POD Conference October 2017
This was my second POD (Professional and Organizational Development) Conference. The US version of Canada’s Educational Development Caucus is, as one might expect, significantly larger than our domestic conference, with approaching 1000 delegates (compared with 100 to 150 at EDC).
The conference was well organized with multiple streamed events. Sessions were well attended with at least a dozen at each of the events I went to. Interestingly for me, as a conference organizer, they did not start with a plenary event, but they did end with a session in plenary.
The over-riding message for me was that the challenges we face and the issues that engage us, are common regardless of location. I was pleased to come away with some practical ideas as well as some theoretical or philosophical questions to ponder.
In his plenary Randy Bass encouraged us to think about HE as a tension along two axis – in thinking about effecting change, working as we do ‘from the middle’. His model sets Disintegrative vs Integrative approaches on one axis and Inclusive excellence vs Exclusive excellence on the other. He argues that much of what US institutions have done traditionally falls in the quadrant bounded by exclusive excellence and integrative approaches, with disintegrative approaches (like IT support for eLearning) being used to support the whole work of an institution which should be integrative. He argues that there is pressure for institutions to move into the quadrant bounded by Inclusive excellence (ie not restrict access to those who are traditionally empowered to engage in HE) and Integrative approaches. While I’m not sure I fully absorbed the implications it was a helpful way to reflect on our own approaches to change.
What I found most useful were several practical approaches and innovative ideas. I have summarized these here:
- Learning Fellows – University of Dartmouth uses a form of peer tutoring where students from senior years support junior peers. As with Supplemental Instruction the senior student who has been successful in a course acts as a learning assistant, not only do they support the student, but they also assist the instructor by providing regular weekly feedback to the instructor about the course, what the students are finding difficult etc.
- Delphi technique = Jim Berger from Western Kentucky University demonstrated this approach, first used in industry, to enable a group of experts to reach consensus on a problem that has more than one potential solution. The process is highly structured and would not work in many situations but could be a useful addition to our collection of approaches.
- Principedia/Localpedia, Geneva Stein and Nic Voge from Princeton, shared their work in using a wordpress plug in to build a local version of Wikipedia. In their case they used it to collect feedback from students about the teaching approaches used in particular courses at Princeton, the intent being to help future students learn from past students about the best way to approach learning tasks used in a particular course. It occurs to me that we could consider developing a York version – perhaps used by faculty rather than students, where an instructor in a multiple – section course could share their resources, so that when a new instructor is appointed, typically at short notice, they would have a resource they could use to help them ensure constancy and share ideas. Might also be useful for EDC to create an edcpedia for educational developers to share ideas. The Princeton version and plug in is here: principedia.princeton.edu
- The Educational Leadership map and Framework: Isabeau Iqbal, Simon Bates and Simon Albon (BCU). Through their work in Universitas 21 the presenters have created a framework that is helpful when discussion educational leadership with faculty. The framework takes dimensions of teaching on the X axis and forms of enactment on the Y axis. This enables the individual to think about their work from these two perspectives.
| Leader (influence) | Eg developing and leading faculty workshops | Peer reviewed publications | ||
| Manager (enable) | Designing and co-ordinating a course for students | Facilitating teaching and learning grants. | ||
| Practitioner (do) | Things here are probably not leadership, the rest is or can be | Teaching and Learning Committee member | ||
| Activities to facilitate and support learning (deliver) | Course/ program design / development (design) | Scholarly reflection, professional development (develop) | Scholarship and public dissemination (disseminate) |
It occurs to me that this might be helpful for faculty putting together teaching dossiers or applying for teaching awards.
- CRLT players – this was a plenary event where a group of student actors demonstrated the use of scenarios performed by actors to enable discussion particularly of sensitive issues. It occurred to me that we have something similar in place at York thanks to Eva Peisachovich’s work with Simulated People – perhaps we could use this for workshops with faculty as well as with students.
- The Sparkshop – Megan Frary and Teresa Focarile from Boise State University suggested the use of tailored highly focused 15 minute workshops as a way to reach out to faculty. The idea is to take the sparkshop to the faculty rather than expect them to come to the teaching centre. We can definitely adapt this for use a York.
