Dynamic teacher community
The aims of this project were 1. to get better insights in the experienced needs and barriers of teachers with respect to information provision and exchange; and 2. to create a platform that would strengthen the Science Faculty teachers’ community by visualizing ongoing initiatives, facilitating exchange of good practices, scholarly insights and calls for collaboration across the different departments. This project resulted in an advice report documenting the needs and barriers, and teacher experiences from pilot experiments, with respect to information provision, exchange of good practices and dissemination of educational projects among the teaching staff at the Faculty of Science. With these results, we have outlined what means of communication and type of exchange, and their necessary requirements, would be desirable for creating and maintaining a vivid teacher community, and we have formulated an action plan on how to structurally embed the effective approaches from our pilots and make them available to the whole teacher community.
Background
Teachers feel lost in the jungle of different information resources (e.g. education domain of intranet, departmental MS Teams environments). They have needs for both formal and informal information, and timely (dynamic) and structural information. Several of such needs are currently covered by ongoing initiatives, like the intranet, but are often not experienced as structured and interactive, or are even not found by teachers. This problem is even more pronounced among new teachers and hampers the ‘onboarding’ of our growing teaching staff. It is currently not clear what barriers prevent teachers from gaining access to relevant information and exchanging insights within the teacher community. Research on so-called Communities of Practice (CoPs), a network of individuals who share experience and passion and may share news of professional interest, and learn together, would be a very effective approach to facilitate exchange and, subsequently, strengthen the teacher community. Integrating the initiatives and activities that already take place within our teacher community in a CoP would be a very effective approach to facilitate exchange and, subsequently, strengthen the teacher community.
Project and aims
This project aimed to enhance Science Faculty teachers’ community by improving information access and collaboration. To this end, we investigated what needs and barriers are experienced by teachers throughout the faculty with respect to getting access to information, getting connected to ongoing educational initiatives, and exchanging information within the teacher community. The second aim was to create a platform that would strengthen the Science Faculty teachers’ community by visualizing ongoing initiatives, facilitating exchange of good practices, scholarly insights and calls for collaboration across the different departments. To this end, we investigated what the requirements for such a platform would be. Next, based on the outcome of this investigation we ran several pilots to experiment with different initiatives that support both structural and dynamic information exchange within the teacher community and evaluate how these initiatives were experienced by a representative teacher test panel.
Results
Key insights and yields from this project are:
- Overall, teachers experience poor information provision. The most frequently mentioned problems are limited overview of what information can be found where and that it is often also not clear what they should know (“blind spots”).
- The perceived problems with information provision are experienced most strongly by new employees, international staff, international staff and teaching staff with a small teaching assignment.
- There is a great need for just-in-time information, which is best facilitated by a combination of one central point for relevant information (‘wegwijzer‘) and accessible, personal contact with more experienced colleagues (‘buddy’).
- During the onboarding process, new employees feel overloaded with information that is not yet relevant. This is experienced as overwhelming and not relevant. At the time when teachers do need the information, they have already forgotten it and cannot find it again.
- Good practices that came up in focus groups that align well with the above experiences mentioned experiences are:
- buddy for new teachers (dept of Information and Computing Sciences, dept of Pharmaceutical Sciences),
- a comprehensive manual for lecturers (dept Biology),
- a checklist for coordinators (dept Biology/Bachelor MBLS),
- a standard course guide format (dept Chemistry).
- In addition, within this project the Quick Starter for teachers (Log in with Solis ID) has been developed which serves as a central point for information provision. This guide is also available in Dutch: Wegwijzer Docenten(Log in with Solis ID)
- Within this project, the buddy system for teachers was evaluated and manuals were developed for supervisors and buddies to support departments in setting up and effective buddy system.
- Many teachers have a greater need for exchange with colleagues. Main barriers experienced by teaching staff are a lack of time, conflicting teaching responsibilities in schedules and unfamiliarity with the possibilities. With the Quick Starter for teachers we have tried to make the opportunities for exchange more visible.
- Teachers indicate that their interest in exchange lies mainly at departmental and faculty level, preferably through physical or hybrid meetings scheduled outside teaching times. Preferably there are specific themes associated with these meetings. There is less interest in an online platform and functionalities that does interest teaching staff (e.g. profiles of colleagues) are already covered by the intranet. Good practices that align with these interests are:
- departmental educational meetings (dept Biology, dept Pharmacy)
- journal club (dept of Information and Computing Sciences).
- A faculty education day could fulfill the need for more exchange at the faculty level.
Read further
- Good practice: Buddy’s voor startende docenten
- Wegwijzer voor docenten (faculteit Betawetenschappen)
- Quick Starter for teachers (faculty of Science)
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