I started a new job yesterday, similar role, but in a new institution.
We have a meeting next Monday all day to plan the future with an external facilitator. Probably the usual: postit notes, markers, butchers paper, mints and sweaty pitchers of water. Should be good, we have some chance to plan how this new unit will coagulate into something productive.
It is interesting to recall how over the past months the possible structures have emerged as ideas. There are at least three themes. Most of us in the centre will probably fit into all three in one way or another:
- staff development (which is generally prefaced by the word academic)
- educational technology (which is the area I have been slotted into)
- and what I have seen called SOTL – the Scholarship of teaching and learning.
But it is staff development that I am currently immersed in. Even the terminology is a little fraught. I definitely avoid the term ‘Staff training’. My first job, as kind of a precursor to the formal transfer, was to provide some help with the migration from WebCT 4.2 to WebCT 6.0. (Now sometimes referred to as BlackCT or just Blackboard, but that is another story)
I presented 36 workshops for staff. The same old questions besiege me: is this the best we can come up with in models of staff development?