Effective CPD Implementation in Research Universities
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
1 like•467 views
An exploration of some considerations involved in implementing CPD for learning and teaching in a research intensive university.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Featured
Featured (20)
Effective CPD Implementation in Research Universities
- 1. How can CPD for learning and teaching be implemented effectively in a research- intensive university? Dr Jennie Osborn 29 April 2014 1
- 2. 2
- 3. 3
- 4. 4
- 5. 5
- 6. 6
- 7. 7
- 8. 8
- 9. 9 “to be a teacher is my greatest work of art”, Beuys, 1969
- 10. 10 Wordle of University Plan 2009-19, University of York.
- 11. 11
- 12. 12 Humboldtain University: both teaching and research are not yet completely solved problems.
- 13. 13
- 14. 14 “Time to develop my career? That’s a fantasy!”
- 15. 15 A big development buffet, courses are all there, you just go and help yourself’
- 16. 16
- 17. 17
- 18. 18
- 19. 19
- 20. 20
Editor's Notes
- Overview of presentation: What is CPD? – What is valued as CPD? Chatting and sharing Researching Taking on roles Curriculum development Training What it might be: Courses and conferences Professional interactions Networking Consulting experts Personal research Learning by doing Learning by teaching. (Becher, 1996.)
- Continuing: “systematic, on-going, self-directed learning. It is an approach or process which should be a normal part of how you plan and manage your whole working life” (IPD, 1997) Career wide. Not just for those starting out continuous professional development. Promote ideologies which exalt continuous learning.
- Professional: prioritising the professional in CPD – professional someone with adequate knowledge base, takes responsibility and is in return offered some autonomy. Those professionals can be found across Universities, not only in academic departments, but also in research centres, institutes and units, libraries, colleges, and support services. Need to consider all staff who contribute to the student experience in order to build a holistic CPD learning and teaching. programme In contrast with compliance to competency-based requirements – educational development should be emancipatory not domesticating. Resist deficit model . . . Model of a professional in higher education should be ‘transformative’ professional who analyses and critiques the taken for granted and encourages change and innovation in practice and theory.
- Development: Developer’s role should be primarily about collaboration – CPD not done by one group of staff to another. Avoid building a colonising force. MacDonald (2003) suggested that university managers generally expect academic development units to act as agents for organisational change, viewed by academics as teaching and learning foot soldiers. Criticality is critical. Need instead to open up space for debate. Create communities of practice – a critical learning communities. Taking a constructivist approach to learning and role social interactions in the construction of values and identity.
- Community building, communities of practice. Open working environment. Provision informal spaces (physical, temporal and intellectual) for discussion. Harness the potential power of CHAT! Dialogue and critical conversations. Provide space for development professional communities Provide opportunities for talking, listening and sharing ideas Team learning skills Dundee big breakfast.
- Also need more formal approaches to inquiry and teaching. Although discussion can discuss teaching – how student learning is made possible (Ramsden, 1992, p. 5) in individual contexts, scholarly teaching and CPD should make transparent how we have made learning possible How do we engage staff in CPD to facilitate this scholarly approach to teaching practice? Cannot simply be a case of feeding information, more than one-dimensional, flat representation of knowledge transmission. Need to ensure that academics we are working with identify with our aims, and that CPD provision identifies with theirs.
- Need to recognise the individual. One size doesn’t fit all. Respect diversity, multicultural and global mindsets. Need to take care that our allegiance to evidence based-practice (academics respect evidence – right?) but blanket implementation – this works doesn’t work. Need to align provision with imperatives of those working with. Delicate balance – domesticating and emancipatory CPD. Deal with suspicion – taint of managerialism. Need to handle our academics, which is after all, where the magic happens for the student, with care. Need to acknowledge that . . . .
- Teaching is more than just a set of competencies. Teaching is an art, which represents a diverse range of human activity which stems from human agency and creation. It is imaginative, partly constituted of skills which can be acquired, but carrying many more significances than that. CPD therefore needs to speak to the experience of academics as teachers and researchers, whilst simultaneously aligning with the institutional context and strategic imperatives.
