Conversations

Early this May the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning hosted Creating a Learning Culture:  Conversations that Matter, the institute’s fifth annual Conference on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching. This conference explored the elements of meaningful conversations and conversations helps us understand student learning and enhance teaching practices. The two-day conference included all members of the academic community from universities across Canada.

Jenny Krahn, PhD, Director of CCAL, and Rita Egizii, doctoral student at the Werklund School of Education and research team member at CCAL, presented Onboarding students to a soft skills development platform. The Haskayne Guided Path System™ (Haskayne GPS™) allows students to ground their leadership development in self-knowledge through a series of self-assessments.  From there, students are encouraged to develop an intentional plan – a pathway – to strengthen their soft-skills. This past year 100 per cent of first-year Haskayne students used the Haskayne GPS™ as part of their coursework.

“The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Research Grant, awarded through the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, supports research into how to best design the first-point of connection to the Haskayne GPS™,” explains Rita Egizii. 

The Haskayne GPS™ is an on-line leadership development tool for Haskayne students.  The backbone of the tool is the development plan that each student creates for herself/himself.  One of the attractive features of the Haskayne GPS™ is the pool of self-select assessments that help each student establish a baseline for their development goals. 

The Conversations conference was an excellent opportunity for CCAL to contribute to the scholarly field of soft skill development for undergraduate students, to introduce the Haskayne GPS™ to the University of Calgary community and to ground the program in evidence-based research. 

“What we hope to achieve with the research is three-fold.  First, we hope to show that a tool can be developed that strategically and methodically guides a student through the process of leadership development.  Secondly, our research will show that the progress of a student through that development process can be quantitatively measured. Thirdly, our work will illustrate that the Haskayne GPS™ is an innovative tool, relevant and provoking enough that student choose to engage in and with it beyond course requirements. 

Findings from the data will contribute to the scholarship of both learning and teaching by providing evidence that a strategically and rigorously designed learner-centred tool can help business students to build leadership capacity in parallel with their educational and life experiences during, and after, their time at the University of Calgary.” 

The Haskayne GPS™ is a collaborative project involving field experts, CCAL team leads, input from community leaders and, most of all, students who stand to benefit most from a tool that personalizes their leadership development.