bioCEED Teachers Retreat – finally!

The 7th annual bioCEED Teachers Retreat took place June 13th and 14th at Hotel Park Vossevangen on Voss. bioCEED was happy to announce the BIO Teachers Retreat after having to postpone several times due to pandemic restrictions. The Teachers Retreat is an annual seminar/workshop for all teachers at The Department of Biological Sciences and has previously been organized around different topics such as active learning and supervision. The main aims of the Teachers Retreat are building a scholarly and collegial teacher culture, building competences, and sharing experiences. The retreat is often organized through workshops. A key feature of these retreats is the creation of a shared language around teaching, and a safe place to discuss teaching and learning with our colleagues.

This June the topic for the Teachers Retreat was content and alignment in our study programmes. This topic was inspired by the ongoing project “Student active research and transferable skills in redesign of biology education”. To make the process transparent, and also to include more voices in the process, teachers were invited to contribute in a workshop identifying essential topics for the bachelor’s degree, and the sequence in which topics should be introduced. Through this project and workshop, bioCEED and BIO are contributing to testing and adapting a model for study program redesign and backwards planning in Norwegian higher education, and UiB in particular. We plan to analyze teacher feedback from the retreat and present those findings at the next retreat later this year.