Blog

I blog about educational development, facilitation, and teaching. 

As of March 2018, I am blogging more regularly at isabeauiqbal.com (my coaching site). I will still occasionally blog here.

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Please click on the tags at the bottom of the page (in the black shaded area) if you would like to find a post on a particular theme. For example, to find posts I have tagged with “educational development”, you would click on that word at the bottom of this page.

Photo credit: Colors by Jon Cornwell (CC BY)

  • A FAILFaire in educational development

    FAILFares are not about celebrating failures, but rather about providing ‘a space in which people can celebrate taking risks and the open and honest sharing of information …so that we could learn from these things.’  – (Trucano, 2011) I recently read an interesting blog post, by Michael Trucano (@trucano), that described his experience of organizing and hosting a FAILFaire for the World Bank. It…

  • Educational developer’s portfolio

    Educational developer’s portfolio: Resources for creating your own For the past two years, I have had the pleasure of collaborating with a dynamo group of educational developers on the Educational Developer’s Portfolio*. This initiative allowed me to take my interests and experience in the area of teaching portfolios, and apply it to educational development. Good stuff!…

  • Liberating structures

    I recently had the pleasure of participating in a Liberating Structures workshop in Vancouver. Liberating structures can be defined as “microstructures that make it quick and simple for groups of people of any size to radically improve how they interact and work together” (Lipmanowicz & McCandless, 2013, p. 21). At the core of Liberating Structures’ philosophy…

  • Teaching and learning inventories

    I am currently reading the second edition of Maryellen Weimer‘s excellent book titled “Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice“. In it, she refers readers to a number of inventories relevant to post-secondary teaching and learning (many of these I have not heard of and would like to follow up on). Here is a list of all…

  • Becoming better listeners

    I recently read the textbook Communicating Mindfully by Dr. Dan Huston (@huston_dan) who has written a practical  resource for instructors in post-secondary education.  Though I was drawn to many ideas throughout the book, in this post I consider those from Becoming Better Listeners (Chapter 3) because of their relevance to the work I do with the Formative…