Shannon Johnston

This case study presents an approach to professional learning for educators preparing to teach in a new building dedicated to flexible, collaborative, technology-enhanced learning and teaching. The approach was designed to expose teaching staff to spaces and pedagogies in active learning that they could then bring to their students’ learning. The CHAT acronym for our pedagogical model – Collaborative, Hands-on and high-tech, Authentic and active, and Team-based – framed the active learning focuses, and a continuous professional learning framework developed a sustainable model for accommodating staff needs and capabilities from a variety of starting points.

Real-time reflection-in-action is a critical capability for effective practitioners, just as the more common reflection-on-action is critical for learning. Reflective practice is typically regarded as an individual activity. However, to be an effective negotiator involves real-time reflection-in-action. Results from a Masters-level Negotiation unit show that reflection in negotiation contexts is emergent rather than sudden, is collective, and typically occurs in a break from the negotiation action. We develop the work of Schön and Yanow and Tsoukas to propose a framework of reflection-in-action that better fits the interactive context of negotiation and explore some implications for the teaching of negotiation and other similar professional situations.

Ensuring that university graduates are ready for their professional futures is a complex undertaking that includes, but is not limited to, the development of their professional knowledge and skills, and the provision of empowering learning experiences established through their own contributions. One way to draw these complex processes together for a large undergraduate class setting may be through a teaching and learning framework that centres on engagement. Engagement precipitates deeper learning, based on student-centred knowledge and skills development through co-creation. This conceptual paper proposes the Large Class Engagement model (LCE), which integrates high levels of student cognitive involvement and participation as antecedents to engagement, and treats engagement as a co-creation process between educators and students. The model applies services theory to conceptualise engagement in large flipped classes. The case study in this paper adds a new perspective to higher education. More specifically, it illustrates how a service dominant logic can be used to foster co-creation and thus enhance the learning experiences and outcomes in very large classes.

E-portfolios are being introduced into initial teacher education programmes internationally to help pre-service teachers build records of their learning journeys and develop into reflective practitioners; to allow them to assemble collections of evidence of their achievements against graduate standards, which can function as digital CVs; and to facilitate the seeding of personal learning networks that will support lifelong learning after graduation. Despite certain tensions between these aims, the potential benefits of e-portfolios make them an increasingly popular choice in teacher education. In this article, we discuss the introduction of Wi-Fi-based e-portfolios into a Master of Teaching programme at an Australian university. These served primarily as developmental e-portfolios, or personal learning environments (PLEs), and were designed to place particular emphasis on reflective practice. We describe how the e-portfolios were perceived and used by pre-service teachers in the first year of their implementation, and indicate the challenges and limitations encountered. Lessons learnt from the implementation are outlined and recommendations are proposed.

Quality assurance (QA) has long been applied in the corporate sector to ensure stakeholder satisfaction, compare standards with those of other organizations and raise standards in the face of competition. Applying rigorous QA and accreditation to educational processes and outcomes, particularly in higher education, is a more recent phenomenon. This chapter examines these issues in regard to conventional university education.