campus connections ISSUE 69, JULY ‘14 - QUALITY TEACHING EDITION FOR UCOL STAFF, ABOUT UCOL STAFF
ISSUE 61, FEBRUARY ‘13
HIGH PERFORMING TEACHING TEAMS
contents from the ce..........................................................................................3 learning space...................................................................................4 course design....................................................................................5 warm welcome..................................................................................6 cognition at ucol...........................................................................7 working together..................................................................... 8-9 nice numbers.................................................................................... 10 innovation fund........................................................................... 11 special interest.............................................................................. 12 new practice.................................................................................... 13 leading the way.......................................................................14-15
Excellent teaching comes in many forms 2
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from the ce FROM PAUL The High Performing Teaching Teams initiative has now been alive for over a year. Launched last year, HPTT is an ongoing organisation-wide initiative that recognises that UCOL has high performing teaching teams that can be highlighted, learnt from, further supported and built on. In fact, that’s what this publication is – it is HPTT itself. This special edition Campus Connections takes a look at the teaching excellence already in place at UCOL, and I hope the articles will serve to excite you as UCOL staff members about the opportunities available. In order to continue to effectively provide our communities with universal access to applied education and training that enhances student development and career potential, UCOL must continuously lift its game, i.e. improving learner outcomes. To ensure this is realistic and goals attainable, UCOL has committed to supporting staff as dual professionals, experts in industry and teaching. Through the HPTT initiative, we will provide ongoing mentoring, professional development, resources, goal setting, action/support plans, and enabling policies/procedures. UCOL Academic Leaders have already become well engaged with the HPTT initiative, through leaders’ retreats, meetings, communities of practice, and coaching. This year Leaders will be thinking about what a high performing teaching team looks like, where their teams are at, and how they can best engage with professional development opportunities, utilise resources and build on existing strengths. All Teaching Teams have different needs, there is no one-size fits all but we do all have the same end goal. Enjoy reading, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what we can achieve this year.
Paul
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course design Andy Hynds is a secondary school teacher, a graphic/ industrial designer and a learning disabilities specialist... Now he is combining his skills to get stuck into educational design. Andy works at UCOL in the Regional Trades and Technology Centre and his task is to produce a delivery and assessment model that integrates both theory and practical skills aimed at vocational trade learners. The project involves Andy working with Lecturers as subject matter experts, and UCOL Curriculum Academic Services, to come up with a highly interactive/scenario-based system that will accelerate learning and achievement. Andy says the work he is doing is challenging but it all comes down to empowerment. “There are more people out there who don’t fit the
mould than do. Students need delivery modes suited to the way they learn.” The Carpentry programme is the current focus, and Head of School for the Built Environment Danny Reilly says he is excited about what is being produced. “The system will be designed to allow students to enter the workforce with competence earlier, and us to monitor and measure students’ progress,” he says. “This, combined with our relationship teaching practices will greatly assist us in taking students beyond secondary school and into a vocation.” Elements written into the delivery and assessment model so far include embedding QR codes into lesson plans so that students can bring up notes easily online, writing assessments to go on an iBook so students have the option of answering questions orally, and employing on-task ‘surprise’ assessments to encourage attendance. *Andy’s one-year fixed term role is funded by the HPTT initiative.
Carpentry Lecturer Cam McIntosh (left) and Andy Hynds (right) 4
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learning space creating mobility in the classroom
Exercise and Sport Lecturers Vaughan Antonio (left) and Tim Seaholme (right) in the new space. Vaughan is also a Te Atakura Teacher, and Tim is an Impact Coach The Certificate in Exercise and Sport Performance (CESP) Teaching Team are ideas people. Last year they came up with the idea that creating a space for students to break into groups and gather together easily would allow the students to collaborate in groups more effectively. Janet Walke, a High Performing Teaching Teams (HPTT) Director, says the CESP team were investigating a different way of delivering their programme, and their deep understanding of their students’ holistic way of learning led to a conversation about the use of a ‘homeroom’ Room 7.2.07 on the Palmerston North campus was available, so consultation with other
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room users took place and HPTT and Facilities Management supported a redesign of the space. Now, one side of the room remains a traditional teaching space, and a new breakout space contains node chairs, screens and high table workspaces. Lecturer Warren Granger says the changed space has enabled the CESP teaching team to create relaxed yet dynamic classes with the ability to break into groups and gather around mobile units to brainstorm etc. “The ability to adjust the space within minutes challenges the lecturer to get away from the chalk and talk method of teaching and be more mobile around the room. As the year has progressed, students are starting to take ownership for the space, using it for study after class too.”
