Teaching Culture Perception: Documenting and Transforming Institutional Teaching Cultures

Abstract

An institutional culture that values teaching is likely to lead to improved student learning. The main focus of this study was to determine faculty, graduate and undergraduate students’ perception of the teaching culture at their institution and identify indicators of that teaching culture. Themes included support for teaching development; support for best practices, innovative practices and specific effective behaviours; recognition of teaching; infrastructure; evaluation of teaching and implementing the student feedback received from teaching evaluations. The study contributes to a larger project examining the quality of institutional teaching culture.

Keywords

• quality
• teaching culture
• indicators
• quality enhancement
• qualitative
• focus groups