There is a near universality to the mission of all leading schools and programmes of public health, to improve health for all through high-quality education, research, and public health practice. For most leading academic public health schools and programmes, research and teaching share space as the predominant drivers of the financial wellbeing of institutions. And yet, despite the prominence of teaching in the day-to-day realities of many academic institutions, we have paid much less attention to the role of teaching in our academic ecosystem compared with the attention we pay to research. Although leading universities foundationally exist to generate scholarship and have elaborate systems in place to value and incentivise this, teaching recognition is often an afterthought.

The COVID-19 pandemic perhaps showed us the importance of teaching for academic public health institutions as never before. Colleges and universities around the world spent the better part of the past year determining how to continue their operations. Although the full range of institutional function was affected by the pandemic, in many ways research operations were affected far less than educational programming. Faculty and staff engaged in population health science were, generally, able to adapt to different work environments, continue research collaborations virtually, and continue to produce scholarship, much of it contributing to our understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic. Continuing to fulfil our educational missions proved more challenging. As the exigencies of pandemic mitigation curtailed normal educational operations, institutions found themselves allocating scarce resources to accommodate different modalities of teaching and learning. Some institutions invested in new educational technologies and faculty and staff trainings. Some instituted extensive on-campus COVID-19 testing and tracing, all to keep educational programming going.

Given how clear COVID-19 has made the centrality of teaching to our day-to-day operations, is now a time for us to reconsider how we value teaching in the academy? Can we make long-overdue changes that better align how we value teaching with the importance it holds for academic public health? This is a critical moment to recognise and reward excellence and innovation in teaching, value differences in staff and the essential roles they play in the educational mission, and value differences in student backgrounds, lived experiences, and approaches to learning. But how do we achieve that while continuing to recognise the centrality of research scholarship to the mission of leading universities worldwide?

We suggest three steps. First, we need to rethink our appointment and promotion procedures, and how we evaluate and weight teaching in its own right compared with what has long been considered the currency of academia, research. Teaching, research, and service are core activities that should not be in conflict, but rather, complementary. Second, if we expect excellence in these core activities, we must commit to offering and supporting faculty development programmes that are specific to each. Third, we need to develop systems of incentives and rewards in teaching, much as we often do to promote university research programmes. This strategy will require new valid and reproducible approaches to assessing excellence. Unfortunately, much of our teaching evaluation continues to rest on rather outmoded student ratings, often called teaching evaluations, which we recognise are driven as much by student sentiment as they are by pedagogic success. A rethinking of educational evaluation would require honest engagement with different modalities of teaching evaluation that robustly assess pedagogy and are practicable on a large scale for academic institutions.

None of this will be easy. University cultures are embedded over centuries and teaching remains a near afterthought for many leading institutions. But COVID-19 has shown us that we simply cannot exist without teaching, elevating visibility for teaching as never before. Although we have made efforts to revise curricula,1A vision for graduate public health education., 2Sullivan LM Velez AA Galea S Graduate public health education in the post-COVID-19 era. an opportunity has been created for a creative rethink of how we value education, a spur to educational innovation, creativity, and research that could vault our institutions forward through a once-in-a-generation improvement.

We declare no competing interests.

References1.

A vision for graduate public health education.

J Public Health Manag Pract. 23: 553-5552.Sullivan LM Velez AA Galea S

Graduate public health education in the post-COVID-19 era.

Lancet Public Health. 5: e473Article InfoPublication HistoryIdentification

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(21)00113-4

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