Javier Paricio and Idoia Fernández

The improvement capacity of the teaching practices of academic staff is necessarily limited by the quality of their perceptions of what good teaching is. Anyone that perceives teaching as explanatory will simply ignore that there are many other dimensions of good teaching, well-substantiated in research, which follow more advanced perceptions of what teaching means and of what learning means. Advancing those teaching approaches is a requirement for improvement and is a greater challenge for the institutional programmes for the academic development of the teaching staff. First of all, progressing in this challenge requires a map on which to plan, in other words, an organised and coherent framework of the key factors that characterise that good teaching and the teaching approaches in which they are inserted. This is the aim of the Teaching Professional Development of University Academic Staff Framework developed under the aegis of RED-U that is discussed here. Specifically, the approaches to teaching are discussed that give meaning to the four levels of teaching development in which this framework has organised: from approaching learning as “assimilation” of contents to learning as personal and intellectual transformation, from approaching teaching as explanatory to teaching as shared inquiry and as a research hypothesis.