Communities of Practice

We are excited to be supporting the following Faculty Communities of Practice (CoP) in the 2023-24 academic year. Please read more about each CoP below.

To join a community of practice, please email ctl.ubco@ubc.ca and you will be added as a member to the community and to the Teams collaboration space.

Introduction

Teaching, research and leadership is at the core of all we do at UBC. This CoP aims to facilitate the growth, success, and innovation in all our teaching and EL initiatives, and to provide a collaborative, supportive, and social environment to do so.  Striving to be an institution that leads, inspires and enables students through excellence in transformative teaching is our daily challenge, and better to tackle it enthusiastically together.  This CoP will be beneficial for, and we welcome, both new and experienced faculty/lecturers/sessional instructors. Teaching excellence is at the heart of it, and often where our EL inspirations come from.

Objectives

The objectives of this CoP are to:

  • Bring faculty together to help create, innovate, focus (eg. find your focus/niche/strengths), share and collaborate on teaching/SoTL and EL initiatives
  • Identify needs and challenges of teaching and EL work and provide support; whether a new teaching or seasoned professor
  • Provide opportunities for learning the breadth and opportunities (including grants etc.) for teaching, EL work, and the leadership skills required and resources to help
  • Further the understanding of teaching excellence, EL, what it is, and its value
  • Sharing effective strategies to promote teaching excellence
  • Identify and work synergistically with related institutional units, CoPs and the Educational Leadership Network (ELNET)

Faculty Coordinators/Facilitators

Bowen Hui – Associate Professor of Teaching, Computer Science – bowen.hui@ubc.ca

Sally Stewart – Associate Professor of Teaching, School of Health and Exercise Sciences, FHSD – sally.willis-stewart@ubc.ca

CTL Coordinator

Janine Hirtz, Assistant Director of the Centre for Teaching & Learning – janine.hirtz@ubc.ca

Meeting Dates and Format

Meetings will be held during the third week of the month. Times and days will vary between each term to allow for more people to attend the CoP.  Meetings will be held in SCI 331. Please join us when you can.

  • Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2023 (2:30 pm – 3:30 pm, SCI 331)
  • Friday, Jan. 19, 2024 (11:30 am-12:30 pm, SCI 331)
  • Friday, Mar.22, 2024 (11:30 am-12:30 pm, SCI 331)
  • Friday, May 17, 2024 (11:30 am-12:30 pm, SCI 331)

Email ctl.ubco@ubc.ca to gain access to the Teams Channel for this Faculty Learning Community of Practice.

Introduction 

Welcome to one of our new Community of Practice group for the upcoming academic year.  We are excited to offer this valuable and needed opportunity to support your teaching excellence, and of course, your students. 

Why Focus on Wellbeing in Teaching and Learning:  

There is strong evidence that student wellbeing is critically linked to learning, engagement, resiliency and academic success.  Wellbeing is a factor contributing to academic tenacity and helps students weather the challenges and demands of the transition into, and while attending university. In addition, the classroom environment and professor approaches to teaching can greatly and positively influence student wellbeing. Student, faculty and staff wellbeing is an institutional priority as documented in our most recent strategic plans and is strongly linked to the mandates expressed in other institutional initiatives around EDI, ARIE, IAP, and Climate Action. 

Objectives 

The objective of this CoP is to bring teaching and support faculty together for the opportunity to share, discuss and gain ideas, resources, challenges and successes for teaching wellbeing, and furthermore, to offer support and mentorship for doing so. We will also invite different faculty members to some meetings to highlight some of their successful practices. 

Faculty Coordinators/Facilitators 

CTL Coordinator 

Electra Eleftheriadou, Educational Consultant for Inclusion. electra.eleftheriadou@ubc.ca  

Meeting Dates and Format 

Times and days will vary each term to allow for more people to attend the Community of Practice. Meetings will be held in SCI 331. Please join us when you can. 

