This week, Helen McLean, Senior Advisor, Learning and Teaching and Rosemary Chang, Project Manager – Scholarship of Learning & Teaching (SoLT) project, write about the college’s new approach to supporting academics applying for teaching awards.
This year in the College of Design and Social Context (DSC), we are supporting our college participants in the RMIT Teaching Awards process by using a community of practice model that makes writing and sharing of knowledge about learning and teaching the central methods for developing deeper understanding of individual teaching practice. We are exploring how teaching staff might be enabled to deepen their understanding and articulation of their teaching practice as they develop teaching award applications.
We are providing a supportive space whereby participants learn from each other in the drafting and development of submissions under the guidance of two College LT team members. We are offering three sequential workshops and five writing + thinking spaces to support the writing and development process of submissions using hands-on writing sessions, models and feedback on drafts. The workshops invite participants to engage with theoretical frameworks about writing and the genre of teaching awards through scaffolded reflection and dialogue, as well as engaging in writing activities and sharing of drafts for comment. The writing + thinking spaces are opt in and unstructured. They are designed to assist applicants with maintaining momentum and time management as they weave their applications together.
We aim to nurture a supportive community where applicants receive individual, formative and ongoing feedback from college L&T team members and peers through review of drafts. We discuss writing strategies for the teaching award genre and for selecting learning and teaching evidence to support applicants’ stories. The approach seeks to enable teaching staff to genuinely deepen their knowledge and articulation of teaching practice in the context of the teaching awards application process.
We are also taking a long term view of developing teaching awards applications and encouraging applicants to consider working on planning and preparing their submissions with sufficient lead time. In many cases, applicants are opting to take a year or more to reflect on their teaching practice and gather focused evidence. We are supporting participants to think strategically about the teaching awards process in relation to their individual career plans, taking into consideration their aspirations and suitability for national awards, grants and academic promotion. We therefore help with mapping out an individual schedule for developing learning and teaching practice, collecting evidence and applying for grants and awards over the immediate future.
This overall approach for supporting teaching award applicants builds on previous posts on the teachingtomtom which have emphasized the planning and benefits of the effort and writing involved for developing a successful and rewarding application.
We are realistic with applicants about the competitive nature of teaching awards, particularly at the national level. We therefore aspire to ensure that the work that applicants put into the development of an RMIT award has the potential to seed a strong case that will both demonstrate the contribution that has been made to learning and teaching and tell a convincing and memorable story for the purposes of another award, promotion or even a publication (see Iain Hay’s book Inspiring Academics for a lovely read of award-winning university teachers’ explorations of their practice).
We hope that the college process we are using this year will set the foundation not only for supporting quality submissions, but also for enabling deeper understanding and expressions of practice, leading to scholarly reflections and writing in learning and teaching and the relevant fields for each applicant.
Share your thoughts on this new approach to teaching award applications by leaving a reply in the comments section!
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