Reflection, Evaluation, and Collaboration in Teaching

REACT - What is it?

• Goals
• Principles
• Process
• About REACT

Goals

Reflection, Evaluation, and Collaboration in Teaching (REACT) seeks to improve the quality of learning and teaching at CQU by supporting a culture of innovative practice through the dissemination and adoption of project outcomes.

This will be accomplished by:

• increasing the perceived importance and reward associated with good teaching;
• reducing the difficulty of writing about teaching innovation;
• opening up the design of teaching to enable collaboration with and input from a diverse set of peers;
• inserting an extra layer of peer review before implementation, and
• encouraging evaluation of learning and teaching.

Principles of REACT

The project is founded on knowledge from a broad array of disciplines and seeks to address a range of issues associated with teaching and research in universities.The three core principles of the REACT project are:

1. Motivation
   Encourage contributions through use of a set paper structure, a mentoring relationship and a collaborative, collegial process that leads to the publication of a referred journal article.
2. Research
   Require literature-informed comparison of alternatives, evaluation of outcomes and peer review before and after implementation of the innovation in the teaching environment.
3. Collaboration
   To use a collegial process that encourages collaboration during design of innovations and the formation of communities of practice. Use of a fixed paper structure also encourages collaboration by making it easier to compare and contrast current papers with earlier papers.

• Foundations for REACT

Process

Based on these principles, a process has been designed to help in the development of papers describing innovations in teaching and learning that are based on research, informed by multiple perspectives and evaluated. Two important aspects of this process are the use of collaborative writer's workshops and a structured format for the papers that are written.

• Writing Process
• Paper Format
• Presentation - REACT Workshop (video stream of a writer's workshop)
• Sample REACT paper

About REACT

The REACT project has been, and continues to be, supported by CQU through the Learning, Evaluation, Innovation and Development (LEID) Centre; the Division of Teaching and Learning Services and the e-Journal SLEID.

The next call for interested participants will be made in June 2006.

David Jones Faculty of Business and Informatics Central Queensland University Rockhampton, 4701 Australia email: d.jones@cqu.edu.au phone: (+61)-7-49-309-856

Jo Luck Faculty of Business and Informatics Central Queensland University Rockhampton, 4701 Australia email: j.luck@cqu.edu.au phone: (+61)-7-49-309-550