a student population of another discipline is not considered interdisciplinary teaching.

In the next months, the YAL and LTA will continue working together on this topic. This will include a workshop during LTA Education Festival in May this year.