Fruits of the event for the development of teaching

The Faculty of Science event for the development of teaching met on the 26th of October, 2018, at the Hotel Katajanokka (former Jail house). The theme for the day was Student well-being. During the day, knowledge and best practices were shared and work groups met. In this blog post I have collected the shared knowledge and practices. You are welcome to comment and continue the discussion for the development of teaching at the faculty!

The Director of development Susanna Niinistö-Sivuranta started the day with the title Student well-being, sense of community and the future of learning. During the session, Presemo was used as back channel with two questions: “How can we develop a supportive interaction culture in our degree programme?” (with the results 1&2) and “Share you best practices/experiences about pedagogical solutions or learning situations that support students to express their own ideas and feelings” (with the results). In the results, three themes could be seen:

  • Student mental health issues
  • Informal meetings with students and faculty
  • Activating and versatile teaching methods with which students meet, get friends and become members of the community – methods including educational technology

The Psychologist Elina Marttinen continued with Deciding on the direction of career and life:Personal goals, identity development, and wellbeing. Her previous presentation on about the same topic but in Finnish can be seen at http://www.mediaserver.fi/live/yths with the password “eloyths18”.

In the afternoon we had six parallel workshops. Each of the workshops used a Flinga for collecting and sharing their practices. The work group themes and links to Flingas are listed below.

  1. International student recruitment and selection in Master’s programmes (chair: specialist Esko Koponen)
  2. Academic mentoring of students (“oma opettaja”) (chairs: Teachers’ academy member Johanna Rämö with Jokke Häsä)
  3. Collaboration between programmes in teaching: Academic and transferable skills (chairs: senior lecturer in university pedagogy Anni Rytkönen and study psychologist Anu Lehtinen). We had some slides to start with and for the work groups, we shared a generic model for the development of academic expertise during the Bachelor’s studies (pptx, for further development!), created jointly by HYPE and the study psychologists.
  4. First year experience in Bachelor’s programmes (chair: Teachers’ adacemy member Szabolcs Galambosi)
  5. Completion of Master’s degrees (chair: Teachers’ academy member Kirsti Korkka-Niemi)
  6. Student well-being (chairs: senior lecturer in university pedagogy Liisa Myyry and study psychologist Emilia Karjalainen)