Academic Staff Professional Development

This website contains info and support material related to recent seminars, workshops and lunch hour discussions.

Academic staff professional development philosophy

Student throughput is closely linked to learning, assessment and feedback/feedforward practices. To ensure throughput, academic staff with the ability to provide the needed learning and assessment practices which will ensure student success, is an imperative. Therefore, the role of academic staff has changed from ‘lecturing’ in order to transfer knowledge and skills to mediating and facilitating learning with a view to supporting knowledge retrieval, mastering of skills, development of attitudes and selection of values. This role will be cultivated in our academic staff development endeavours by building competence in enhancing:

• the retrieval of theoretical/practical ; occupational and general knowledge;

• training of the mind for conceptual grasp; critical thinking; analytical ability; problem solving ability, etc.

• building capacity for autonomous learning through maturity and independence of thought; potential for knowledge creation and application; and

• personal development towards the ‘educated person’, development in creative, affective and moral domains and the skills for citizenship/employment.

The question is who should learn, and who should be supported? From an academic staff support perspective the emphasis will be on the academic staff to do the learning and the academic staff professional development practitioners to provide the support to mediate and facilitate the learning. Academic staff in turn will be enabled to provide the opportunities for students to learn via the learning, assessment and feedback/feedforward support/opportunities they provide.

Based on this philosophy I will strive for the provision of support to enable staff to provide quality learning, assessment and feedback/feedforward opportunities that will support the learning and learning needs of their students and research skills to interrogate own practice in order to improve their own practice and professional status.

Areas of Engagement

• Individual staff support

• New lecturer seminar

• Lunch hour seminars

• Workshops on specific topics

• Assessor training

• PGCHE

• Student feedback and follow-up

• Faculty/departmental interventions

• Support with learning programme development

• Support with programme/module self-evaluation and HEQC audits

• Webpage inputs