BQC7003 is a 3-credit postgraduate course in the Master of Facilities and Maintenance Management programme. The course addresses organisational behaviour and resource management through topics such as management theory, communication, leadership, decision-making, human resource management, ethics, and performance evaluation. Its learning outcomes require students to identify teamwork skills in management organisations, interpret organisational theory and effective resource management, and organise professional discussion on organisational behaviour issues in multiple contexts with clear, evidence-informed recommendations.
My contribution in a co-taught course
This is a co-taught course, and my contribution focuses on approximately half of the module. I position this case study not as a claim of sole ownership, but as an example of how my teaching practice operates within a shared postgraduate teaching environment, and as a case in which my teaching contribution is clearly identifiable and pedagogically distinctive. In particular, the course allows me to contribute strongly in areas aligned with my teaching philosophy: discussion-led learning, inquiry, collaborative meaning-making, and the use of theory to support professional interpretation and evidence-informed judgement.
The parts of the course that I lead include the opening framing of the module, managing organisation and resources, competencies and skills of facilities management staff, work motivation and personality, management practice, current issues in organisation management and business, discussion, and shared involvement in the interim and final presentation stages .
This makes the course a useful example for my portfolio because it shows how my teaching operates within a shared postgraduate environment while still carrying a clear signature in its learning design, facilitation style, and assessment contribution.
Design intention
BQC7003 allows me to teach in a different context and to a different level of learner from my undergraduate courses. For me, postgraduate teaching should feel different to students. I expect them to take more responsibility for their own learning, work more independently, and begin practising the habits of lifelong learning as part of the learning experience itself. I want them to take away not only knowledge, but also the framework of academic inquiry, critical thinking, self-directed learning, and ownership of their learning experience.
For this reason, I design my contribution to the course so that students do much of the learning work themselves, while my task is to facilitate that experience. I want them to engage actively with theory, connect it to professional and personal experience, debate ideas, and use evidence to justify their interpretations. This intention is also reflected in how I structure the course. About half of the teaching weeks that I design are built as self-directed learning weeks, where students work through prepared lesson materials that include assigned reading, guided commentary, interactive Moodle lesson activities, and embedded assessment. I use this structure deliberately so that postgraduate students do not experience learning as something delivered to them, but as something they must actively work through and take responsibility for.
How the teaching works
My contact sessions in this course are mainly seminar-style. Students are given reading materials one week in advance and are expected to respond to prompts in the class Teams channel before the contact session. This is not simply to check preparation. It is a deliberate strategy to ensure they come to class ready to engage with the text rather than encounter it for the first time during the session.
During the three-hour contact session, students discuss, unpack, and critically connect the topic to their own professional or workplace experience. Because many of the postgraduate students are already working, or have prior work experience, I deliberately use that experience as part of the learning process. The sessions are therefore built around discussion, academic inquiry, and professional meaning-making rather than content delivery alone.
The strategies I use include Socratic questioning, jigsaw activities, open discussions, debate, and post-session continuation in Teams. My role is to facilitate discussion, challenge students to think outside the box, elicit responses, and push them to justify what they are saying. Each session ends with a summary of the key learning, so that students can consolidate the topic before moving on.
About half of my teaching weeks in this course are designed as self-directed learning. In those weeks, students work through prepared Moodle lesson materials that typically include reading texts, guided prompts for response, interactive elements, and assessment tasks. These are not filler or unsupervised weeks. They are structured learning experiences intended to help students engage with theory actively, prepare more seriously for seminar discussion, and develop the habits of self-directed postgraduate learning.
Assessment design
One of the strongest parts of my contribution to this course is in the design of the main coursework. A major group assessment used in the course was originally designed by me as a way of creating an accessible but intellectually demanding case that all students could work on collaboratively. The idea was to avoid the access limitations of many real-world organisational case studies while still requiring students to engage with authentic organisational issues.
In one recent iteration of the course, this took the form of a published televised documentary analysis, where students selected a televised real organisational documentary and produced a group video analysis that combined problem framing, theory-led insights, teamwork and relationship analysis, and actionable organisational recommendations . The task required students to anchor their claims to time-stamped scenes, triangulate these with external sources, and translate organisational behaviour theory into specific managerial recommendations . This made the coursework both accessible and analytically demanding.
The marking was carried out jointly by the teaching team. We served together as the panel during presentations, marked the accompanying report concurrently, and then averaged the marks. This fits the co-taught nature of the course while still reflecting a distinct teaching contribution through assessment design.
Current issues and lived experience
Another part of my contribution that reflects my teaching philosophy particularly well is the design of current-issues learning tasks. One example is the co-working centre visit, where students are asked to visit a co-working space and interpret it through the combined perspectives of organisational behaviour and facilities management. The task requires them to notice and analyse community interaction, workplace dynamics, physical and organisational layout, facilities and amenities, technology, collaboration barriers, atmosphere, and branding in relation to the assigned reading and their own observations.
The purpose of this exercise is not simply to describe a place. It is to help students experience FM execution and organisational behaviour in the real world as both customer and observer. Good facilities management should feel seamless and almost unnoticed by lay users, but professionals should be able to detect clues from lived experience. This kind of exercise helps students develop critical thinking through what they experience directly, and then connect that experience to theory in a reflective and academically informed way.
What this course shows about my teaching
BQC7003 is a good example of my teaching because it shows how I adapt my practice to a postgraduate context without losing the core principles that shape my work. In this course, I push the constructivist side of my philosophy more deliberately. I expect students to prepare in advance, bring experience into discussion, engage critically with theory, and take greater responsibility for what and how they learn.
The course also shows that my teaching is not defined only by undergraduate technical subjects or field-based investigation. It also includes seminar-style postgraduate teaching in which discussion, inquiry, interpretation, and professional debate are central. My role here is not to dominate the session, but to design the conditions for deeper learning and then facilitate that learning as it unfolds.
BQC7003 demonstrates how my teaching changes appropriately with learner level and context. At postgraduate level, I want students to experience a different kind of learning relationship: one where they are more independent, more accountable, and more engaged in academic inquiry as part of their professional development. This course reflects my belief that higher education should not only provide knowledge, but also cultivate critical thinking, self-directed learning, and ownership of the learning experience itself.