Hello fellow SCoPE users,
It’s long overdue, but at last we are ready to post some information about the work we do in employee development through the Douglas Development Office at Douglas College. I’d like to introduce the Douglas Development Coordinators, a quartet of three faculty and one staff who are responsible for building employee capacity by providing high quality, timely professional development at Douglas College. Our acronym is DDT, but there is nothing toxic about us! Douglas Development Coordinators are seconded from their home faculties for a three year period, but we maintain other identities:
- Julia Robinson also coordinates the Learning Centre on campus
- Thea Berretta also teaches in Sociology
- Wendy Waidson works full-time as our Office Coordinator and
- I (Lin Langley) teach Communications and Print Futures Professional Writing courses.
Our mandate is to enable individuals to achieve their learning objectives, so that they can fulfill their roles and responsibilities within the teaching and learning process.
Often, Douglas Development is referred to as the “glue” that connects people in diverse disciplines, services, and faculties across the College. We are proud to work in an office that brings people together in meaningful ways to talk about their work. We have offices at both the New Westminster and the David Lam campuses, where we provide voluntary and free professional development opportunities for faculty, staff, administrators and other members of the College community. We seek to provide a place for open dialogue across the College community, working cooperatively with individuals and groups to develop, deliver, and support a wide range of professional development opportunities.
In addition to regular workshops related to teaching, learning, assessment, technology, research and College strategic directions, we are responsible for a number of major initiatives.
- We organize a bi-annual Douglas College Professional Development Day (DCPD Day), when classes are cancelled and many College services are closed to allow employees to come together to listen to and interact with local and international presenters.
- In association with the DCPD Day, we host a bi-annual “Opening Classroom Doors” event, where for a week in February, we invite instructors to welcome College employees to observe in their classes.
- We have developed a faculty peer mentoring program, which we fondly call Peer FM, where pairs or trios of instructors come together on a regular basis to talk about issues related to teaching, learning, technology, research, College governance, and/or key resources, groups, or people.
- We are one of five BC institutions involved in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning’s Institutional Leadership Program. Our job here is to promote the scholarship of teaching and learning on our campuses, which we do by working with a cohort of interested and enthusiastic faculty members to investigate a shared research question related to student perceptions of an engaged classroom environment.
Of course, we sit on a variety of committees and work with our senior management team to promote understanding of initiatives such as our new Academic Signature and the College Post-Probationary Faculty Evaluation process. But it is really in the less tangible areas where the “work” of Douglas Development occurs. We seek to:
- Support all stages of development in an educator’s career,
- Support and continue developing a College-wide ethos of teaching and learning
- Build community across the College.
But do we like cats? Yes, the pedagogical, the feline, and the chocolate variety. And we like dogs, too. Wendy loves her aged diabetic cat named Mittens, Lin is fond of her two felines, Spud and Princess, and Thea enjoys her chocolate: Kit Kat, to be honest. Julia has a soft spot for her arthritic old dog, who, thankfully, is no longer up to chasing cats.
So that’s us! Finally, we have carved out some time to post our information on the SCoPE site. Thank you to Liz for providing this venue. We look forward to learning more about you and your institutions.