In higher education institutions globally, academic development practitioners whose work is to professionally develop academic staff in the area of teaching, have historically come into the profession without specific formal training. Their ideas and practice stem from the context of their work and life experience, and their knowledge grows with experience on the job. As a result, there is a great variety of knowledge and expertise that shapes professional development activities in higher education institutions. The aim of this article is to report on the findings of an investigation which drew on the collective wisdom of academic development practitioners who participated in a workshop on the topic of professional development. Activity Theory was used as an interpretive lens to identify key aspects from the data and align these onto a 'Ladder of Learning' -a hierarchically structured framework to inform appropriate professional development activities for academics. The insights gained from the findings may be used to strengthen academic professional development practice in support of ongoing improvement of the quality of teaching.
Learning within first-year biology is about inquiry, but in this content-heavy science students can easily fall into the trap of parrot-fashion learning. This study investigates the influence of lecturers' expectation of students in meaning making on the nature of their slides and the quality of students' note-making. Data were collected by classroom observations, video-recordings, a questionnaire for students and interviews with lecturers and students. The quantity and quality of students' notes were analysed for four lectures. The analysis of data resulted in three categories of lecturers: 'student-centred', 'student-directed' and 'teacher-centred'. The student-centred lecturers provided key points on their slides, anticipated that students would build on their class notes and focused on the development of the students' criticalthinking ability. The student-directed and teacher-centred lecturers aimed to complete the syllabus and emphasised the provision of detailed slides that first-years needed to learn. In addition, student-directed lecturers stated that they attempted to simplify topics that they knew students found challenging. When undergraduates perceived that the lecturers' slides did not provide sufficient content for assessments, they reported that they captured more notes during and after the lecture, but analysis revealed that the first-years' notes were usually a close reflection of lecture slides. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
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