- Research. (Wordle from University Plan, 2009-19) Fortunately at a research intensive institution these dual imperatives are largely aligned. Much of the magic comes from research. One of key characteristics and strengths of research-intensive universities is research-led teaching. Student experience enriched by research carried out by academic and research staff. “Research intensive universities emphasise the symbiotic relationship between teaching, student learning and research as a key characteristic of the education they offer. But what the relationship is precisely is not always clearly articulated. One role of a CPD programme should be facilitate an exploration of how teaching, learning and research can be brought together to promote an educational experience for students that is genuinely research informed.
- Strongest identification and allegiance is at discipline level. Therefore the exploration of research-based teaching should have an obvious disciplinary focus, enable articulation of not only generic practices, but the practices, culture and sensibilities of academic tribes and territories at discipline level. Academics demonstrate twin assumptions their discipline is the only way to interpret the world and that their discipline cannot help them make sense of teaching. Moving away from generic CPD offering, ethnographic embedding development in the tribe help academics to articulate and develop the disciplinary specificity of their teaching practices, to explore the taken-for-granted elements and tacit understanding of signature pedagogies and the threshold concepts of their disciplines. So can see teaching and learning through the lens of their discipline.
- SoTL: scholarship of teaching unity not only practice of teaching and learning and research, but overall unity of teaching and research, which is disciplinary as well as generic. Humboldtian – Hegelian tradition, not only, but also. Synthesis. Need to convince them that teaching is a problem which has not yet been solved, and that it is a researchable problem which can be informed by experience and knowledge formed by their discipline. “Good teaching, like good research, is multi-dimensional, difficult and contextual’ (Healey, 2000, p. 183) Engage with literature – ‘HE teachers need to ‘bring to their teaching activities the same critical, doubting and creative attitude which they birng habitually to their research activities’ (Elton, 1987, 50) This is role of CPD.
- Hierarchy and status teaching vs research. Research top tier. Status of Learning and Teaching: not seen as a real discipline or a researchable area. Less importance placed upon it, educational developers not seen as real academics. (Institutions and senior management raising status of learning and teaching). The link between research and teaching crucial to research intensive universities – research more highly valued, academic developers at research-intensive universities need to contribute to the development of the concept itself of research-intensive teaching. Need to provide an opportunity to document and recognise key achievements in a way which could be used for promotion on the basis of leadership in teaching/supporting learning. Not only in probation and induction (first 5 years), but also in appraisal and career development throughout academic career.
- So, this is all very well, but how? If we build it will they come? And if not, what might be the barriers? Quote from Julie Hall, (2009) “Time to develop my career? That’s a fantasy!’ UK professional standards framework and ethical staff and educational development, in Laycock, M. and Shrives, L., (eds) Embedding CPD in Higher Education, SEDA Paper 123, London, SEDA, pp. 37-45, p. 39. Need to note pressures research at a research intensive university will have an increased impact upon ability of staff to engage. Time! Not take up too much time.
- “a big development buffet, courses are all there, you just go and help yourself” (Crawford, 2010, 195) Busy busy busy – too big won’t help themselves. Half day workshops, lunchtime workshops, drop-in sesssions, one-to-one support (stuff based in their department?) Buffet – bite-sized pieces, time pressures shouldn’t necessitate delivery of those which lend themselves to bit-sized delivery, not restricted to: Resource-based (boning up) – tips and tricks, pragmatic and practical. Training – updating themes such as disability legislation; software training; quality frameworks; risk assessment – piecemeal, one-off ‘interventions’ such as workshops
- From small, single, separate tactics to large, complex, integrated, aligned, multiple tactics. A strategy. Individual components, aligned with whole to create a bigger picture. Not focussed on improving . . . But transforming practice, and creating innovation. Breaking from apostolic succession, teaching how one has been taught, tinkering at the edges. Transformative.
- But fostering critical reflection and inquiry. Present a theoretical and conceptual position from which to view teaching its development. Those positions have been predominantly social science based, no reason why can’t use disciplinary practice to cut through ‘wet woolly wall’ educational research jargon, articulate new paradigms and methodologies authentic to disciplinary contexts. CPD translate alien language.
- CPD – scaffold development as staff move through process developing their teaching and learning practice. Collect and read literature; Investigate own teaching and student learning; Relate discipline knowledge to teaching and learning literature and own teaching and student learning; Communicate results of own work.