Coralie McCormack started the discussion group Talking About Teaching and Learning (TATAL) with Robert Kennelly when they decided to re-establish the HERDSA ACT Branch in 2008. Their aim was to encourage greater collaborative scholarship in teaching and learning amongst the universities of the region.

Coralie and Robert introduced TATALs to begin the HERDSA ACT Branch events to help people reflect on their teaching, a goal they had ever since Robert received his HERDSA Fellowship in 2003. They wanted other people to experience the benefits of collaborative reflection that Robert had discovered when he was mentored by Coralie. They brought wine and cheese and encouraged participants to talk about teaching and learning. Slowly the TATALs took on a life of their own with HERDSA providing support by covering the catering costs.

Initially TATAL was promoted as helping people prepare for their promotion & grant applications. The program began in September 2008 with fourteen colleagues from three Canberra universities meeting for one and a half hours. The idea was for a collaborative group to work together over a year to produce a teaching philosophy statement and a teaching portfolio. Soon it became evident that TATAL was about what could be learned by discussing your own teaching and learning with others. Invariably the discussion would focus on what went wrong, not what went right, which would not be the substance of any promotion application.

Coralie and Robert had conceived TATAL as a pathway to a HERDSA Fellowship. They quickly learned that would not be the case when none of the first TATAL participants went on to complete a Fellowship.

The rewards for participating in a TATAL are intrinsic rather than something extrinsic like promotions or fellowships. This is about what can they learn themselves about their own teaching and learning. Robert Kennelly

A decision of the first TATAL group in 2008 was to produce a HERDSA Guide on using stories in teaching. Robert Kennelly says that once the teaching philosophy was out of the way, he and Coralie would invite people to tell stories. This activity becomes the heart of TATAL. Robert thought the guide would have a broader application than TATAL because stories are a good way to help a university teacher think about, and reflect on, their teaching and learning.

The success of the first TATAL prompted Robert and Corallie to continue starting new TATALs. After 4 years of running TATALs at the ACT Branch Coralie McCormack and Robert Kennelly had managed to perfect the process of creating a safe collaborative environment for people to meet regularly and explore their own teaching and learning. This was a concept Robert and Coralie thought could be adapted to become a series of meetings throughout a HERDSA conference.

They put the proposal to the Gold Coast Conference Organising Committee for a session to be run every day following a pre-conference workshop. The Conference Organising Committee initially found the proposal too complicated to organise until an intervention by Roger Landbeck reassured organisers that a HERDSA TATAL was a good idea. It was to run face-to-face for eight hours during the conference, and then moved onto Skype after the conference closed.

Robert Kennelly acknowledges that TATAL is not for everyone and after a full room in the pre-conference workshop, only three people remained in the TATAL at the end of the conference.

By 2016 TATAL workshops had been held at the 6 previous conferences to provide a space for people from different locations to reflect on their teaching and learning. The TATAL team had grown to include Stuart Schonell, John Gilchrist, Maria Northcote, Gesa Ruge, and Geoff Treloar. The TATAL team were looking for an opportunity to spread the word about TATAL further while ensuring consistency across workshops.Stuart Schonell had been a facilitator of three HERDSA TATAL workshops and took the lead on producing a TATAL Teaching Philosophy Workbook that was launched at the Perth conference.. Robert Kennelly sees the first 12 months of a TATAL as relatively process driven and the idea of the TATAL workbook was to take someone through the first year of that process to get a teaching philosophy statement.

In 2017, Coralie McCormack and Robert Kennelly began a research project with Dieter Schonwetter and Gesa Ruge on the value of teaching philosophies for academics and their institutions. They interviewed HERDSA fellows and Canadian 3M National Teaching Fellow, asking them to reflect on the development of their teaching philosophy and its connection to academic, career, and institutional experiences. While visiting Australia and New Zealand in 2019 Coralie McCormack and Robert Kennelly invited Dieter Schonwetter to be part of the team that started TATALs in Auckland and at Avondale University. While visiting Australia Dieter recorded a video of his teaching philosophy framework which became part of the first year of the TATAL process. 

2020 was to be the 10th anniversary of TATAL held at a HERDSA Conference when CoVid-19 intervened and the conference was postponed. In 2021, the pandemic caused yet another conference cancellation and Robert Kennelly decided to take the 10th HERDSA TATAL solely online. This became the third TATAL format, adding to the original face-to-face local meetings and hybrid face-to-face conference meetings followed by online discussions with particpants from around the world.