See the change, make the change, and own the change – Yasmin Amarsi, Professor at the School of Nursing and Midwifery at AKU, on the Rethinking Teaching Workshop
The Network of Teaching and Learning (TL_net) held their 5th Rethinking Teaching Workshop (RTT) from June 27th to July 2nd, 2019 at Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan. This workshop aimed to encourage participating faculty to examine and develop their thinking about the course design process. 24 members from different faculty across AKU attended the workshop over the course of four invigorating days of large and small interactive group sessions. Participants left the workshop satisfied with a new and improved approach to designing their courses.
“I had a brief idea before attending this workshop, of what to expect from this training. But, it has been a complete turn-around –a total eye opener. It has helped me un-learn and re-learn the way I used to think about designing and implementing an academic course” said Dr. Amyn Lakhani – Director of the Community Health Department at AKU in East Africa – who attended this year’s workshop. Going forward, Dr. Lakhani looks to better his design saying that his course’s “learning outcome will be revised, the course teaching/learning strategy will be enhanced, and course assessments will align with participants’ learning”.
Each day of the workshop began with facilitators presenting the session’s topic to participants. This was followed by faculty splitting into small groups to work on developing concept maps, learning outcomes, and assessment and learning strategies. Sessions concluded with participants presenting the results of their redesign process, which was then met with constructive feedback from the facilitators and their peers. The effectiveness of the sessions was clear as one participant stated in their post-workshop evaluation: “Peer-learning was the best feature of RTT. Feedback from our peers from other departments should be a regular feature of all the workshops and we should be given such platforms where faculty from all disciplines can work together to improve teaching and learning at AKU.”
“My experience during the workshop was engaging and enjoyable. During this excellent and well-organized workshop, I was able to reflect deeply and design a course in early childhood development, my field of specialization, with opportunity for peer feedback and facilitator support” said Dr. Almina Pardhan, Assistant Professor at the Institute for Educational Development in Pakistan. During the workshop, Dr. Pardhan designed a 5-day Continuing Professional Education Course in Early Childhood Education and Development, entitled ‘Enabling Practitioners to Support Parents to Build Healthy Parent-Child Relationship for Early Child Development’. RTT provides an excellent basis for faculty to work on course designs which can later be developed into potential submissions for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) grant offered by TL_net. “I plan to offer this course later this year or early 2020. I am intending to write it up as a proposal for a SoTL grant through TL_net and to submit a proposal for the SoTL conference being held later this year.”
Since its conception, the goal of TL_net’s RTT workshop has been to allow faculty to align learning outcomes, content knowledge, teaching pedagogies, and assessment practices. RTT provides the opportunity for participants to rethink their course design strategy in a way that is unique from other workshops and experiences. Dr. Sana Saeed, Assistant Professor in the department of Pediatrics and Child Health suggests that faculty “grab the opportunity to attend the RTT workshop because it is an amazing platform to integrate your experience and connect it from A to Z.”