I recently rediscovered the article by Land (2001) on how different orientations to academic development can be put into relation to each other. And I find it so helpful to think in those terms to understand better why some colleagues do what they do!
There are different ways to approach academic development: courses are very common with different lengths and amounts of collaboration built in, as loose collection of seminars or with progression over several courses, as are inspirational presentations, or individual seeking of informations in podcasts or blogs. Those approaches depend both on what individuals seek out, and what institutions offer. Here, I briefly summarize what academic development as horizontal learning means.
Our work as academic developers at CEE is based on how we think that relationships between teachers work, and using that to influence their conversations in a way that improves teaching. Here is (part of) the literature we base this understanding on (a lot of this from in-house research, or close collaborators).
Now that my working assumption is that trust is essential for student learning, what about trust that our “students”, i.e. the participants in our academic development workshops, have in us? Does that work in a similar way, or how is it different?