Portsmouth Business School
Winning lesson is in the bank
Wed, 13 Jun 2012 11:15:00 BST
Human resources specialists at Portsmouth Business School, Alex Tymon and Cherry Hood, are joint winners of an international inaugural teaching and learning prize.
Their reflective writing activity is one of the first deposits in a new international bank of excellent resources for lecturers in the subject of Human Resource Management.
The Portsmouth academics were awarded joint first prize with two colleagues from Bangor at an international University Forum for Human Resource Development conference in Portugal. A recent graduate of Portsmouth’s Masters in Business Administration (MBA) course, Heather Short, was shortlisted for best research paper at the same conference.
Alex said: “Having a bank of good ideas for ways of teaching this subject is an excellent idea but I think that if you want to take something from the bank you should also be prepared to put something in. We certainly didn’t expect to win first prize.
“Our activity gives students a chance to reflect on their learning which is important because it helps them understand what they’ve learned, helps them recognise what they know and it feeds forward by changing their behaviour long-term.
“Continuing Professional Development requires people to write down what they’ve learned; our example requires students to also link back what they’ve learned to theory.”
Alex and Cherry were given a £250 cash prize at the conference, the major annual gathering for those studying or working in the HR field from all over the world.
Portsmouth MBA graduate Heather Short attended as a scholar practitioner and her shortlisted paper was titled “A critical evaluation of virtual training in SMEs”.
Dr Valerie Anderson, Margaret Mackay and Cheryl Brook, all of the Department of Human Resource and Marketing Management at Portsmouth Business School, also presented their research at the conference.
Conference organisers, the UFHRD, said interest in teaching and learning was of fundamental importance because human resources was at its heart about lifelong learning.