A Prezi by Shrewsbury College. This is a prezi by Shrewsbury College. Students and staff participated in online Learning Communities to explore their effectiveness as a professional development strategy for improving the quality of teaching, learning and assessment.
The aim was to develop Professional Learning Communities focussed on enhancing teaching, learning and assessment that balanced process and outcome goals. One of these was to accommodate the 'insider perspective' and encourage 'exploratory, expansionist, descriptive, inductive actions and thinking' to produce 'valid, real, rich, deep data'. At the same time the aim was to respond to the demands of credibility by adopting an objective, factual and reliable perpsective (Blaxter et al. 2006, p65).
Survey data highlighted a wide range of positive impacts for learners at Levels 1 to 4 in Business, IT, Hair and Therapies which were also triangulated via interviews. Learners agreed that the strategies they developed helped them to reflect on (90.9%) and evaluate their learning (88.8%). Survey data also suggested the strategies that were developed were also helpful to learning (84%) and in enhancing engagement (79%), confidence (78%) and enjoyment (72%). Interviews with staff revealed that collaboration with colleagues helped them learn new strategies, and bring new ideas and methods to their students. Staff also felt working in ths way was empowering and helped them come together as a team to develop their knowledge.
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