Proceedings of the 8th World Conference on Future of Education
Year: 2024
DOI:
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A Double-Loop Learning Intervention to Improve Academic’s Teaching Practice: Rationale, Design, and Impact
Dr. Kirsty Williamson, Dr. Claire Sinnema
ABSTRACT:
Successfully and efficiently developing university students’ communication skills is an important feature of sustainable educational systems. However, academics, specialists in their disciplines, often feel ill-equipped to teach such capabilities. To tackle this issue, we designed and implemented an intervention to support discipline academics who were expected to develop the writing capabilities of postgraduate business students. The significance of our research is that it dealt with the complexity of the problem through a methodological approach designed specifically for the improvement of practice: Problem-Based Methodology. We constructed theories of action to understand the intricacies of academics’ approaches to integrating writing in their courses and the factors that explain these approaches. Our subsequent intervention featured a collaborative, whole-programme approach involving double-loop learning. The intervention was successful in improving academics’ practice in ways that also improved students’ written communication. In addition, the improvements were feasible within busy academic roles. We will discuss how practice improvement will be sustained and provide insights about the transferability of our approach to other contexts.
keywords: problem-based methodology, educational intervention, academic development