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 not just lectures, however, each event is a mix of research briefing, hands-on experience and reflection. Participants experienced what it’s like to be coached on their CLARA profiles, and to be coaches. They also heard from a team from UTS Faculty of Science, who have been breaking new ground. Student Mentors shared how they have been trained to be CLARA coaches, as a vehicle to scale coaching over hundreds of first year students.
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.