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Any topic can be sensitive, and every subject area will have sensitive issues and topics that academics in higher education and further education settings will be expected to negotiate. Your ability to negotiate sensitive topics is important because the ways in which you engage and teach about sensitive topics will affect your ability to provide a positive learning experience and teaching alliance with students. In practice, you will face enormous pressure to ‘deliver’ on teaching, which will only be mirrored by similar freedoms in deciding on how and what needs to be done to get students to where they need to be. Negotiating, identifying, preparing for and delivering teaching on sensitive subjects and topics can be difficult in individual academics. This chapter, seeks to prepare you for developing a deeper understanding of some of the philosophical, theoretical, and practical-based concerns and issues related to teaching sensitive topics and subjects. This chapter begins with providing a rationale for what follows, and it explores some of the key themes, positionality, identity, transformational learning and lived experience, that are explored in greater depth in the collection. This chapter also contains a detailed breakdown of the structure and the content of this edited collection, and it concludes with some reflective comments about the implications of the collection for you as an individual and your career.

The teaching of teaching is sophisticated work although it is often viewed simplistically. To challenge simplistic approaches to teacher education, teacher educators need to actively articulate the specialist knowledge, skills, and abilities that underpin expertise in teaching and to do so through their practice with their students of teaching. In schools, teachers do not commonly experience a workplace culture whereby the explicit discussion and critique of pedagogical purpose and reasoning occurs. Therefore, it is all the more important that teacher educators bring such thinking to the surface in their teaching about teaching. Teaching is not just about the “doing” of teaching; it is also about the “why” – which leads to the development of informed and meaningful practice to enhance student learning. This chapter considers some of the principles that underpin thinking about teaching as more than transmission and therefore shapes what teacher educators need to know and are able to do.

This chapter describes pre-service teachers' teaching practices of didactic methods based on cognitive apprenticeship. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate potential of Second Life® as a space for teaching practices of pre-service teachers. The participants were 160 college students who were completing a practicum at Korea National University of Education. These students enrolled in four sections of teaching methods and educational technology, which was one of the requirements for their teaching certificate. The students were placed in groups of three to five students according to their majors. In Second Life, they practiced their teaching and participated in the evaluation of other groups' teaching. They discussed Second Life's potential, such as a space for expanding their teaching experiences and explored possibilities for using it as an environment for teaching practices. The authors believe that readers will find that Second Life can offer a valuable environment to promote pre-teachers' understanding of teaching techniques.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a reflective evaluation of the concept of the teaching commons as presented by authors Huber and Hutchings and to summarize expected outcomes from participation therein.

An appraisal of the book The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons is presented to explore the conception of the teaching commons. This review addresses the definition of the teaching commons and explores the establishment of, and participation in, the teaching commons as a means of advancing the scholarship of teaching and learning and for improving student learning.

A fundamental premise is developed suggesting that the development and utilization of a teaching commons will improve teaching and learning through the provision of a defined safeplace for conversations about teaching and learning and specific avenues to share information about teaching innovations for improving student learning. Sustained faculty engagement in a teaching commons must be supported by formalized institutional recognition and appropriate rewards.

A practical resource for faculty members involved in the scholarship of teaching and learning and for administrators developing teaching and learning centers or resources for utilization by faculty members.

This review examines the definition and establishment of a teaching commons for improving the scholarship of teaching and learning at the college and university levels.

The methods of Wiener's cybernetics are applied to analyse the fundamental properties of the teaching process, it is suggested that a mathematical model be formulated for the process. Accordingly a macroscopic law of the teaching process is obtained and discussed.

Focuses on learning outcomes in debates on teaching methods in higher education (HE). Presents six core learning outcomes and ten common teaching methods for each of the learning outcomes. Concludes that the search for any universally best teaching method is bound to be fruitless and should give way to the search for better ways of achieving particular learning outcomes. Recommends the widening of the repertoire of teaching methods available to academic staff as a means of diminishing the severity of the trade‐off between teaching effectiveness and teaching efficiency as the unit of teaching resource continues to fall.

Studies have highlighted the influence of how students perceive their learning environment in shaping their attitudes to learning, their approach to learning and ultimately with the quality of their learning outcomes. Although far less extensively researched, it appears that how academics perceive their teaching environment influences both what and how they teach. The nature and effect of these perceptions has important implications for the recruitment and retention of key personnel and for the quality of teaching, learning and campus work life in general. This paper reports the results of a study that investigates the perceptions of a group of Australian and New Zealand academics of their work environment. The aim of the study is to identify those factors perceived as negatively affecting teaching, the key themes underlying these factors and the relationships between perceptions and choice of teaching approach. The results and their implications for the quality of university teaching are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of a change in teaching structure in improving the performance of students in an introductory management accounting subject at an Australian institution. The change in structure involved a shift in the balance between lecture and tutorial face‐to‐face contact hours with increased emphasis being placed on tutorials in an attempt to enhance the benefits of cooperative learning.

The paper evaluates the success of the new approach by comparing the performance of students across the two teaching structures. Specifically, the paper compares the performance of students on exam questions covering five key management accounting topics.

The results revealed that the new teaching structure (a two‐hour workshop‐based tutorial and a one‐hour lecture each week) improved student examination results significantly in comparison to the previous “traditional” approach.

This paper demonstrates the benefits of teaching and learning conducted in a small class size setting with the use of cooperative learning. Such an approach could be adopted more widely in the teaching and learning of accounting to enhance the generic and analytic skills of students.

This paper provides empirical evidence to support largely normative claims that cooperative learning when combined with greater focus on small class teaching can improve student performance.

Schools of business administration have experienced a return to the importance of teaching effectiveness as external competitors are vying for declining student populations. To better assess teaching skills and offer suggestions for improvement areas, outlines the role of the key groups involved in assessment of faculty teaching and proposes an integrated development model for implementation.

The evaluation and continuous improvement of the quality of teaching and learning in higher education is an issue of sustained concern. While most universities are implementing systems of quality assurance, there is substantial variation in the principles underlying these systems. La Trobe University has developed and implemented a university‐wide system of quality assurance that ensures that each subject is systematically reviewed and enhanced by those teaching in the subject. While it incorporates compulsory student evaluation of teaching of each subject the result of this student evaluation is not the focus of the quality assurance system. The focus is on ensuring that those teaching the subject, reflect on and make recommendations for further improvement of the subject. Outlines the quality assurance system, the principles on which it is based and describes and analyses the processes engaged in during its development.