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warm welcome NTIP – NEW TEACHER INDUCTION PROGRAMME UCOL has always officially welcomed new teachers but now it’s happening more frequently. A new iteration of UCOL’s New Teacher Induction Programme (NTIP) has now been in place 18 months, and the main difference is that it now runs each month from February to November, instead of just twice a year. UCOL Leader for Teaching Excellence, Janet Walke, says the frequency of the programme gives new teaching staff members the best start possible, and some survival skills when stepping into a classroom as teachers for the very first time. “Teachers at UCOL are almost all dual professionals, and as such they are subject experts but could be better equipped with teaching tactics.” NTIP delivers through its modules a total induction package and introduces a new teacher to the support systems that are in place for teachers at UCOL.
Six modules cover the topics of teaching skills/ survival strategies in the classroom, UCOL structure and processes, technology in teaching, assessment and moderation processes, classroom observations, and the Student Experience Team as a resource for teachers and students. Vicki Klein, a Registered Nurse and now Lecturer on the Nurse Education Team recently went through NTIP a couple of weeks after starting work at Whanganui UCOL. “I had worked as a Clinical Lecturer casually before overseeing students on placements and I really enjoyed teaching,” she says. “It’s not easy, it’s a bit challenging with a whole room of students! The main thing I took away from the induction programme was information on the academic curriculum – how to access it and why it is important.” A review of NTIP has recently been completed and a plan is now in place to further streamline the process.
One of Vicki’s ventures before starting at UCOL
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Cognition at UCOL Te atakura well underway UCOL’s relationship-based programme, Te Atakura is going strong. There are now 50 Teachers and 18 Impact Coaches involved from 22 different programmes across all three campuses. The Impact Coaches are supported by Cognition Education Consultants, in association with Professor Russell Bishop. Cognition Education’s Mary Sinclair, who has held a range of teaching and management positions and has a wealth of experience in national education policy development and education change management, says the programme is now in its first full ‘impact cycle’. “The programme at UCOL is a developmental model. UCOL made a commitment to improving outcomes for Māori students and wanted to base its next professional development on what works well. What we are doing is developing an existing programme to ensure it applies to the post-school environment and is based on voices of UCOL students, Lecturers and Leaders.” Mary is joined by Cognition Education Consultants Michael King and now Vivienne Russell at UCOL and what they share is a deep understanding of Russell Bishop’s New Zealandbased research. “We have made organisational and individual commitments to developing a programme true to Russell’s research which works for UCOL,” Mary says. “It’s a unique programme. With UCOL, we have agreed on an effective teacher profile, and we undertake
Mary Sinclair
Micheal King
ISSUE 69, JULY ‘14 - QUALITY TEACHING EDITION
learning on that effective teacher model with UCOL’s Impact coaches. It’s a practical model. We come together regularly to look at practice capability and also student outcomes, and then decide what’s needed next.” The task now is to sustain what has been put in place. There are multiple learning journeys underway at the same time, and some of the issues can be confronting, but as Professor Russel Bishop says, ‘what is good for Māori is good for all’. “We know that this research does work. We’re starting to see outcomes at UCOL already.”
so, what does a te atakura teacher look like? The effective teacher profile has two key dimensions: Creating a familylike context
Interacting with the learning context
Caring for/nuturing learners
Activating what students already know
Demonstrating high expectations
Formative assessment - feedback, forward
Ensuring all learners can learn
Co-construction - of tasks, success criteria
Knowing what Power sharing, students need to learn working cooperatively
Vivienne Russell 7
working together Rachel Hoskin is a specialist Graphic Designer. She studied at Whanganui School of Design before working in the high pressure industry of Advertising and subsequently moved into Education 13 years ago, initially as a Junior Lecturer in the Design and Multimedia Diploma at UCOL. There were originally two Advanced Diploma teams working in parallel with a lot of crossover, so they got together as a whole team and wrote BAVI. HPTT Assistant Anna Madeline spoke to Rachel about how they did it...
want that to succeed.
