“Though [teachers] do assume leadership in [their] classrooms,” write the authors of More Quick Hits: Successful Strategies by Award-Winning Teachers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), “in a genuine learning community everyone teaches and everyone learns”. A good learning community is built upon a foundation of intellectual collaboration and co-operation. A primary responsibility of a university teacher is to create a classroom climate that facilitates teaching and learning. The classroom environment must be such that the teacher and students get to know one another first and foremost as human beings and as learners. Learning thrives, and teaching is most effective, in inclusive and motivating environments. Teaching is about helping to unleash the creative abilities of the learner. As one philosopher put it, teaching is about stimulating apparently ordinary people to unusual effort. For me, the central challenge of good teaching is not, contrary to popular misconception, identifying winners, but making winners out of ordinary people. It is fundamental to success in this task that the classroom honours difference and the open expression of same. Being human underscores the finite quality of knowledge, and the open-ended nature of learning. To be a good teacher, therefore, is to be a learner as well.
I believe that a good university education should inculcate, promote or foster critical and creative thinking. Good education ought to challenge students to question assumptions, knowledges, beliefs, and expectations. When students learn to think, read and write critically and creatively, they learn not only to take responsibility for what they learn, but they acquire skills that can last longer than the knowledge that they acquire. A good teacher must work with students to make learning an enriching and empowering experience. Unless, students know that their contribution has merit and will be respected, they will not begin to develop their own perspectives. Critical and creative thinking are particularly important in legal studies because the ultimate objective of teaching law is to help students acquire the habit of “thinking like a lawyer”. Thinking like a lawyer means that students will not habitually take what the teacher says at face value, but would often ask “Where’s the evidence?”. It also means that students can use and apply the knowledge that they have acquired. It is in the process of using and applying that real learning takes place.
Finally, the point of teaching, I believe, is not only to facilitate an understanding of the world, but to change it for the better. Good teaching must, therefore, go beyond interpretation of doctrines, principles, and theories, important as this is, to an imagination of alternative possibilities. In other words, teaching, like research, must ‘scratch where the society itches’.