QESS - Collaborative Development Programmes

Creating a space for developing tacit knowledge of teachers

Tacit knowledge needs a context to develop. Social, cultural and historical contexts are important for individuals as such contexts provide the basis for one to interpret information to create meanings: “there are no facts, only interpretations’. In the process, we need a ‘space’ for the discourse and knowledge creation. This space can include physical space such as an office space, virtual space such as email, and mental space such as shared ideals.

Through the space, teachers with shared ideals on a particular issue of their work, for example, “What should be the focus of a financial accounting course of first year business studies of AD or HD programmes?”; “How to enhance student participation in first year English of AD or HD programmes?”; “How to design assessment strategies to assess the performance of students in a statistic course of second year IT related AD of HD programmes?” etc will have opportunities:

To get together in a face-to-face situation to share their practices, feedbacks, energy, passions and tension in handling the issue;

To join heads in suggesting, planning and designing classroom practices, with commonality for all groups and specialty for individual group on that particular issue for trying out;
To implement the suggested practices in their own situations, collecting feedbacks to share amongst the group, review and revise and repeat the process as appropriate;