Pieter Hertzog Du Toit

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Pretoria

Background. Clinical associates (ClinAs) are educated in decentralised learning platforms where they gain skills and a concrete understanding of the fundamental challenges of healthcare in remote and poverty-stricken districts of South Africa. Due to the decentralised nature of the programme, these students seldom have access to ‘on-campus’ academi...

Background. Clinical associates (ClinAs) are educated in decentralised learning platforms where they gain skills and a concrete understanding of the fundamental challenges of healthcare in remote and poverty-stricken districts of South Africa. Due to the decentralised nature of the programme, these students seldom have access to ‘on-campus’ academi...

Tourism education should strive to provide students with authentic learning opportunities so that they can develop into well-rounded graduates. The industry is in constant shift, with numerous forces continuously affecting its sustainability. In synchronicity, the higher education landscape should also adapt to the needs of the industry, society, e...

Background: The purpose of this study was to explore the use of a modified nominal group technique (mNGT) to inform the curriculum of a Short Learning Programme for peer mentors in the Bachelor of Clinical Medical Practice (BCMP) program. Methods: An mNGT was used to achieve group consensus. Research participants included academic staff and stud...

This paper serves as a conceptualisation of how the principles of Whole Brain® thinking can be used to inform lecturer identity. The objective of this position paper is to engage discourse on the educational professional development of early-career academics in health sciences. It is about laying a scholarly foundation for self-study. As a scholarl...

Background: The study was conducted to the background of a qualification in medical clinical practice offered at a Faculty of Health Sciences at a university in South Africa. Aim: The aim of the study was to determine how the theory of Whole Brain® thinking informed our professionalism and its relevance to transforming self and practice. Setting:...

Background: The study was conducted to the background of a qualification in medical clinical practice offered at a Faculty of Health Sciences at a university in South Africa. Aim: The aim of the study was to determine how the theory of Whole Brain® thinking informed our professionalism and its relevance to transforming self and practice. Setting: T...

This poster summarises research that was performed on Internal Auditing honours students to determine whether yoga techniques could be used in a class room environment to promote a calm and relaxed state of mind.

Background: The Bachelor of Clinical Medical Practice (BCMP) is offered at the University of Pretoria, South Africa since 2009. As lecturers responsible for offering some of the first-year modules, we embarked on an educational professional development trajectory. It includes continuous self-study and studying the collective. The aim is lecturer-id...

During work integrated learning (WIL), pre-service mentoring helps prepare final-year education students for the workplace. The pre-service teacher is placed alongside a mentor teacher, and the higher education institution (HEI) stipulates the timeline and the requirements. This study follows a wide-ranging research project, identified by the acron...

As a proponent of action research for more than 20 years, I reflect on my scholarship of higher education using an auto-ethnographic lens. The research reported focuses mainly on my facilitating of learning as a lecturer at the University of Pretoria, one of the largest residential universities in South Africa. Through informal educational professi...

The self-enquiry reported in this article is conducted at a meta-level of meaning making. A meta-level of reflection is typical of a meta-cognitive mind-set; it entails reflecting on my reflection from a scholarly point of view. The theory on whole brain thinking informs the conceptual framework for my research and teaching practice; therefore I ha...

In this brief overview of action research in higher education in southern Africa , the authors, all of whom are academic leaders in action research in this region, report on the successes and challenges of conducting action research in settings where its methodological validity and rigor are still questioned by many mainstream academics. This chapt...

Nareen Gonsalves, Pieter du Toit, Theresa Chisanga (together with a team of colleagues at her university), and Daisy Pillay are all higher education teachers and researchers (teacher researchers) working in very different university settings in South Africa.

This article reports on an investigation into the use of action research for beginner teachers’ professional development through the use of peer mentoring. Action research principles were applied by the mentor and the participating mentees/peers, forming a scholarly community of practice. The mentees were empowered to transform their teaching pract...

Background. The literature on deans of medicine focuses mostly on the qualifications, roles, abilities, management and leadership competence of the deans. The gap between theory and practice is, however, the nucleus of the position. Objectives. To describe insights into the educational forces that act on a dean of medicine and the implications for...

This article takes the form of a meta-reflection on the educational contribution to the wider community of the University of Pretoria made by Professor Graham Duncan. It is but a snapshot of the academic life of a scholar of note. The epicentre of the article revolves around his educational professionalism that emanated from an intrapersonal point...

The study reported in this paper focuses on the idea that I, as academic specialising in higher education, monitor and gather data about my practice, alongside colleagues enrolled for a formal professional qualification in higher education, with a view to sustaining scholarly and professional development. I do this to improve my practice in an inno...

The Foundation for Professional Development offers, inter alia, an advanced management development programme for health care managers in the public and private sector, sponsored by the USAID and co-certified by Yale University in the USA. The focus is on professional development and transformational leadership. Authentic learning opportunities are...

Three lecturers respectively in Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology, Occupational Therapy and Physiotherapy (SLPA, OT and PT) at a public Higher Education Institution in South Africa collaborated to determine thinking preferences. The Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI®) was used to collect data from three lecturers while an adapted vers...

Background: Although nursing education aims to equip nursing students to provide care to dying patients and their families, nurses often feel ill-prepared to cope with the emotional labour involved in end-of-life care. Objectives: The aim of the study was to explore and describe nursing students' experiences of end-of-life care through experient...

