PRO-Teaching: Sharing Ideas to Develop Capabilities

Abstract

The PRO-Teaching project was first piloted in 2009 at Griffith University, Australia with six academic teachers from the School of Education and Professional Studies and one from the School of Information and Communication Technology. This pilot assisted in streamlining the process and documentation, prior to implementation in the then Science, Environment, Engineering and Technology (SEET) Group in 2010. Two years later and more than 125 teachers involved, the Griffith PRO-Teaching project was awarded a university grant in 2012, to support offering PRO-Teaching to all academic teachers across the university wishing to focus on the Griffith principles of teaching to promote excellence in teaching. PRO-Teaching was designed to make use of a developmental form of peer review and observation of teaching with the intent to create a collaborative and supportive relationship for teachers to discuss and share ideas around their teaching practice. Using a sequenced approach, data collection was designed to draw from a range of sources to build evidence of teaching quality that may supplement or contrast the current university’s student experience of teaching (SET) questionnaires that are currently the dominant determinant of teaching quality. In this instructional chapter, we have set out to provide you, the reader, with an overview of the PRO-Teaching mechanism, with a step-by-step guide using the very worksheets, templates and checklists employed during its implementation.