Community of Practice - Professional Development Framework Portfolio - Feb. 2020 to Sept. 2020

"Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly." - Etienne Wenger

Twelve apostles commenced on our journey to complete the Professional Development Framework Portfolio (PDFP) module in GMIT on the 27th February 2020. Little did we know then that the Covid 19 emergency was only around the courner and we went from working together in the same place

to working together online - and still smiling (most of us anyway!).

I would like to sincerely thank the other two menbers of my Triad on this PDFP journey, Mark Costello and Eleanor Rainsford for their support and fun and hard work. I would not have gotten through it without you both. I had never even heard the term "Triad" before the 22nd Feb this year, now it is one of my favoutite words!

Within GMIT we are fortunate to have a Teaching and Learning Office (TLO) that provides many resources, but importantly a community within which we participate in dialogue about our teaching practices.

Link to Evidence of Collaboration in our Triad

Thank you also to everyone else on the module and worked hard in their pairs and triads. Thank you for your feedback on my portfolio, posts and assignments, peer learning and peer assessment are such powerful tools. I will endeavour to include more of both for my own students.

And last but certainly not least, a huge thank you from all of us to these two wonderful lecturers, Kate Dunne and Pauline Logue. You were delivering a new module which is stressful enough, and to colleagues which is even more stressful but then Covid struck and you had to modify the delivery of the programme - talk about reflection in action! It was wonderful that you had us set up with Microsoft Teams for this module after workshop 1 as it allowed us to hit the ground running with Teams once we all had to vacate the building and go online.

Not only did you both survive the additional challenge that Covid brought but you excelled in providing effective support and feedback to us, your students and always returned a message on Teams or other queries with a positive note. We appreciated all the support and it got us through, I will never underestimate the thumbs up emoji again! Continued success with the Professional Development Framework Portfolio module, it is a lovely module to study and a bit of head space away from the normal lecturing role.

Good luck to all for the

academic year ahead.

I may see some of you on

the Masters journey in

2020/20121.

Best regards,

Rachel