Summative assessment qualifies the achievement of a student in a particular field of specialization at a given time. Questions should include a range of cognitive levels from Bloom’s taxonomy and be consistent with the learning outcomes of the module in question. Furthermore, a holistic approach to assessment, such as the application of the princip...

In this paper we report the design of a comprehensive Whole Brain® Model for learning and facilitating learning that academics can use to accommodate the diversity of thinking preferences in their higher education practices. It is based on more than 14 years of research at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Data obtained are from fields such...

Acknowledging that we have a diverse representation of thinking preferences in our classrooms, we emphasise that learning opportunities should be designed in such a way that they factor in the uniqueness of the individual student – this creates a challenge to all lecturers.

In chapter 6 we propose a comprehensive flexible Whole Brain® Model for learning and facilitating learning as a tool for lecturers to accommodate students’ diverse thinking preferences, as well as develop areas of lesser preferred modes of learning, thus contributing to the development of students’ potential.

Most lecturers take a traditional view of students being a homogeneous learning group and assume in their teaching that ‘one fits all’. In this chapter the focus is on the data collected over the past 15 years from 1000 university students and 312 lecturers in various faculties. Each group’s data is presented in a figure highlighting the group aver...

This chapter focuses on the design and development of Whole Brain® learning material and tasks, and describes how instructional design processes and products may be enhanced with the use of the Whole Brain® Model. We describe exemplars from an information literacy module and provide an analysis of these examples to illustrate how each example addre...

Facilitating of learning in higher education can be transformed through the use of Whole Brain® learning. Whole Brain® Learning in Higher Education argues that facilitating learning in Higher Education should undergo transformation in order to develop the full academic potential of all stakeholders following the principles of action research. Empir...

Facilitating of learning in higher education can be transformed through the use of Whole Brain® learning. Whole Brain® Learning in Higher Education argues that facilitating learning in Higher Education should undergo transformation in order to develop the full academic potential of all stakeholders following the principles of action research. Empir...

This article provides an overview of the current trends in assessment practice within the field of graphic design. The demands placed on educators to apply sound assessment practice for Higher Education subjects is as intense in the field of graphic design as in any other. Forcing the assessment of creative visual work into existing assessment meth...

Context and setting. Academics face difficulties when trying to include public health in the medical curriculum. The first hurdle is an already overloaded curriculum and the second the marginal interest in the healthy on the part of those who are mainly concerned with the ill. One overlooked potential opportunity for inclusion in the curriculum is...

The Bachelor of Clinical Medical Practice (BCMP) is a new degree at the University of Pretoria (UP), designed to create a new category of mid-level medical workers, namely clinical associates. UP produced its first 44 graduates in 2011. The BCMP created the opportunity to innovate learning and teaching through designing, monitoring and evaluating t...

As an educator I am responsible for my professional development and the professional development of all educators with whom I have scholarly encounters. These encounters involve making a difference in the professional lives of other members of society, for example, in an educational setting with a view to transforming such a society, and transformi...

The Department of Information Science in the Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology at the University of Pretoria is responsible for offering a semester module on Information Literacy to all first-year students across all faculties. The Department has embarked on a process of curriculum innovation of the module. For th...

The operational context of the research reported in this paper is teaching a module on Information Literacy at university level. The specific focus is on the array of learning style preferences of the academic staff responsible for offering the module and of academic and professional staff responsible for curriculum innovation. The learning style p...

This article reports a research project in which the thinking preferences of a group of students enrolled for a module on information literacy at the University of Pretoria were determined. Annually about 7 000 first-year students enrol for this module. The main aim of the research project was to determine to what extent the traditional approach to...

The University of Pretoria introduced a compulsory Information Literacy module to address the need for delivering motivated knowledgeable employees that embrace information and have the skills to find, select and use relevant information accurately, efficiently and effectively in an explosive information age. Low class attendance, an indication of...

In this article we argue that Kelly’s construct psychology (Kelly 1955; 1966/2003) provides a useful framework for mentoring in the Higher Education sector in South Africa. Kelly’s notion of constructive alternativism prompts practitioners to adopt a questioning attitude to life in HE; newly appointed academic staff members and their mentors have t...

The aim of this article is to report on the strategies which were used to teach research design to Masters students, as part of my professional development as higher education practitioner. The focus is on exploring the use of cooperative learning as a vehicle to facilitate the acquiring of knowledge and skills in terms of research methodology. Thi...

Changes currently taking place globally in education, training and all areas of human potential development where learning forms the crux, have implications for e-learning. Interactive participation in virtual teams has become an evident means of promoting the principles of deep and constructive learning, and the life-skill of working in teams. Tea...

The intrapersonal learner's experience of co-operative learning and group work. We report on research done on how learners with a preference for the intrapersonal learning style experience group work. We expand on Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. Observation of group work in Afrikaans Methodology classes at the University of Preto...

Changes currently taking place globally in education, training and all areas of human potential development where learning forms the crux, have implications for e-learning. Interactive participation in virtual teams has become an evident means of promoting the principles of deep and constructive learning, and the life-skill of working in teams. Tea...

Research on the human brain, and specifically on how we think and learn, has contributed to our understanding of the functioning of the brain. Insights gained from this research has, amongst others, led to the development of a metaphoric four quadrant whole brain model, by which human thinking style preferences can be described. The significance of...