Back in 2006 or so, I kicked off a process called REACT – Reflection, Evaluation and Collaboration in Teaching – which was aimed to improving the quantity and quality of the scholarship of teaching and learning practiced at my university.

For various contextual reasons (and perhaps some inherent in the project) it didn’t go very far. The following are some of the resources developed for that project

REACT – What is it?

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.

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.

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.