  • Thursday, Dec. 7, 2023 (2:30 – 3:20 pm, ART 361) 
  • Monday, Feb. 12, 2024 (12:30 – 1:20 pm, SCI 331) 

Meeting Highlights

 

Introduction 

Inclusive excellence is a core area in UBC’s Strategic Plan, and the forthcoming accessibility plan asserts the importance of access in teaching and learning. Place-based teaching and learning can take many forms and stems from a commitment to the specificities-of and obligations-to place, which includes an imperative to decolonize our classrooms and teaching approaches. These priorities are important to many of us, yet we lack open, shared spaces to dig into the specificities of our practices and reflect on new possibilities in a supportive environment.  

In teaching, one of the best ways to learn from each other, and also one of the most rarely used, is to invite others into our classrooms so that we can see one another in action. Thus, part of this community of practice’s approach will be to open our teaching spaces up to each other in a non-evaluative mode, so that we can observe and learn from each other. 

Objective 

In this community of practice, we seek to explore and share our teaching and learning strategies and practices with a focus on how we can better centre access and inclusion in active, experiential, and place-based pedagogies. This will be achieved through building relationships within our membership and creating shared spaces to observe and support each other as we learn. We will encourage discussions on how we position ourselves and connect with place to guide our practices towards equity, diversity and inclusion.

Facilitators 

  • Natalie Forssman, Assistant Professor of Teaching, Community, Culture and Global Studies, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (natalie.forssman@ubc.ca) 
  • Robin Young, Assistant Professor of Teaching, Biology, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science (robin.young@ubc.ca) 
  • Electra Eleftheriadou, Educational Consultant for Inclusion, Centre for Teaching and Learning (electra.eleftheriadou@ubc.ca) 

Meeting Format 

Learning by doing, learning by observing, and learning in dialogue are the professional development pedagogies we hope to enact and make space for through this community of practice.  

While creating an open space to discuss ideas, challenges, successes, and scholarly literature on access, inclusion, and place-based teaching and learning is the broader goal of this community of practice, we propose to reach this goal by piloting a Teaching Squares approach to facilitate a space to reflect on our teaching through non-evaluative observation of the teaching of our peers. Teaching Squares, sometimes re-purposed as Teaching Triangles is an approach where instructors are clustered in small groups of 3-4 that emphasize diversity of discipline and diversity of social connectivity within each group, as well as non-conflicting teaching schedules. Each member of the group observes the teaching of at least two other members of the group, and then the group meets for conversations that focus less on what the instructors did (feedback), and more on what the observers learned about their own teaching, by reflecting on the practices of their peers and the effects of those practices on students (self-reflection). We explicitly invite all educators and interested Postdoctoral Fellows to join this community of practice, even if some may not have teaching assignments in the upcoming term. 

Each Teaching Square will be facilitated by the Faculty and CTL facilitators and, depending on the level of interest in this community of practice, several Teaching Squares will run simultaneously, with whole-group meetings to complement the learning happening in those smaller clusters.  

Meeting Dates 

The commitment to join this community of practice and participate in one cycle of the Teaching Squares engagement will be approximately 10 hours over the course of two terms. More information about the format of the time commitment is as follows: 

  • We will hold a (1.5 hr) initial meeting and information-sharing session on Thursday, October 12th at 2pm in the Central Courtyard by the Science Building (or in SCI 331, if it’s cold outside) where we will explore and co-articulate group priorities and approaches. After this meeting, the groupings for Teaching Squares or Triangles will be formalized by the facilitators, integrating relevant preferences and constraints from the participants. 
  • Each group of 3-4 will meet once (1 hr) to describe the specifics of their course, including exchanging syllabi, understanding the context of the course within their teaching trajectory and goals, and understanding why each participant has chosen to join the group. This meeting is also devoted to creating a robust agreement of expectations and confidentiality between the participants such that, for example, participants agree to confine specific details of an observation to the ensuing discussion, while using the ideas generated in the discussion beyond the boundaries of the group without identifying names. The date of these smaller meetings will be determined once the groups are formed. 
  • Each participant will be expected to observe two classes (2 x 1.5 hr), meet for two post-observation brief chats (2 x 0.5 hr), engage in a reflection discussion with their group of 3-4 (1 hr) and attend a whole-group end of Teaching Squares cycle wrap-up and get-together in Term 2 (1.5 hr). 
  • A winter whole-group optional check-in meeting (1.5 hr) will provide participants with an opportunity to exchange learnings and refine goals and process. The date of the whole-group check-in meeting is tentatively scheduled for December 13th at 1:00pm in SCI 331. 

