Reflecting on our November event in the Collaborative Teaching Excellence Award (CATE) and National Teaching Fellow (NTF) seminar series with our only Cardiff University award winning team led by Dr Wendy Ivins

Written by Dr Wendy Ivins, Dr Kathryn Jones; Dr Nathan Jones and Dr Jenny Highfield from the School of Computer Science and Informatics; and Emmajane Milton, Professor in Educational Practice.

In our first online event on the 15 November 2023 we had another brilliant session – the third event in our new regular networking and discussion series.

The COMSC team session was titled “Better together: the power of collaboration in Teaching and Scholarship – A National Software Academy perspective” and was focused on putting collaboration and team working at the heart of learning and teaching.

The team talked about ……

• integrated ways of working with – students – staff – industry – clients and with programme learning outcomes spanning projects and modules to support the student experience.
• the importance of establishing expectations related to team-working for everyone both staff and students. The meant explicitly teaching students group work skills.
• the benefits of listening to students and using their perspectives to inform decisions to refine and improve ways of working which in turn built the resilience and sustainability of the programmes.
• a variety of strategies to encourage student engagement (e.g. ‘fishbowl’ and ‘blind date’ activities) and how the project work was authentic (client driven) and student led
• the advantages of having purpose built student spaces that enabled flexible and collaborative working.
• the breadth of scholarship outputs from this work, all of which have been supported, enabled and championed by the Head of School.

We asked the CATE team for their reflections on the session too:

 “It was really joyful to present as a team (especially given two of our team are former students)! We valued the opportunity to reflect on our progress, telling you all about our efforts in collaborative teaching and scholarship and our plans going forward. The two hours seemed to go by in a flash and we really felt like there was still more to discuss! Thank you all.”

Colleagues who attended the event said highlights included the:

• Conversations
• Cross University expertise / discussion
• Shared thinking and learning
• Hearing from a variety of people/perspectives
• Opportunity to ask questions/discuss
• Examples of good scholarship from across the university
• Opportunity to talk about scholarship with colleagues
• Very interesting topic today
• Learning about a fantastic project – a real model
• Hearing about collaborations between students, staff and industry

In future sessions colleagues said they would like:

• even more time to discuss themes, ideas and perspectives raised.

Join us at our next seminar

We warmly invite you to join us at our next National Teaching Fellowship seminar on 17 January 13.00-15.00 on the Cathays campus in room 0.52, Main Building. Please register through Core so that you get the link for the event.

Our next event “It’s in everything we do …. a responsibility and a privilege” will feature Emmajane Milton from the School of Social Sciences – who will share thoughts on learning, education and student experience and how what educators model in their teaching sends strong and powerful messages about learning and its value to our students.

Please book your place through the HR System using the code: TEAC9691

We look forward to seeing you there.