Initiative Lead
Institute of Technology Tralee

Primary Contact
Tom Farrelly
tom.farrelly@staff.ittralee.ie

€45000

Enhancement across Disciplines

This T&L initiative focuses on enabling excellence during key academic transitions, i.e. academic staff as they transition into higher education (HE) and faculty leaders as they transition into and through management. It represents a collaboration with Cork Institute of Technology, who are proposing a similar initiative, with the intention that the process, resources and findings will be shared over the duration of the pilot.

Across the Institute of Technology (IoT) sector, early career lecturers experience high teaching loads (18 hours/week), there is no requirement to hold a pedagogical qualification and there is little dedicated, structured support. We propose to pilot a semester-long programme for this cohort which will challenge the dominant teacher-centric view of education and provide opportunities to enhance practice via critical reflection, technology and evidence-based instructional practices. The pilot will be characterised by a dialogic approach that includes peer and student feedback. To enable participation, we plan to reduce the teaching load for this cohort over 1 semester. A cross-discipline approach enables peer support and provides opportunities to learn from diverse experiences.

The purpose of higher education, embracing student diversity, prioritising student success, focusing on learning, and capitalising on a digitized world, present some of the challenges that good Continuous Professional Development (CPD) can address. We plan to engage our faculty management teams in a series of masterclasses on Academic Leadership in Teaching and Learning in Contemporary Higher Education to enable our academic leaders to lead programmatic change and better shape staff CPD to meet future needs in HE.