If you have any questions or would like to participate and the initial meeting time/place doesn’t work for you, please reach out to Natalie, Robin or Electra over email. 

Introduction 

WIL stands for Work Integrated Learning (which currently includes 9 types based on CEWIL Canada’s definition, including co-operative education, internships, apprenticeships, and more https://cewilcanada.ca), and CoP stands for Community of Practice. In essence, this is a regular meetup where people in the WIL ecosystem come to share their experiences with WIL. Each meeting will have a designated “speaker” who will share some elements of their work.

Any professional who is working, practicing, researching and/or is engaged with Work Integrated Learning in higher-education in British Columbia. 

Objective 

As a CoP member you will spend an hour hearing what others in the WIL community are doing. CoP members will be asked to volunteer to take turns to be the ‘lead’ of a meetup, to share with others what they do as part of their WIL work. Sharing can be done with or without slides; it really isn’t that formal.  

What’s in it for me?
Learn from others about the diversity of WIL programs in BC’s higher education sector, build connections and be part of a community of passionate WIL educators and practitioners.  

Faculty Coordinators/Facilitators 

Alon Eisenstein, Assistant Professor of Teaching, School of Engineering. alon.eisenstein@ubc.ca  

Meeting Dates and Format 

The WIL-CoP will meet bi-monthly starting October, typically on a Tuesday at 12pm.  

All meetings will take place via Zoom and are open to professionals from across British Columbia from all institutions of higher education. The WIL-CoP is a collaboration with ACE-WIL, the Association for Co-operative Education and Work-Integrated Learning BC/Yukon https://acewilbc.ca  

The first meeting will take place October 17th 12-1pm. To register, please use https://ubc.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5Yoc-mhrjIuH9R5FiUokGDgcMel2FCWVYQo  

Introduction

In today’s digital era, the incorporation of emerging teaching and assessment technologies brings substantial benefits to both students and instructors. This CoP initiative aims to facilitate the sharing of innovative strategies and resources in this realm. By joining, instructors will have the opportunity to contribute to discussions led by invited speakers sharing their own experiences with implementing digital assessment and teaching technologies, including lessons learned. This new faculty learning community seeks to examine literature-informed best practices in digital assessment techniques, thereby promoting teaching excellence and student success. We welcome all instructors to encourage cross-institutional collaboration and support for those interested in exploring digital assessments.

Meeting Format

We will meet both in-person (SCI 331) and online via Zoom. Each meeting date, we will focus on different digital assessment technique or tool that has potential to enhance learning as well as improve course resource accessibility and ease of use, reduce feedback time for students, and provide instructors with flexibility in the creation, delivery, monitoring, and marking of course assessments. In addition, we will apply principles of learner-centred course and assessment design to evaluate the various assessment tools and their implementation. Specifically, we aim to uncover ways in which digital assessments can improve overall student experiences (autonomy, self-efficacy, connections with peers) and contribute to well-being (flexibility, clarity, usability) as well as provide instructors with flexibility in the creation, delivery, monitoring, and marking of course assessments.

Objectives

  1. Foster a collaborative environment where faculty members can share, learn, and support each other with emerging digital assessment strategies and technologies.
  2. Discuss the different ways that digital assessment tools have been used in the creation, implementation and marking of formative and summative assignments and exams, including examining how digital assessment tools are being used to measure student learning gains.
  3. Encourage cross-collaboration and knowledge exchange on evidence-based digital assessment practices across disciplines and institutions.

Faculty Coordinators/Facilitators

  • Zoë Soon, Associate Professor of Teaching, Biology, IKB Faculty of Science, ZoeAnne.Soon@ubc.ca
  • Peyman Yousefi, Assistant Professor of Teaching, Civil Engineering, Schulich School of Engineering, University of Calgary, yousefi.p@ucalgary.ca

Meeting Dates

The first meeting will be January 18th. Please contact Barbara Komlos (barbara.komlos@ubc.ca) to be added to the Teams Channel for this CoP and receive the most up-to-date information about meeting dates/times.