“I wanted to be the best teacher I could be, and I have always wanted to have more skills and knowledge to develop my students.”
Heather has a background in business, marketing, psychology, IT and now education. After completing her IT degree at Wintec, Heather was given the opportunity to return to Wintec as a lecturer. She decided to enrol in the Adult & Tertiary Teaching, Level 4 (ATT4) qualification: “I wanted to understand educational language; things like ‘formative and summative’. Secondly, it was for my own personal learning, I wanted to be the best teacher I could be, and I always wanted to have more skills and knowledge to develop my students.”
Initially, Heather had some concerns about a return to study: “It had been quite a while, so I was worried that it was going to be full on and I’d struggle to balance work, my personal life and study. I also felt that I’d have a lot of catch up and preparation to do as I was going in completely blank. However, it was quite the contrary. The course was designed very well, it was interactive, well-structured and there was a lot of support from the Facilitator and the LearningWorks team. One of the other great things is that the class has people from multiple industries (e.g. nurses, construction, IT), and they all felt very similar to me which was reassuring.
Having people from a wide variety of industries helped with my learning as well. Sometimes if I found it hard to wrap my head around a concept, I’d hear how one of the nurses (for example) had applied it in their workplace. This made me think from a different perspective and made the content easier to digest.”
Heather and her colleagues have noticed that her teaching approach has changed for the better since completing the ATT4 programme. She encourages anyone that is thinking about doing the course to give it a go: