Pedagogical Counseling Program Development through an Adapted Community of Inquiry Framework

Cife’S Pedagogical Counseling

CIFE is an example of a University Educational Development Center or Center of Teaching Excellence, offering guidance and multiple resources for Teacher Professional Development (Perry & Smart, 2007). The Center has experience in various programs for counseling of University lectures, with the objective of improving the educational quality of the undergraduate and postgraduate programs that the University offers. The PC process aims to generate an authentic and profound dialogue about specific and contextualized innovations in teaching practices, with a view to identifying counseling elements and strategies that may lead to improvements in that particular teaching and learning process. In many cases the Laboratory of Investigation and Development on Informatics and Education (LIDIE), a branch of CIFE, has included in the strategies of PC the generation of learning environments supported by Information and Communication Technologies.

We outline in Figure 1 the schematics of standard PC processes undertaken by CIFE. One or various CIFE teams (A, B, C, etc.) attend each PC process (PC1, PC2, etc.). In all CIFE PC projects, the accompanying process is done via a collaborative work and with the participation of teams of professionals of a variety of disciplines such as pedagogy, systems engineering, psychology, graphic design and so on. Sometimes, but not often, a CIFE staff with expertise in the lecturer’s discipline as well as in pedagogy is also present in the accompanying team.