RH: Our entire team wrote the degree; we all took parts, the theory people took the philosophy and the practical people took all the papers and divided them up and started writing outlines. We would have meetings over the summer. We would have paper outlines plastered around the walls and the projector with the philosophy up. The team came out of
RH: The team’s pretty good really but they are busy, so I guess some of the challenges are that they’ve got these big ideas and some of them do fall over because they don’t have the time to do things. I have this opinion that if you make the staff really motivated and happy within their jobs then that translates to happy students and a much more enthusiastic staff member and a better relationship there. So I like to offer staff PD as much as possible.
that. Q: How did you create such a great team? It sounds as if it happened organically? RH: Absolutely. We come from industries that like to work in teams. Designers like to work in teams, photographers like to work with people, they tend to do that. We just work well together; it is just a natural thing. When we designed the degree, you know, we designed it around us, around our strengths and around what we thought that we needed to do for the students to get fantastic jobs and be very employable in industry. We just work naturally well together as a team and that helps, I think. It would be hard if there were any conflicts within the staff but when there are we address that quite quickly but there’s not many, if any. It’s all about ‘buy-in’ too, you know? If you have a degree that you’ve been part of writing, you own it and I think that really helps the staff. If you’re gonna design a curriculum, get the staff involved then they get that ownership and they
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I also try to give the staff opportunities to teach different bits or different levels each year. We’ll vary it up. The staff like it: they ask for it and every year I say to them “what subject do you want to teach in next year?” and they’re very happy to jump in and say “yeah I’d love to take such and such next year, that would be something really cool and really different and I’d like to do that”. Q: What have been the challenges or barriers to developing the team?
“I still don’t see myself as an academic. I’m learning from my team every day. It’s an open forum.” Q: What are your next plans for the programme? RH: Gosh! I’ve got so many! I kind of take more of a holistic view, so rather than just programme-specific, I’m looking at the broader sense of the school and our students. There are a number of things on our list. We want to embed Matauranga Maori into the BAVI curriculum. We’re looking at increasing our research somehow, again, this is just something we want to explore as a team. We’re looking at staff exhibition, you know, being able to do our
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own work and show our own work, so we’ve got a little team around that and we have a little team around marketing. One of the things on our timeline is International Relationships and Industry Relationships. We have a relationship with Brooks Institute in the US. Brooks is the world leading photography school and their strength is in Visual Journalism or Photo Journalism, so that is why we came up with an idea to embed visual journalism into our BAVI curriculum. We went ahead and got the Canon relationship so we’ve got a Canon agreement in place, which is very beneficial for us and we’ve already had an extremely good stakeholder learning environment in Auckland, because that is where Canon is based and a lot of our industry are in Auckland so that relationship’s already been cemented in Auckland and industry are now feeding into our programme there.
“I kind of take a more holistic view, so rather than just programme-specific, I’m looking at the broader sense of our school and our students.” Q: So, do you guys meet every week? RH: We have team meetings every month, but as you know because you’ve been in our staff studio, it’s a collaborative staff studio so we’re talking all the time. Our staff meetings once a month are general catch-ups, they’re like “let’s just update everyone on the spot” what’s happening in BAVI, what’s happening in Diploma and we have it for the 5 programmes so Music, Performing Arts, Interior Design, we all catch up and have that time together as a whole school. We do like to work as a whole school, we don’t like to be insular, we don’t like working in silos, although this happens a bit. Q: What advice would you give to other team leaders who want to strengthen the quality of their teaching?
