I hope you’ve enjoyed the Establishing a Teaching Persona (ETP) course this year. With the digital pivot, I’ve run things a bit differently this year as all sessions have been online. I didn’t think that the previous structure of one full day of teaching, and then a half-day of micro-teaching practice would work well online, so instead, in response to your priorities on the survey I sent out, I changed it to four 90 minute sessions focusing on different key areas but retaining the emphasis on identity and compassion.

The slides for each of the sessions can be found here, in case you want to refer back to them:  identity, planning and presenting, engaging students in active and creative learning and reflecting on teaching.

I’m not sure everything has translated effectively to online – in the face-to-face version, we used a Lego building activity to explore teaching identities and I’m not completely satisfied with the replacement activity of choosing pictures. What I did really enjoy was co-teaching the sessions with my colleagues Jane, Pam, Richard and Ruth – I think there’s huge benefits to teaching collaboratively (such as getting different perspectives and input) , so if you have the opportunity to teach with others I would definitely recommend doing it, and don’t be afraid to ask others for help if you think a session would work better with more than one teacher (especially online).

If any of you have any thoughts about what worked or didn’t work, please let me know in the comments. I’m leaving City at the end of the month to join the University of Winchester as Head of Learning and Teaching, but the academic team in LEaD will be continuing ETP.

I’m also doing a conference presentation about the move to online at 11:25am on Wednesday 30th June as part of the Learning at City Conference – please do come along if you want to hear more about the reasons behind the changes, and if you’d like to let me know how it worked from your perspective!