Looking ahead

I plan to move forward in my professional development by gaining more and more diverse experience from the field, by accepting new challenges and opportunities for professional development (for example attending lectures and courses that target some of my “work in progress” areas), by gaining insight from related areas (for example through cross-curricular work, school visits and research activities connected to related professions), and by more frequently and systematically collaborating with colleagues to observe and reflect on my own and other’s teaching. In the future, I also hope to implement even more of these perspectives into my research.

I proceed with a stronger sense of “humble confidence” than what I possessed in the beginning of my teaching career, a confidence that I believe, in agreement with Risan, Christophersen, Enli, Eriksen and Tkachenko (2009) can help build some core qualities in a university lecturer (p. 13):

• a certainty that I know something and have something to offer others,
• an openness towards my students when it comes to sharing perspectives from my own background and experiences, and
• an openness towards my students when it comes to understanding their needs.