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What Teaching Taught Me: How I Learned to See Teaching Differently

A story about becoming a scholar of teaching and learning, and an invitation to reflect on your own teaching journey.

Date: Thursday, June 25
Time: 11:00am - 12:00pm
Location: Kinesiology and Health Studies, Room 104

After more than a decade as a clinical researcher, Dr. Justin Bilszta joined a medical education department and discovered that teaching and learning were far more intellectually complex than he had imagined. Content delivery became learning design. Individual teaching became collaboration. What initially appeared straightforward deepened through evidence, reflection, failure, and listening. Having taught both individual learners and cohorts of more than 1,400 students, and collaborated with colleagues across continents, Dr. Bilszta came to view rigorous, evidence-informed teaching as work requiring the same intellectual rigour as research.

In this lecture, he reflects on how listening to students reshaped curriculum design, why large or remote teaching environments do not need to sacrifice connection, what research on learning revealed about his own teaching practice, and how international collaboration deepened his understanding of relationships, humility, and learning.

Dr. Justin Bilszta is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Medical Education at Melbourne Medical School, University of Melbourne, where he serves as Director of Custom and Graduate Programs and Course Convenor of the Master of Clinical Education. With more than 20 years of experience in higher education, his work focuses on curriculum design, faculty development, research education, and evidence-informed teaching in health professions education. He is Co-Chair of the Medical Deans of Australia and New Zealand Research Educator Network (REN) and has published and presented internationally on educational scholarship, reflective practice, curriculum design, and international collaboration in teaching and learning.