In 2022 I established a new model for the School of Population Health Education Academy. The Education Academy offers the opportunity for the school’s teaching staff to come together to share their ideas and innovations around excellence in teaching. The Education Academy has been developed on the distributed leadership model where the collective expertise of the group is recognised and provided space to affect change. Two initiatives that I have implemented:

1. Monthly forum. The forum provides a regular time and space for educators to be exposed to the latest pedagogical research (journal club style), share successes (talks/demonstrations) and collectively solve teaching challenges (grant pitching style). Topics have ranged from assessment rubrics to creating videos for teaching to building a learning community.
2. Education focused talks at school seminars. A set number of the regular school seminars are now devoted to topics in education. This is intended as a vehicle for disseminating learnings from education focussed activities/conferences/workshops. It is beneficial for the Education Academy to have a broad reach as everyone can be considered an educator in some way, even if it isn’t in a formal teaching role. For example, academics from the school who attended the Course Design Institute in 2022 shared their learnings together with their plans for development of their courses.

All sessions are recorded and available on a Teams channel for future reference. Informal feedback from academics within the school has indicated an appreciation for the topics raised so far and an enthusiasm to keep the conversation going.