JOELLE​PETERS

Attributes Nine, Ten and Eleven

 

• Monitor developments and trends in tertiary education, technology and pracitce, anticipate changes and adapt teaching and learning accordingly

• Foster communities of practice, identifying and sharing good practices across the organisation and beyond 

• Foster collaboration and collegiality in order to catalyse team solutions to enhance learning.

 

As a lecturer I help foster communities of practice and monitor developments and trends in tertiary education by attending regular meetings and discussions with my colleagues. I meet regularly with my office group (O BLock), self managing team (Engineering Technologies), my school (Architecture, Building and Engineering) as well as with colleagues and other practitioners I meet through professional development opportunities (such as my Te Reo classes). We take these meetings and discussions as opportunities to discuss things like how our various courses are running, at risk students who may need more support, new methods of teaching and any new projects or changes happening in the wider institution. I recently attended the TERNZ conference in Auckland and had the opportunity to present as well as meet other tertiary educators and attend their seminars about their experiences and insights as educators. After each session we would return to 'home groups' and discuss what we had heard and how it could be applicable to our institutes or what had interested us about it.

 

During my APL process I also participated in group discussions and meetings where we all brought something we had been working on and shared the ideas behind our work. During these meetings I discussed my decision to use an online portfolio by creating a website and demonstrated the working skeleton of my portfolio to my colleagues. I discussed how I preferred this method as it was more sustainable and adaptable than a traditional paper portfolio which requires printing and posting several copies of large documents, including all of our evidence. I am told by Catherine Robinson (our facilitator) that since then others involved in the meetings taken up the idea and have also created online portfolios to use for their APL process. 

 

I also foster collaboration and collegiality within teams I'm involved in by attending the previously outlined meetings, various social functions, through more casual chats in the staff room, and discussion and combined projects. I have recently coordinated a paper which was run in modules with different staff teaching separate sections. I organised meetings during the planning phase of the course to discuss who would teach when and what material they would cover. This was done because none of our timetables/knowledge bases allowed for us to teach an entire stream on our own, so the module system allowed us to share the load in a flexible manner.