Rachel Hoskin - Head of School Photography, Arts and Design, and Te Atakura Impact Coach ISSUE 69, JULY ‘14 - QUALITY TEACHING EDITION
RH: I found this book called Do Nothing. It’s a leadership book and it’s about how a manager needs to step up and set a culture of trust. I mean everything. So it gives the staff members freedom to make mistakes. I try to do that as much as possible. I want them to try new things and they can try new techniques, they can try new strategies and I will take the blame if something goes wrong. And that’s not a problem. I want them to be able to do that – otherwise if they think there’s going to be a nasty consequence at the end then they won’t try anything new. I don’t see myself as an academic, although I am leading an academic team. I have taught for 13 years but I still don’t see myself as an academic. I’m learning from my team every day. It’s an open forum. It’s a collaborative learning environment. I just do what I do, so I don’t know how to tell someone else how to do it, I can only tell them what I do and hope they develop their own strategies.
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HIGH PERFORMING TEACHING TEAMS
ce Numbers
ATTENDED THE
uture Learn F e
THE TUIA TE AKO HUI
AT
Te Wananga o Raukawa 35 STAFF ATTENDED ENGAGING CHALLENGING LEARNERS WORKSHOPS
run by Julia Bruce ON BEHALF OF AKO AOTEAROA
5 STAFF ATTENDED
the Change Management course AT THE UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND BUSINESS SCHOOL
Graduate School of Management
45 10
Staff Attended
he
T
The National Maori Tertiary Educator’s Hui
&
ing
6 Staff
6 STAFF ATTENDED
D ig i t a l S t ude
nt
Ni
T f u n d e d P r of es siona l De velo pme nt act ivities in 2013
Th
T HP
CONFERENCE IN AUCKLAND
2 staff ATTENDED THE
National Centre of Literacy and Numeracy for Adults Symposium
2 Staff ATTENDED THE
INDUSTRY TRAINING FEDERATION
Conference IN
Wellington 7 staff ATTENDED & PRESENTED AT THE
National Tertiary Learning and Teaching Conference IN
Unravelling the Adolescent Brain workshops run by the Brainwave Trust
Invercargill
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innovation fund what’s the next big idea? Does your team have a big idea for positive change but limited resources? Do you have a dream of holding a team retreat or hui to skillshare and develop new classroom teaching methods? Do you have a new teacher resource or new teaching strategy you wish to share with your team and pilot? Does your team need time to review the curriculum you’re delivering? High Performing Teaching Teams (HPTT) has a new fund for your team to develop new ideas to change classroom practices and enhance the overall quality of teaching. The fund is designed to be for collaborative, whole team development therefore applications should be developed in consultation with your team. This could be either your small programme-level teaching team or your whole school.
Examples of things that can be funded are: team retreats with a particular focus and outcome for the classroom; creation of a teaching resource; trialling new teaching strategies; backfilling for a teacher (time) to review curriculum, critical reflection, develop resources etc. You are advised not to apply for: consumables (e.g. tea, coffee, cups, urns, paper, copying, and stationery items); conference attendance; rewards for students; equipment (e.g. computers and tablets). There are two funding brackets for you to choose from, and applications can be made at any time. For more information please email Anna Madeleine on a.madeleine@ucol.ac.nz.
