Time: 12:00 AM
Location:
The UTS research mission is to have societal impact. CIC is committed to educational research that impacts practitioners in the trenches, in our schools and universities — here in Sydney’s schools and at UTS, and globally through our interenational network.
As part of this work, we have launched a new series of researcher/practitioner meetups called NIC@CIC: Networked Improvement Communities @The Connected Intelligence Centre. NICs were a concept first proposed by computing pioneer Doug Engelbart, as a means of accelerating collective learning about what works/fails in order to make breakthroughs in tackling a complex problem. This has since been adopted and tuned for different fields such as healthcare improvement, and now education [more…].
Over 40 educators from Sydney schools and UTS gathered for a briefing on the work of CIC from Director Simon Buckingham Shum, setting the stage for Ruth Crick (CIC/School of Education), who briefed the workshop participants on her work assessing students’ dispositions, as a measure of their appetite for challenge and complexity. In particular, she introduced the learning-to-learn self-assessment tool her research program has developed: CLARA — the Crick Learning for Resilient Agency profile, which is a type of Dispositional Learning Analytics:
NIC@CIC events are designed to mix research briefing, hands-on experience and reflection, introducing technologies as appropriate. Participants experienced what it’s like to be coached on their CLARA profiles, and to be coaches.
They then heard from the Faculty of Science team (Andy Leigh, Alison Beavis and Peter Meier), who have been piloting CLARA with all first year students. Student Mentors have been trained to be CLARA coaches, as a way to scale coaching over hundreds of students through the use of fictional student personas and their profiles. The highlight of the event for many was when two of the mentors shared powerful stories of how CLARA had helped them to develop a new awareness of how their graduate attributes needed developing.
The conversation continues in the invitational online community… get in touch via cic@uts.edu.au if you want to learn about future NIC@CIC events.