Brock staff member Natalie Currie-Patterson is sharing her teaching and learning expertise with the world and helping to support student success through faculty development at the University College of the Cayman Islands (UCCI).

Late last summer, the Centre of Pedagogical Innovation’s (CPI) Associate Director of Educational Development delivered professional development workshops for faculty members at UCCI, which signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Brock in April 2024.

At Brock, Currie-Patterson supports faculty members, instructors and teaching assistants, providing guidance and resources around different pedagogical approaches, accessible classroom teaching and learning, course design, and assessment and evaluation.The two UCCI workshops she developed and facilitated covered assessment strategies for effective teaching and learning as well as using feedback to improve learning outcomes for students.

While the primary purpose of her trip was to teach others, Currie-Patterson said it was a valuable opportunity to grow in her own practice.

“I learned a great deal from the folks in these sessions and the conversations that we had, the questions they asked and the examples they brought to our dialogue on assessment and feedback,” she said. “I went there to share ideas about assessment and feedback, but certainly I learned a great deal from them as well.”

She was particularly struck by how similar UCCI and Brock are in the ways units collaborate to support students and in the common teaching and learning experiences of faculty members and instructors.

“Participants were interested in a lot of the same things people at Brock are interested in around teaching in this post-COVID era; supporting students through the teaching and learning experience in ways that are meaningful to them and using multimodalities in their classrooms,” she said.

As well as engaging with UCCI faculty members, she was also able to attend professional development sessions on topics such as student engagement and generative artificial intelligence.

Currie-Patterson hopes to weave some of the lessons she learned from her international peers into the work she does at Brock.

“It’s really interesting to see the ways that people are teaching in different contexts and the way that different institutions do things. I think we’re here working in service of high quality, effective teaching and learning and it’s helpful to understand the various pathways that can lead us to those things and to have them influence our practice going forward,” she said. “It was a really great experience.”