Jane reports on a new partnership and a particularly rewarding session with Higher Education lecturers who are also neighbours of ours...
Isn’t it fabulous when you meet someone with whom you click? You just know within a few minutes that they get you, and you get them. Despite the short acquaintance, you feel instinctively that you share values and have a common bedrock, language and perhaps esnse of humour.
The same thing can happen with organisations. Result was lucky enough to meet the UK Management College via its ‘ambassador’ and Dean of Teaching, learning and EDI, Dr Amy Bywater. The team met her at the Advance H.E EDI conference in March. She then caught up with us and invited us to take part in UKMC’s conference for teaching staff. How could we refuse?
We were astonished to discover that this wonderful institution, focused on mature students, is just down the road from us. Why had we never met before? We are very glad we now have!
The starting point for designing this session was to draw on experience. When I was a full-time Further Education Lecturer, I remember how tired I became by the end of the teaching term. I recalled this feeling when we were preparing our session for UKMC’s conference. Teaching is a highly rewarding but also very demanding profession. We therefore planned to offer an hour to reinvigorate participants – letting them be a bit more playful and explore a potentially wider range of methdology when preparing their lectures and workshops.
We called our session ‘Diversify your approach’ and suffice to say, it involved a few props in the room – including photo cards, a toy xylophone, action hero figures, a scale of numbers on the wall and a few other things. These were designed to remind the lecturers of the different learning preferences – visual, auditory, reading/writing and kinetic. But in addition, we looked at factors such as whether learners were:
• logical/analytical
• social/linguistic (processed learning best by interaction)
• solitary
• tactile/learn best in the natural environment.
I admit to feeling a bit nervous prior to the session. Despite having done this for almost 40 years, I think that if I didn’t feel apprehension, then I would have achieved complacency – which is never good and trips you up.
The participants were a vibrant and collaborative group. As soon as we started discussing the topic together and doing the planned group activities, the nerves subsided. Saif and I loved the mix of serious and playful interaction with this very experienced group of educators. Their commitment to their students – and to their own learning as teachers – was impressive. It is rare to work with such a motivated group of staff, and it was a great pleasure to do so.
We were made to feel so welcome at UKMC and would like to thank Dr Amy Bywater, Dr John Obeng and Dana Beidas for the invitation and for their support on the day. We really hope that this will be the start of a beautiful friendship!
We are what we do and we love what we do.