Reflections from the Advance HE Teaching and Learning Conference 2026

7 July 2026

At the end of June, I attended the Advance HE Teaching and Learning Conference in Sheffield with the support of SBBS Scholarship Funding. The theme this year is “Success by Design: The Future of Learning Now”, with almost 300 workshops and sessions exploring how higher education can better support student success. It was the first time I presented at a large national Teaching and Learning conference, and I particularly looked forward to hearing how colleagues responded to some of the same questions I had been thinking about: how we develop students’ critical thinking, how we prepare them for an AI-rich world, and what employability should now mean in higher education. 

Together with Dr Lilah Glazer, we presented our work on discipline-embedded critical thinking appraisal. Our approach aims to make critical thinking more explicit for students by drawing on the Watson-Glaser critical thinking domains and translating them into activities embedded in disciplinary teaching for biology and biomedical sciences programmes. A key challenge is that we often expect university students to “think critically”, yet the processes involved in critical thinking can remain largely implicit. By making skills such as recognising assumptions, drawing appropriate inferences, interpreting information and evaluating arguments more visible, we hope to give students a clearer framework for approaching complex questions and evidence, and be able to apply those skills. The presentation generated some valuable conversations with colleagues from a range of disciplines. Although critical thinking may look different across subject areas, these discussions reinforced for me that it is important to learn from how different disciplines approach this shared educational challenge and make the underlying processes more visible

What I enjoyed most about the conference was how many of the sessions connected with this wider question of what students will need in the future. I attended talks on employability, authentic assessment, AI and digital literacy, and development of professional skills. These discussions made me reflect on how closely critical thinking, AI literacy and employability are now linked. The ability to use AI tools is clearly becoming important, but simply knowing how to generate an answer is not enough. Students also need to be able to question that answer, judge the quality of the evidence behind it, recognise what may be missing and decide whether the conclusion is justified. 

I came away from the conference with a stronger sense that this is where critical thinking education has an important role to play. As AI makes it easier to produce information and answers, perhaps one of our most important responsibilities as educators is to help students become better at judging them. 

For me, that was the most valuable part of the conference: not just sharing our work, but coming home with a clearer idea of why it matters and where I would like to take it next.

 Dr Yuan Zhao

Lecturer in Medical Genetics

Medical Genetics