scholarly journals TLABs: A Teaching and Learning Community of Practice – What is it, Does It Work and Tips for Doing One of Your Own

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (5) ◽  
pp. 136-147
Author(s):  
Shelley Beatty ◽  
◽  
Kim Clark ◽  
Jo Lines ◽  
Sally-Anne Doherty ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Learning Community ◽  
Community Of Practice ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Academic Staff ◽  
Academic Careers ◽  
Teaching Skills ◽  
Western Australian ◽  
Successful Teaching

Communities of Practice are an increasingly common tool used to support novice academics in higher education settings. Initiated in 2015 at a Western Australian University, TLABs is an acronym for ‘Teaching and Learning for Level A and B’ academic staff and was designed to build a community of practice to mentor junior academics; help them develop their teaching skills; and enhance academic careers. The paper describes the nature of TLABs; how it is experienced from the perspective of participants and provides recommendations for implementing a successful teaching and learning community of practice in a higher education setting.

scholarly journals Creating, Sustaining and Realising the Value of a Faculty-wide Community of Teaching Practice

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (03) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Honey ◽  
Trudi Aspden ◽  
Anuj Bhargava ◽  
Louise Carrucan-Wood ◽  
Angela Tsai ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Learning Community ◽  
Community Of Practice ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Teaching Practice ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Shared Interest ◽  
Wide Community

Communities of practice are frequently described and discussed in academic literature and within education. They are depicted as groups of people with a shared interest coming together and in a higher education setting this shared interest relates to the practice of teaching and learning. The establishment of a cross-discipline faculty-wide community of practice to support educators in higher education is novel. This paper describes the establishment of a community of practice within one university faculty uniting educators across multiple disciplines within the Faculty. Data spanning thirty months since the inception of a teaching and learning community are presented. The findings illustrate a growing community of practice, along with perceived benefits and future directions. The creation of an interprofessional faculty-wide community of practice illustrates how educators can be drawn together because of their common passion for teaching and learning and a mutual concern of how to maximise student learning.

scholarly journals Treating students as partners - Is it so simple? An empirical investigation of student partnership in a business education context

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (5) ◽  
pp. 38-51
Author(s):  
Zsuzsanna Tóth ◽  
Bálint Bedzsula
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Business Education ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Empirical Investigation ◽  
Academic Staff ◽  
Online Application ◽  
Homogeneous Groups ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
The Right ◽  
Successful Teaching

The challenges assigned by the ‘student as partner’ movement have redrawn the ways how students and academic staff actively collaborate for the sake of successful teaching and learning. To gain competitive advantage, higher education institutions should understand what student partnership means in their context and decide how to talk about and act upon it. The primary purpose of this paper is to reveal how student partnership is interpreted by our students and lecturers who took part in an online brainstorming session and in an online application of the Q organizing technique to rank the concepts resulting from the previous brainstorming session. The results have been utilized to identify the main similarities and differences between students’ and lecturers’ interpretations. Neither students, nor lecturers could be treated as homogeneous groups, which also raises challenges to find the right mix of institutional answers to the conceptualization of student partnership.

scholarly journals Enabling learning through technology: some institutional imperatives

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Audrey McCartan ◽  
Barbara Watson ◽  
Janet Lewins ◽  
Margaret Hodgson
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Staff Development ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Academic Staff ◽  
Educational Practice ◽  
Learning Technology ◽  
Higher Education Funding ◽  
Institutional Practice ◽  
Effective Use ◽  
Technology Programme

The imminent completion of many Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP) projects means that a considerable number of courseware deliverables will soon be available to Higher-Education (HE) institutions. The Higher Education Funding Council's intention in funding the Programme (HEFCE Circulars, 8/92, 13/93) was to ensure their integration into academic curricula by providing institutions with an opportunity to review their 'teaching and learning culture' with regard to the embedding of learning technology within their institutional practice. Two recent workshops, conducted with a representative sample of newly appointed academic staff in connection with the evaluation of materials to be included in a staff development pack whose purpose is to encourage the use of IT in teaching and learning (TLTP Project 7), strongly suggested that the availability of courseware alone was insufficient to ensure its integration into educational practice. The establishment of enabling mechanisms at the institutional level, as well as within departments, was crucial to ensure the effective use of learning technology.DOI:10.1080/0968776950030115

scholarly journals A Critical Review of the Use of Wenger's Community of Practice (CoP) Theoretical Framework in Online and Blended Learning Research, 2000-2014

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sedef Uzuner Smith ◽  
Suzanne Hayes ◽  
Peter Shea
Keyword(s):  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Blended Learning ◽  
Community Of Practice ◽  
Online Teaching ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Online Teaching And Learning ◽  
Integrative Research