Got big ideas? Want to try out something a bit different or review what you’re doing? Get in touch ISSUE 69, JULY ‘14 - QUALITY TEACHING EDITION
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special interest UCOL has made the most of the opportunity to learn from New Zealand’s acclaimed Maori Educationalist, Professor Angus Macfarlane. Professor Macfarlane is not only the Keynote Speaker and workshop presenter at the annual Staff Symposium; he is also expected to conduct a workshop for the Nurse Education Team, later in the year. Symposium organiser Janet Walke has heard Professor Macfarlane speak on several occasions at conferences and says she has come away with gems of information each time. “I knew the work he had done around culturally inclusive pedagogies would be of special interest to staff, considering the Te Atakura programme at UCOL.” “The Nurse Education Team specifically asked
Angus Macfarlane 12
for a professional development session with Professor Macfarlane and the HPTT are keen to support that. We were hoping to arrange for him to stay on after the Symposium,” says Janet. “But his academic commitments mean we will have to schedule his return to UCOL, for later in the year.” Professor Macfarlane’s keynote speech titled, ‘Diversity as a Discourse for Connecting Teaching and Learning’ addresses key questions and explores considerations that relate to Māori learning in particular. In his workshop Huakina mai, he looks at opening doorways for learners and teachers in tertiary settings. ABOUT PROFESSOR ANGUS MACFARLANE Dr Macfarlane is Professor of Māori Research at the University of Canterbury, and affiliates to the Te Arawa confederation of tribes in the central North Island. The thrust of his research activities focuses on the exploration of cultural concepts and strategies that influence educational practice. In 2003 He was awarded the inaugural Research Fellowship by the New Zealand Council for Educational Research. In 2004 his landmark book, Kia hiwa rā! Listen to culture – Māori students’ plea to educators, was published, and he was a recipient of a Tohu Kairangi award, a citation for academic achievement in Māori education. Another book, Discipline, Democracy and Diversity, was published in August 2007, and this was followed in 2011 by Restorative Pedagogies. Dr Macfarlane is the recipient of a number of awards. In 2010 he was presented with the nationally-acclaimed Tohu Pae Tawhiti Award, acknowledging his significant contribution to Māori research over an extensive period of time. In 2011 he was awarded a Good Practice Publication Grant from Ako Aotearoa, the National Centre for Tertiary Teaching Excellence. In 2013 he won the University of Canterbury Research Medal for outstanding leadership in educational research – the first Māori academic recipient.
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new practice ucol - a te atakura institution UCOL has now established itself as a ‘Te Atakura’ institution. As Semester 1, 2014 comes to a close, here is some feedback from staff involved in Te Atakura, from throughout the journey so far: JON BAILEY - IMPACT COACH - DECEMBER 2013 “It has been very thought provoking and has forced me to reflect on my current teaching practice and current relationships with my students as well as exploring strategies to help relationship building. I have really questioned what exactly “engagement” is, what it looks like and how I can quantify improvements in student engagement.... Being open to [my students] about what Te Atakura is all about and what it is trying to achieve has allowed for transparency and openness. The students themselves have been co-constructing the lesson plans from their feedback therefore they are effectively creating the learning environment which suits them best.” TIM SEAHOLME - IMPACT COACH - JUNE 2014 “The best aspect has been finally having a new perspective to look at the students that drift in an out, don’t engage in class. This project has given me a new lens to look at how to engage these students and change things that in the past I would not think we could change... The biggest challenge has been being honest with myself about how I see these students. How I [previously] saw them compounded the problems I had in class.” GILLIAN GOSPER - TEACHER - JULY 2014 “The best aspects so far have been working with other Lecturers that have the same passion for students as I have, learning new classroom activities to do with my students, and making me look at my teaching practice. I have my first observation next term, so I have a challenge but I have to have an open mind as it is for my benefit. This is to help me to become a better Lecturer so I will take as much help and support as the Coach will give me. PETER VANDERVEEN - TEACHER - JULY 2014 “I had a student who I was having some real difficulties with… I talked to my Coach about him and we began to explore ways of getting him more engaged. The student helped identify some ways that I could help him, which were reinforced by my coach, Maryanne Corrigan. This student is now very active in the classroom. The biggest challenge has been not having enough time or the opportunity to fully read the material we are given. Other than that I am fully sold on Te Atakura, I have seen it in action and it works!” ERIN LINCOLN - LEAD COACH - JULY 2014 “There’s a lot of excitement now. The challenge for me is getting used to coconstructing with everyone - deciding where our new learning needs to be, based on where we’re at now. I don’t know how things look two months from now. A lot of people are out of their comfort zones because we know there has to be change. Teachers are building good relationships with Impact Coaches though. We are starting to see change already, with teachers and with the capability of their coaches.”
