Abstract:

Teaching at university level has always played a marginal role compared to research, in which the university’s focus is more concentrated. Recent trends in higher education have increased the attention given to the quality of the teaching offered in higher education. Quality teaching has become an issue of importance for a twofold reason. The landscape of higher education has been facing continuous changes: increased international competition, increasing social and geographical diversity of the student body, calling for new teaching methods, introduction of information technologies that are modifying continuously the nature of interactions between students and professors. Furthermore, it is necessary to counteract the high drop-out rate from university, especially among first-year students. In this context, the “Mentors for Teaching” project was launched in 2022 at the University of Pisa. The project involved the voluntary participation of lecturers teaching on the various degree courses of the University of Pisa. The “Mentors for Teaching” project was set up primarily with the aim of remedying the lack of systemic actions to support university professors in their role as teachers. In fact, the academic organisation does not provide adequate teaching training, so that most lecturers teach without having the necessary teaching skills and without the possibility of receiving specific support. The teacher is therefore in a lonely situation in front of his or her class and does not have the tools to understand, interpret and evaluate his or her own performance.
The Pisan experience brought out the need for a peer-to-peer comparison capable of highlighting the weaknesses that still run through the teaching methodologies; sometimes it was explicitly stated by the participants that „nobody taught them how to teach what they knew.“ The assumption of this statement, which may appear disarming but which in fact declares the truth, namely that knowing a discipline even in great depth is not the same as knowing how to teach it, where teaching is understood as the ability not to transmit notions, rather than to deliver knowledge in such a way that it becomes skills, hence transferable and spendable actions. The experimentation also brought to light another aspect that was perhaps not sufficiently evaluated: even while the role of mentor is being carried out, the teacher learns because from observing and reflecting on the methods implemented by his/her colleagues, he/she also revisits his/her approach to teaching. This is, therefore, metacognition, the highest level of thinking that human beings can achieve.
Our paper aims at describing the “Mentors for teaching” project of the University of Pisa by disseminating the results achieved. This can lead to create a network between various universities within and outside Europe that can share values and best practices to increase as well as innovate the quality of teaching in higher education.

References:
[1] Felisatti, E., Rivetta, M. S., & Bonelli, R. (2022). Formación de mentores: El proyecto “Mentoring Polito Project” dirigido al profesorado universitario. Rol, competencias y prácticas formativas. In: Revista Electrónica Interuniversitaria de Formación del Profesorado, 25(3), 191-205. https://doi.org/10.6018/reifop.532581.
[2] Johnson, W. B. (2015). On being a mentor: A guide for higher education faculty. Routledge

Keywords:

Mentoring, University teaching, Faculty Development, Quality Teaching.