Lauren Barbeau + Claudia Cornejo Happel discuss how to cultivate critical teaching behaviors on episode 559 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Being a good teacher or a good researcher is not something you’re born with. It’s something you learn. It’s something you can get better at.

Teaching doesn’t fall into nice, neat color coded boxes. We need something that represents the complexity and the messiness and the way that behaviors overlap and might fall into more than one category.

If we can’t reflect on our teaching, we can’t identify our strengths to start leveraging them, to start working on them.

If you’re looking for an entry point into critical teaching behaviors, start by reflecting on your teaching and take a look at the materials we’ve provided to help you do that.

Be kind to yourself because some semesters are harder than others.

It all comes back to caring about students, being transparent about what we’re doing in the classroom, explaining our purpose, and involving them in the conversation that is the learning together in the classroom.

While there’s no one thing that is more difficult than another, it really helps us to find a behavior that resonates with us and that we can use as a lens to think about our teaching more holistically.