Teaching for Success | What Lecturers Do Behind the Scenes
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SU Student Success Initiative Series: Episode Thirteen.
Recorded on Monday 19 October 2026.
Nobody becomes a lecturer by being taught how to lecture. They become an expert in their field first, and the teaching comes after. This conversation is about the layer of student success you never see: how modules get designed, how assessments get built, and what happens when a university invests in teaching the teachers.
Jacolette Kloppers hosts the thirteenth of 15 conversations on Lunch Club, joined by Dr Rhoda Meyer, Senior Lecturer and Faculty Development Lead in the Department of Health Professions Education; Dr Benita Bobo, Senior Advisor: Higher Education at the Centre for Teaching and Learning in the Division for Learning and Teaching Enhancement; and Na-ella Khan, Senior Lecturer and Module Head of Audit 378 in the School of Accountancy.
What we cover in this episode:
- From theatre to teaching: Dr Meyer started as an operating room nurse, and her teaching journey began in her first year as a nursing student through ‘see one, do one, teach one’. She describes the operating room as a high-pressure, unpredictable place where students were often left to cope alone – and what that taught her about what students actually need.
- Teaching on a busy ward: Why clinical teaching and workplace-based assessment work differently from a lecture hall, and what a supportive, empowering learning environment looks like in practice rather than on paper.
- Training the experts: As Faculty Development Lead, Dr Meyer works with clinicians and scientists who know their fields deeply but may never have been trained to teach. She explains why investing in teaching skills changes student outcomes, and describes the moment a colleague first recognises themselves as an educator.
- What peer observation gives you: Dr Bobo on why lecturers invite colleagues into their classrooms, and what reciprocal observation and feedback offer that no workshop or course can.
- Feedback as information, not a score: How lecturers can actually use what students tell them to change their teaching – and how good curriculum design contributes to student success before a lecturer even walks into the room.
- What adult learning taught her: Dr Bobo completed her Postgraduate Diploma in Higher Education cum laude while working full-time, attending classes after hours and once from a bus. She reflects on what that experience taught her about what students need from lecturers, and what it means to design for students with unreliable connectivity.
- Closing the gap to the profession: Ms Khan audited at CBIZ in Florida and at PwC before moving into academia. She names the biggest skills gaps between tertiary education and professional practice, and how her teaching tries to close them.
- AI in the auditing classroom: How AI is changing what and how she teaches and assesses, and how she brings emerging technology and data risks into the room so students are ready for the profession they are entering.
- Ethics beyond the rulebook: Ms Khan’s teaching philosophy puts professional conduct and ethical reasoning at the start of tertiary education, not the end. She explains how to teach that in a way that goes past rules and memorisation – and what she would say to a student who thinks chartered accountancy is out of reach.
Where to find support:
SU website: https://www.su.ac.za/en/students/success – or from the SU homepage, click Students, then Support, then Student Success.
Recorded on Monday 19 October 2026.
Nobody becomes a lecturer by being taught how to lecture. They become an expert in their field first, and the teaching comes after. This conversation is about the layer of student success you never see: how modules get designed, how assessments get built, and what happens when a university invests in teaching the teachers.
Jacolette Kloppers hosts the thirteenth of 15 conversations on Lunch Club, joined by Dr Rhoda Meyer, Senior Lecturer and Faculty Development Lead in the Department of Health Professions Education; Dr Benita Bobo, Senior Advisor: Higher Education at the Centre for Teaching and Learning in the Division for Learning and Teaching Enhancement; and Na-ella Khan, Senior Lecturer and Module Head of Audit 378 in the School of Accountancy.
What we cover in this episode:
- From theatre to teaching: Dr Meyer started as an operating room nurse, and her teaching journey began in her first year as a nursing student through ‘see one, do one, teach one’. She describes the operating room as a high-pressure, unpredictable place where students were often left to cope alone – and what that taught her about what students actually need.
- Teaching on a busy ward: Why clinical teaching and workplace-based assessment work differently from a lecture hall, and what a supportive, empowering learning environment looks like in practice rather than on paper.
- Training the experts: As Faculty Development Lead, Dr Meyer works with clinicians and scientists who know their fields deeply but may never have been trained to teach. She explains why investing in teaching skills changes student outcomes, and describes the moment a colleague first recognises themselves as an educator.
- What peer observation gives you: Dr Bobo on why lecturers invite colleagues into their classrooms, and what reciprocal observation and feedback offer that no workshop or course can.
- Feedback as information, not a score: How lecturers can actually use what students tell them to change their teaching – and how good curriculum design contributes to student success before a lecturer even walks into the room.
- What adult learning taught her: Dr Bobo completed her Postgraduate Diploma in Higher Education cum laude while working full-time, attending classes after hours and once from a bus. She reflects on what that experience taught her about what students need from lecturers, and what it means to design for students with unreliable connectivity.
- Closing the gap to the profession: Ms Khan audited at CBIZ in Florida and at PwC before moving into academia. She names the biggest skills gaps between tertiary education and professional practice, and how her teaching tries to close them.
- AI in the auditing classroom: How AI is changing what and how she teaches and assesses, and how she brings emerging technology and data risks into the room so students are ready for the profession they are entering.
- Ethics beyond the rulebook: Ms Khan’s teaching philosophy puts professional conduct and ethical reasoning at the start of tertiary education, not the end. She explains how to teach that in a way that goes past rules and memorisation – and what she would say to a student who thinks chartered accountancy is out of reach.
Where to find support:
SU website: https://www.su.ac.za/en/students/success – or from the SU homepage, click Students, then Support, then Student Success.
