How to cultivate learning communities among university teaching staff

The cultivation of a professional learning community in which university teaching staff can swap ideas, advice and assistance is a big support when implementing institutional curriculum reforms. Enabling staff to build collaborative networks aids their individual and collective growth, helping improve teaching and learning. So how can academics, heads of schools and their institutions facilitate this?

Offering regular networking and socialising activities

It is always useful to gather front-line tutors and allow them to share their unique experiences and challenges and learn from one another. This can be done via activities as simple as playing board games, tea and coffee chats, walks, picnics and group dinners.

Establishing a social committee formed of dedicated tutors helps in planning and coordinating regular activities. Get-togethers must be actively promoted to staff across the institution, whether through posters, emails or social media. Events do not need to be fully funded, but offering some free or subsidised food and drink often helps get more people along.

• How to support staff across all departments to design quality online courses
• Fostering collaboration in staff training through a top-down and bottom-up approach
• If universities push staff towards social media, they must protect them, too

Such networking should bring together tutors from a range of disciplines with widely varying beliefs, perspectives and identities. Despite their differences, all tutors often confront similar challenges, issues and dilemmas in their roles. Creating spaces and channels via which they can find and share emotional and psychological support is crucial to maintaining their well-being.

Professional development programmes

When introducing a new curriculum, like the University of Hong Kong’s institution-wide interdisciplinary “Common Core Curriculum”, which involves new material and teaching methods, professional development is crucial for tutors. Training workshops that bring different faculty members together can help cultivate knowledge and skills that help with lesson planning and delivery, creating assessments, delivering feedback and emerging innovative pedagogies. These sessions should not be run as one-off events but be continuous and shaped by the tutors themselves – perhaps with a different focus each month.

Institutions’ general office and HR teams should look within or outside the university for academics with specialised teaching expertise and outstanding teaching performance, who can be invited as speakers and facilitators.

Teaching and learning advice repositories

A central online repository of teaching resources and advice is an incredibly useful tool for all tutors, regardless of their discipline or specific course. This should be easily accessible to all teaching staff and be regularly updated with fresh insight from the tutors themselves.

This could offer universal advice on teaching practices and classroom management, guides to using key edtech tools, pedagogical models, lesson plans, course frameworks, assessment rubrics, feedback templates and sample assignments. Such resources will support tutors to transform new ideas from theory into practice.

Peer observation and evaluation

By watching the way their colleagues teach, tutors can pick up good techniques and tricks to incorporate into their own classrooms. The observer can offer specific feedback and constructive suggestions as well as helping out in the classroom. This practice of peer observation increases self-awareness for both tutors regarding the impact of their teaching, spurring them on to bring about changes that enhance teaching and learning. Both the observer and observed benefit from meaningful reflection in an environment of trust and flexibility.

Tutors can mutually agree to sit through one another’s classes. A lesson feedback form with the relevant dimensions can be prepared, clearly presenting areas of strength and areas for improvement. Such a framework should be generic with room for flexibility. Important dimensions include planning, subject knowledge and discipline-specific pedagogy, lesson implementation, learning environment and learner support, as well as in-class interactions and teacher responsiveness.

Evidence-based reflective research and enquiry practices

Tutors encounter novel and ever-changing demands – especially in courses that sit outside students’ specialisms – such as how to deal with diverse educational backgrounds or students with no familiarity of the subject matter, and how to keep students motivated and engaged in non-disciplinary classes.

Evidence-based research and enquiry studies allow tutors to understand and evaluate their approaches and strategies for improving student learning in a more systematic and rigorous manner. Tutors can carry out research on their students on site. They can then reflect on, articulate and justify their underlying assumptions and beliefs in published research, contributing to the wider scholarship of teaching and learning.

Collaborative lesson planning

Tutors who teach courses with similar themes and topics can collaboratively plan, examine and evaluate their lessons. Through discussions about explanations, modes of delivery, resources and likely misconceptions, everyone can learn from one another. Tutors can focus attempts to improve instruction on just one lesson at a time, keeping things manageable.

By applying well-known research methods to their own teaching, tutors can become active learners enquiring collaboratively about their instructional practices. This will help strengthen the connection between daily practice and long-term goals. Collaboration creates abundant opportunities for open and professional dialogues, which are precursors to continuous pedagogical experimentation and innovation.

Teaching and learning festivals

Tutors need the incentives to assume responsibility and ownership in directing their teaching initiatives and strategies. Throughout the academic year, tutors could co-organise teaching and learning festivals that celebrate successful innovations and developments. Such events could feature keynote speeches, interactive workshops, and showcase teaching materials and posters. By celebrating teaching success, such events would enable tutors to appreciate the impact of excellent teaching on student learning and institutional goals. Hosting such events regularly would build a strong pedagogical culture. The events give tutors a sense of shared purpose by expressing mutual values and common goals.

Adrian Man-Ho Lam is a course tutor researching and teaching the interdisciplinary common core curriculum at the University of Hong Kong.

If you found this interesting and want advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week, sign up for the THE Campus newsletter.