Scope Academy

SCOPE Academy is a training program that trains teachers to become SCOPE trainers, with the primary goal of ensuring the quality and sustainable embedding of education focused on students' personal development. This education contributes to students' personal and professional development (PPD) by cultivating an open, curious, and reflective attitude, enabling students to make choices that suit them and achieve good alignment between their various identities.

SCOPE's approach is based on a solid theoretical framework that helps students navigate the complex interaction between socialization – the internalization of professional norms and culture – and subjectification – the development of autonomy and uniqueness. The main theories underlying this are Professional Identity Formation (PIF) by Cruess et al. (2015), Transformative Learning by Jack Mezirow (2000), and Systems Thinking from a systemic perspective (Hawkins, 2019). For more information, see our article in Medical Teacher.

SCOPE lessons follow a step-by-step lesson structure that reflects the steps of the transformative learning process. The teacher plays a crucial role by activating reflection, modeling the right attitude (friendly, open, reflective, engaged, curious, and non-judgmental), and guiding students in exploring their experiences, emotions, thoughts, and behavior.

The SCOPE trainer training consists of seven three-hour sessions, an individual supervision meeting, observation moments, and peer consultation meetings. The themes of the sessions focus on:

• Session 1: Professional identity development and increasing self-awareness.
• Session 2: SCOPE lesson structure and self-awareness (beliefs, qualities, and pitfalls).
• Session 3: Listening and awareness of assumptions, specifically about good teaching.
• Session 4: Systems thinking and awareness of one's own socialization.
• Session 5: Systems leadership and application of systems thinking in education.
• Session 6: Making one's own teaching visible through materialization and reflection on the teaching role.

Additional Modules

SCOPE Academy also contains 2 separate supplementary modules:

Unlock Your Students' Potential: Learn to Teach Reflection Skills

(in collaboration with FEB + ESI)

Reflection is an essential skill for all university students and plays a crucial role in their academic development. But how do you get students to reflect and what is your role as a teacher in this process? Teaching your students to reflect is not something done 'just like that'. It requires specific knowledge, skills, and teaching methods, which will be addressed in this training. This course is designed for lecturers who want to delve deeper into the art of teaching reflection. It complements the University Teaching Qualification (UTQ/BKO) and is ideal for educators looking to enhance their ability to encourage and teach reflective skills.

More information: Unlock Your Students’ Potential: Learn to Teach Reflection Skills | Cursussen en workshops | Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

Collaboration: Guiding Personal Development within Collaboration - From Friction to Learning Potential

As a university, we support our students to utilize their full potential as academically trained experts. This statement from the strategic plan is specified by the sentence: "they acquire the knowledge and skills to look beyond the boundaries of traditional disciplines and to contribute together with others to solving complex scientific and societal problems" (Strategic Plan, UoG, p 8).

Exactly these 'knowledge and skills' to move on and across boundaries is quite a challenge. One way to teach students these 'knowledge and skills' is by having them collaborate during their studies. However, we also know that this brings challenges. How do you organize education that is representative of the 'real' world? How do you prevent negative group effects (such as free riders)? How do you ensure that each individual student has actually learned from the process of collaboration?

Giving students a learning experience that also enables them to navigate complex collaborations after their studies is quite a challenge. How do you approach that? What can you as a teacher do to support your students in this? And what does that require from you as a teacher? In other words: How do you ensure that the student knows how to navigate in a next collaboration in a way that is healthy for themselves and others?

This course offers you a perspective on approaching this issue. It gives you some guidance, you learn from the experience of others, and we hope to inspire you to design your own subject with a renewed perspective.

This module is currently in development and is expected to be offered in spring 2026.

More information: scope umcg.nl