Two-day workshop for Academic Staff of CfPS

A two-day workshop for Academic Staff Development was held at Excel World Conference Hall recently. The intended outcomes for this initial workshop were for the participants to be able to understand and explain current trends in higher education, and having understood the development and relevance of the learner-centred approach, to be able to identify how such could be integrated, and finally to apply such more specifically in preparing the module plans and lessons plans for the coming academic year starting September 2013.

The academic leadership team consisting of Saliya Pieris (Chairman), Manouri Pieris (Deputy Managing Director) and Charles Fernando (Chief Academic Officer) had been thinking of this for some months already in order to make such a programme the launching pad for a continual process of empowering the academic staff to perform even better than they currently do.

Some small steps had been taken already during the current academic year to support reflective practice among the staff but this had been thought of as a catalytic intervention. In March this year a high-level panel from the University of London of (which CfPS is a Registered Centre) had been here for what is known as the Institutional Periodic Review. Hearing about the proposed programme they had highly commended the idea.

The key-note address was delivered by Professor Chandra Gunawardena, renowned educationist who has been a leader in the Faculties of Education of the University of Colombo and of the Open University, and who is now the Commonwealth of Learning, UNESCO Chair in Distance Education at the Open University of Sri Lanka. Other resource persons who are experts in the field of Academic Staff Development contributed to the programme. The programme included presentations, group work, individual activity and at the end a Poster Presentation.