Yesterday was the first online version of the Establishing a Teaching Persona course – thank you to everyone who attended as we had some really productive discussions around teaching identities, and your aspirations are very inspiring – to provide insight and take the students beyond their knowledge, but being there to support their journeys; working together to create interesting and engaging learning opportunities and giving your students the fuel to fly; freeing student thinking and allowing their thoughts to grow with guidance; considering students’ individual needs and enabling them to reap the benefits of education.

We’ll be looking at ways you can implement these ambitions in the rest of ETP (please book on using Research Manager if you haven’t already as places are filling up fast!). I mentioned during the class yesterday that one of the most powerful ways that I’ve found to develop my teaching is through reflection. When I reflect on yesterday’s task, I could see some definite easy improvements in making sure the tech functioned as I wanted it to! I found your contributions to be really valuable, so I’ll be ensuring that we have plenty of space to discuss your thoughts and ideas in the remaining three sessions.

The final ETP is all about reflection, so we’ll be exploring how it might be useful for you then. In the meantime, you might find a guide that I wrote about reflective writing on teaching useful (Reflective writing guide for MAAP) – this is for participants for our MA in Academic Practice but goes through some of the models you might wish to use, and even if you’re not needing to do formal reflective writing at the moment, you might find it beneficial to do some reflective writing about your teaching in an informal journal or blog.