Academic Staff Doubles Team a Way to Enhance Students’ Collaborative Leadership Doing Study Course “English for Dentistry”

Description

According to Peter Drucker in a doubles team members cover their teammates, adjusting as necessary to their teammates’ talents and weaknesses and to the changing demands of the game. By collaborative leadership, we mean the process of engaging collective intelligence to deliver results across organisational boundaries when ordinary mechanisms of control are absent. The objective is to study if throughout the delivery of study course “English for Dentistry” to students of Faculty of Dentistry attaining the study course objective is future-proof educational outcome.. Data were collected during the period of academic years 2015/16 till 2020/22 at RSU from Faculty of Dentistry 1st year students taking part in a cross-sectional study.. To ensure that students’ attaining "English for Dentistry" course objective is future-proof educational outcome the elements of research have been integrated into the study course. Students design questionnaires and collect data from Latvia-based respondents, thus conducting a cross-sectional study in small groups. This study year doubles playing with my colleague from the USA, Robert D. Leier, Professor in Applied Linguistics, we are able to go even further and provide the opportunity for students to reach respondents in America and carry out a comparative study. Collecting the data on dental routine and studying dental health of another country population and afterwards making comparison with home country respondents, students expand their horizon, demonstrate their linguistic and Dentistry-specific skills and exhibit acquired competences.. The requirements for doubles-type teams are quite stringent, involving intense commitment, trust and collaboration on the part of the team, nevertheless, academic environment fosters building such teams. Collaborative leadership fights a silo mentality and fosters ‘fluid intelligence’, the capacity to think flexibly across boundaries. RSU academic environment creates the climate that promotes high-quality collaboration forging a shared purpose that inspires all participants, harnesses collective intelligence and ensures accountability for results. 

Period	30 Mar 2023
Event title	RSU research week 2023: University Teaching and Learning
Event type	Conference
Organiser	Rīga Stradiņš University
Location	Riga, LatviaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International