Teacher teams and critical friends
The project will define procedures for building and maintaining teaching teams for all major courses and for organising "critical friends" groups in all departments of the school. The purpose is to secure education quality. The project is carried out at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) within the framework of KTH's change programme Future Education at KTH.
Background
Teaching teams and "critical friends" groups have been proposed in the EECS School's previous quality work as forms of cooperation to improve the situation of teachers in large courses, joint competence development and quality assurance (See Education Quality Processes at KTH EECS report.
We have identified major courses that would benefit from teacher teams through a questionnaire sent to all programme leaders and directors of studies. The survey was followed up with interviews. The conclusion is that some teaching teams coordinate teaching subject-related courses that do not currently have teaching teams but would benefit from increased cooperation, and various examples can be put forward as good practices.
Purpose
Recommendations for the implementation of teacher teams and 'critical friends' groups to
Overall objective
Define procedures for creating and maintaining teams of teachers for all major courses and for organising "critical friends" groups.
Key milestones
Current situation analysis; Proposal on how teaching teams and critical friends will work and how these can be maintained; Pilot with courses in high need of teaching teams or critical friends; Pilot evaluated
Challenges
The fact that the project has not reached the pilot phase is because the time schedule in the project specification was too optimistic. The mapping was much more complicated than expected. One reason is that the recommendations in the report were based on an incorrect definition of "critical friends" groups. Even in the group work at the EECS Teachers' Day, where we clearly defined "critical friends" groups, it turned out that the concept quickly led to misinterpretations that affected the discussions.
Results and lessons learnt
- Identified course groups that will benefit from a teaching team.
- Best practice examples of different forms of cooperation that can be interpreted as learning teams
- Recommendations on how to organise learning teams and 'critical friends' groups
Suggestions forimprovement
Suggestions on how teacher teams and critical friends should work and how these can be sustained: We organised a session at the EECS Teachers' Day to introduce the concepts (teacher teams and "critical friends" group) and collect feedback on benefits and challenges in a group work that has led to preliminary conclusions that we will describe in the project report.
Pilot and follow-up: The mapping took much more time than expected; this meant that we have not managed to launch a pilot with selected courses according to the schedule.
When formulating recommendations, it is important that we focus on the expected positive effects for individual teachers and create motivation; the recommendations should not be perceived as micro-management and time thieves.
Next step
Start with a small number of 'critical friends' groups and teams of teachers who are committed, help them to be successful and make success visible.