Making Connections in Poland through Teaching and Learning Support

Over the past five years, the UG has taught more than 300 Polish university teachers in effective teaching and learning practices. The project was carried out by Educational Support and Innovation (ESI) facilitators, together with experienced lecturers from across the University of Groningen. Project leader Jan Folkert Deinum is impressed by the impact the project has had: 'We see that many Polish universities are now setting up their own teacher professionalization programs. Fantastic to see how our participants are now committed to Polish (higher) education quality.'

All Polish participants have had basic training, comparable to the UG’s University Teaching Qualification (UTQ). The participants first came to Groningen for a week to get acquainted with education at the UG and participate in initial workshops. This was followed by three modules in Poland over the span of one year.

Following this programme, participants could then apply to three in-depth programmes aimed at making teaching and learning initiatives more sustainable in their own institutions: Advanced Teaching Qualification, Educational Leadership (comparable to the Groningen STQ) and Train the Trainer. Rick Huizinga, responsible for this advanced programme: 'Train the Trainer was particularly exciting for us: do we research and reflect on our own work well-enough in order to properly help academic teachers train their own colleagues? We really learned a lot from that and the insights carried over to our current work at the UG.'

Tracy Poelzer, who developed the Advanced Teaching Qualification: 'The ability to go into more depth with what we do educationally at the UG was wonderful. I particularly appreciated the collaboration with instructors at the UG, who presented "elective" workshops to participants in all tracks of the programme. It brought extra insight to have them share and inspire on an international level with our Polish colleagues.'

Jan Folkert notes that the project had an impact not only in Poland, but also on the UG itself: 'We developed a lot in the project that we now use at the UG. And we have also learned to look differently at how we train teachers ourselves. A nice bonus is that we were also able to extract research data from the project. Very necessary, because there is far too little research into what really helps university teachers to provide good education.'

The recently-concluded ‘Master of Didactics’ project was initiated by the Polish Ministry of Higher Education and financed from the European Social Fund. A total of 1000 teachers have been trained; in addition to the RUG, the universities of Ghent, Oslo, Århus and University College London also participated to the basic programme.