After presenting a brief overview of the key elements that underpin Etienne Wenger’s communities of practice (CoP) theoretical framework, one of the most widely cited and influential conceptions of social learning, this paper reviews extant empirical work grounded in this framework to investigate online/blended learning in higher education and in professional development. The review is based on integrative research approaches, using quantitative and qualitative analysis, and includes CoP oriented research articles published between 2000 and 2014. Findings are presented under three questions: Which research studies within the online/blended learning literature made central use of the CoP framework? Among those studies identified, which ones established strong linkages between the CoP framework and their findings? Within this last group of identified studies, what do the patterns in their use of the CoP framework suggest as opportunities for future research in online teaching and learning?

scholarly journals Contextually responsive and knowledge-focused teaching: disrupting the notion of ‘best practices’

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (SI) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ceclia Jacobs ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Staff Development ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Academic Staff ◽  
Knowledge Bases ◽  
Good Teaching ◽  
Approach To Teaching ◽  
Conceptual Paper ◽  
Higher Education Teaching

The notion that universal ‘best practices’ underpin higher education teaching is problematic. Although there is general agreement in the literature that good teaching is not decontextualised but rather that it is responsive to the context in which it occurs, generic views of teaching and learning continue to inform practices at universities in South Africa. This conceptual paper considers why a decontextualised approach to higher education teaching prevails and interrogates factors influencing this view, such as: the knowledge bases informing this approach to teaching, the factors from within the higher education sector that shape this approach to teaching, as well as the practices and Discourses prevalent in the field of academic development. The paper argues that teaching needs to be both contextually responsive and knowledge- focused. Disrupting ‘best practices’ approaches require new ways of undertaking academic staff development, which are incumbent on the understandings that academic developers bring to the enterprise.

Professional community and student engagement in higher education: rethinking the contributions of professional staff

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaw Owusu-Agyeman ◽  
Enna Moroeroe
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Student Engagement ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Academic Staff ◽  
Professional Community ◽  
Professional Staff ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Service Culture ◽  
The University

PurposeScholarly studies on student engagement are mostly focused on the perceptions of students and academic staff of higher education institutions (HEIs) with a few studies concentrating on the perspectives of professional staff. To address this knowledge gap, this paper aims to examine how professional staff who are members of a professional community perceive their contributions to enhancing student engagement in a university.Design/methodology/approachData for the current study were gathered using semi-structured face-to-face interviews among 41 professional staff who were purposively sampled from a public university in South Africa. The data gathered were analysed using thematic analysis that involved a process of identifying, analysing, organising, describing and reporting the themes that emerged from the data set.FindingsAn analysis of the narrative data revealed that when professional staff provide students with prompt feedback, support the development of their social and cultural capital and provide professional services in the area of teaching and learning, they foster student engagement in the university. However, the results showed that poor communication flow and delays in addressing students’ concerns could lead to student disengagement. The study further argues that through continuous interaction and shared norms and values among members of a professional community, a service culture can be developed to address possible professional knowledge and skills gaps that constrain quality service delivery.Originality/valueThe current paper contributes to the scholarly discourse on student engagement and professional community by showing that a service culture of engagement is developed among professional staff when they share ideas, collaborate and build competencies to enhance student engagement. Furthermore, the collaboration between professional staff and academics is important to addressing the academic issues that confront students in the university.

A Model to Build an Intercultural Professional Learning Community in a Latin American Higher Education Network

2014 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Piergiuseppe Ellerani
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Human Resources ◽  
Learning Community ◽  
Professional Learning ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Management Tool ◽  
Video Research ◽  
Education Network

This chapter concerns the research project carried out in a confederation of Institutions of Higher Education (IHE) in seven Latin American countries. Considering the intercultural background of IHE, the universities defined a new profile of their teachers and other human resources by setting up a new model of teaching and learning based on a “learning process” and shifting the paradigm of learning to “centered teaching.” In this chapter, three characteristics of this process are presented: the first one refers to the profile built as the “product” of an Intercultural Community of Thought; the second one refers to a participatory process, called “the value cycle,” as a working model that allows one to co-construct profiles of university teachers, administrative staff, and human resources staff; the third one presents the tools and the technologies using both of them (Personal and Social Virtual Learning Environment based on Web 2.0, the Human Resource Management Tool, Video-Research, E-Portfolio). The project, carried out through action-research, defines a shared idea of the quality of teaching, a research based and supported by tools, that allows teacher self-assessment as well as the possibility to monitor the quality of universities and to develop plans for continuous improvements by building a community of learning. Qualitative and quantitative studies' data are given.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document