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leading the way Julie Poole started out as a secretarial student in 1982 at the then Palmerston North Technical Institute, and was offered a teaching job on the STEPS programme upon completion the following year. She moved from Business Administration to Tourism and Travel, then became the head of the UCOL School of Tourism and Hospitality in 2001. Later she worked with Margot Ferrick to move the Early Childhood programme to the school. Julie also supports members of her team through the Te Atakura programme. We spoke to Julie about her views on leadership: Q: How did you go about making such a great team? JP: I think it’s giving staff the responsibility to get on and do the job that they do so well, but always knowing that if they’ve got a problem they can come to me. I’m not a “What are you doing today? Tick box, tell me what’s happening” person. Let’s just get on with it! And they are such a great team of staff they do just get on with it. They are ideas people so they come up with something new and we’ll trial it. We’ll discuss it at a team meeting and away it goes. It’s more support, being there and available for them if they need it but, you know, have a go, will it work? Try something new. What else can we do? There are certain jobs that I will give somebody to do because I know their strengths. So hopefully I will see a strength and use that strength in a way that’s helpful for the whole team. I know my good administrators, I know the people who like using the computer and looking into new things and the people who are very practical and very very good at training for things like the comps. They’ve all got good strengths so I think I try to build on those strengths. That’s just something I like to do. Q: You mentioned team meetings, do you meet regularly? How often are those?
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Julie Poole - Head Of School Hospitality & Early Childhood Education JP: We try to meet once a week for Hospitality. We do once a fortnight for Early Childhood. Sometimes it doesn’t happen but with the joy of being in an open plan office we do catch up with each other on a regular basis anyway. So if it’s the day-to-day stuff they always come up or I’ll pop down and see them for informal rather than formal meetings. We do get the majority of us together. We try to do focus groups but sometimes that is difficult to find the time so occasionally we set aside a planning day. Q: It’s interesting that you guys have this open plan space and that you do collaborate all the time not just when you have formal meetings. JP: There’s probably a lot of people who don’t like it, who would prefer to be tucked away
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somewhere but in general there’s a lot more of that informal catch up that’s much more important I think. You can go through an agenda of the usual stuff we discuss in the meetings but you often find, especially with Hospitality, that you’re working together in the kitchen so there is that camaraderie and catch up and they’ll go ahead and do something that I’ll hear about much later. Q: Have there been any barriers or challenges to building that team? JP: Well I think it’s the same as any group, at times you’re going to have a little bit of an upset. There’s always going to be something but hopefully we get over that. We’re all adult and we talk about things that are bugging us. You’ve got to love your job!
moment, so we start at 6.30 in the morning and finish at 9.30 at night. What we miss down here is contact with the students on the other parts of the campus. My dream is a building near the main campus, with a groundfloor bakery, a restaurant, and then upstairs would be the kitchens and classroom with a connecting walkway to the campus. So we’d have someone running the restaurants. Somebody could be working the bakery and people could buy things as they’re walking past. I went to Blackpool Flyde College, which had a huge Hospitality Block. Down in the atrium they had the Hairdressing School, the Nail Technicians and a Bakery. Everything was off the Atrium. Before I retire I want to see us get a new facility.
“Look for the glad - be a PollyAnna and look for the glad, you know. Look for their strengths and always encourage.” Q: What are your next plans for the programmes? JP: We’re going through the TRoQ at the moment. Hospitality is top of the list to start and we’re still going! I’m the convener of the ITP Tourism and Hospitality for New Zealand, so I get everyone together from all the polytechnics around New Zealand. We were hoping to have it up and running by next year and we might yet but at the moment we’re going through NZQA. The team is looking forward to new changes.
Q: What advice would you give other leaders of other teams how to build a strong team or how to do that better? JP: I tell my team all the time that they do a great job, which they do. Look for the glad - be a PollyAnna and look for the glad, you know. Look for their strengths and always encourage. And saying “thank you” is probably one of the biggest things. Praise the good and they’ll always come back with more.
JP: I would have a brand new school with a minimum of two big kitchens. We need to think big. We have only got one large kitchen at the
Sometimes it’s hard. There’s a lot of compliance stuff that you’re dealing with and you have to be able to deal with it. Mutual respect is the key. The team does a damn good job. This is working, what can we do to get even better? Let them do a lot of the thinking.
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Q: If money was no object, what stuff would you need to make everything better?
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