Zaineb Henderson
University of Leeds, School of Biomedical Sciences

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.105.6a

I read the article in PN 104 ‘A celebration of education focused careers…’ by Katharine Hubbard with great interest, and downloaded and read the Physiological Society’s publication Recognising teachers in the life sciences. I noticed that on the publication’s last page ‘Top Tips’, the ‘Scholarship and Pedagogy’ section recommends only ‘Engaging with the educational literature’. Surely, to be an excellent teacher you should also be able to include in your portfolio an expert understanding of the subject you are teaching, acquired not necessarily through running a lab or getting research grants, but from extensive reading, keeping up with the current literature and writing learned textbooks on the subject being taught. The icing on the cake would be to include forays into the physical sciences or other biological disciplines to add novel insights into the chosen field, which could enliven the teaching and make the subject more relevant to students.