 Next we want to welcome expert mentor Sharon Flynn with and I love the title NUIG experienced academics pilot group. It suggests there are other groups. This mixed discipline group has nine participants from mixed disciplines across university and they're using light bulb moments. So we're a group of academics apparently experienced from NUIG and Sharon Flynn was our mentor and we'd like just to on behalf of a bigger group or nine of us I think in total and to share some of our light bulb moments along the journey. So we've heard the word reflective practice and reflective a lot this morning and I'd heard it obviously for the umpteenth time before I entered the room with this group of people but all of a sudden the little light bulb start to go when I listened as I listened to other practitioners reflect on their own practice but the light really just came on with a concrete example from Sharon from our mentor and from a conference I think it was it should be in that where she reflected on what it was that had happened what she had done and then but what I learned and it was such it was a very simple but concrete example and it gave me the confidence to develop my own professional development develop my own journey and to finally put an e-portfolio together. So I'm a bit of a squatter in this group actually because I am an education developer but as part of that role every year I ask roughly 30 academics to develop a teaching portfolio and every year they struggle and I struggle understanding their struggle. So this was a time for me to kind of practice what I preached so they're laughing at me. Some of the academics who we put through this torture are here today. This was a chance for me to practice what I preached and I struggled. I struggled to find the time and the space to take a step back to think about what I do every day how I teach the conversations and the interactions I have and the things I do to develop myself professionally. I struggled trying to gather my thoughts and thinking about how I was going to present this to someone and make a presentable. I also struggled thinking about where to start and I started many many times and in terms of presentation I started with many different types of tools for presentation and then I struggled knowing when to press the pause button because we know it's never finished it's an ongoing piece so when do I press the pause button and present it. I haven't answered all of these questions at all but I found the whole experience supported by the fortnightly meetings we had and our mentor Sharon. For me that was a huge light bulb moment and that in itself was a huge part of my professional development. So following on from that I was one of those lecturers who's asked to do an e-portfolio not too excited about it so when the pilot scheme started I was like this is perfect I'm going to pop in here I'm going to learn loads and I'm going to fly through it and yes I loved week one we got loads with the domain no light bulb moments but it was going great and then week two was like a sledgehammer that light bulb moment they were looking for evidence they want evidence to support this evidence-based practice and I went into a cold sweat I had a flashback of when I was in primary school and the priest was in front was chatting away and he said that you know if you were in front in a court of law could you be convicted as being a Catholic and I was like oh my god if I'm in front of the teaching and learning form could they actually convict me of doing what I said I'm actually doing I may all talk so I was like right I'm gonna have to find a way around to provide this evidence and not only that now I had already committed to doing an e-portfolio so I had to be visual evidence so well I guess I was a bit scared and bit oh my god maybe I should just pull out and slip back to GMIT and say no more and it was probably one of the best things I could have ever done because now going forward every domain I looked at and every way I look at my teaching now I'm always looking for evidence I've got loads of loads of plans of action going forward for the next year and I probably asked more questions within my group than answered him so I got loads of advice and loads of examples of different ways that I can actually get that evidence or get more feedback in different formats from my students going forward and so I've got I guess a new perspective and how I'm teaching and moving forward with that and I found it was a great experience there's a light bulb moment I'm Chris I'm also a slight interloper I'm not actually I'm a librarian at anyway Galway and so so I think what was really helpful for me and and I guess a sort of light bulb moment was that the framework identified what I was sort of thinking my head as a couple of axes along which to structure my my professional development but I think I'm gonna go with branches I really like that tree from earlier it was really that was a really nice tree so I'm gonna go with branches and say so you know in terms of the domains themselves they really identified some some some new areas for me of to carry out my professional development some some some themes that I hadn't really thought about that I can I can move towards as I'm thinking about new opportunities to to do my professional development and then along the another sort of branch is these types of learning so so pushing myself to move from being a new learner consolidated learner and then on to mentoring and leading so that's another thing for me to think about and it started to help me to push forward along that that other kind of branch and so I'm specifically doing that in the context of a CPD project called ready 23 so I'm pretty excited about that it's a it's a librarian CPD projects if there any librarians in here who've heard of that you you can you can you can talk to me about that if you want to find out more so so that's all I've found a fantastic project to be a part of so thanks very much