Change Management - Practising what we Teach: Successfully Engaging International Students in the Teaching, Learning & Assessment Process

Abstract

In this article we will review how a Teaching Enhancement and Student Success (TESS) project was used to undertake a particular type of action research on a module which attracts mainly international students, and was suffering from poor student engagement and a high incidence of plagiarism. The subject matter for the module is change management so we, as the module team, should have been able to use our expertise in this field to inform our approach to change, and hence ‘practice what we teach’. We will review how the findings from the action research project were used to change delivery of the module, and reflect on our own practice of conducting action research and managing change. As part of this, the common roots of action research and planned change management in the work of Kurt Lewin will be explored (Burnes, 2009), to help us in our reflections.