Completing my PG Cert

I'm not someone who sits still for long. If you know me, you know that. I'm usually the one in the room pitching the next wild idea, whether that's turning a dental charting session into a forensic murder mystery, getting students to narrate a root canal treatment as a collaborative Finding Nemo parody, or dressing up as Sherlock Holmes with a soundtrack playing in the background whilst teaching. So the fact that I've spent the past year sitting with learning theory, writing reflective blogs, and building an evidence-based portfolio is, in its own way, one of the more surprising things I've done. But I did it. I've completed my PG Cert. And I'm genuinely, deeply proud.

Where It Started: Teach Well

The journey began with the first module of the PG Cert: Teach Well. The ethos of that module was beautifully simple; to teach well, consistently well. Not brilliantly on a good day and adequately on a bad one, but with the kind of considered, reliable quality that students can actually depend on. It sounds obvious when you say it out loud. It's much harder in practice, especially when you're also an Innovative Teaching Lead, a module leader, a personal tutor, a haptics specialist, a 3D printing enthusiast, and approximately four other things simultaneously.

To complete Teach Well, I delivered a micro teach and took part in a professional conversation. My micro teach was on philosophy, specifically on epistemology, the question of how we know what we know. It felt fitting. I've always believed that good teaching should make people question their assumptions. The professional conversation that followed gave me the chance to articulate my practice, my values, and the reasoning behind my choices in a way I hadn't been asked to do formally before. I actually enjoyed talking about myself

Completing Teach Well and the professional conversation earned me my D1 Fellowship and that in itself felt significant. It was the first formal recognition that what I was doing in the classroom wasn't just instinct or enthusiasm, but a genuine, evidence-informed practice worthy of acknowledgement. Completing the full PG Cert portfolio has now earned me D2 Fellowship. That progression from D1 to D2 represents the growth in me from my early days as a technician supporting learning, to a Teaching Fellow leading learning.

I came into this process already knowing how to teach. I've been doing it for years in dental nursing, in simulation, in AI workshops across institutions, in NHS training rooms and lecture theatres and haptics suites. Teaching was never the mystery, but the PG Cert asked me to do something harder than all of that: it asked me to slow down and understand why I teach the way I do. That's a much more uncomfortable question and a much more valuable one.

The Blogs: Where the Real Work Happened

Two extended blogs sat at the heart of this portfolio, and writing them forced a level of honest self-examination I wasn't always comfortable with.

The first, my teaching philosophy and values blog traced how my identity as a person has fundamentally shaped who I am as an educator. Living with Bipolar Disorder and PTSD isn't something I keep separate from my professional life. As I reflected on in the blog, the affective intensity and creativity that comes with my experience genuinely fuels my most imaginative teaching innovations. The television schedule revision session, where students could "change channels" to manage their own engagement, didn't come from a textbook, it came from understanding what it feels like to need autonomy and choice in a learning environment. Students have told me that my openness creates a safe space. That kind of feedback makes me more deliberate with my teaching choices.

The blog also pushed me to interrogate my use of technology. I am unapologetically enthusiastic about AI, haptics, Learning Glass, 3D printing, but enthusiasm without critical grounding is just novelty. The PG Cert taught me to think carefully about sustainable, shared practice rather than just early adoption. Helping colleagues overcome barriers to technology, I've learned, starts with their beliefs about its value, not with the technology itself.

The second blog the critically reflective blog on simulation and the Hallissey Dexterity Block was perhaps the piece I'm most proud of in this entire portfolio. I designed the Dexterity Block originally as a practical fix: the casein blocks we were using were expensive, lacked realism, and didn't accommodate students with dyspraxia. Working with the University's FabLab and a local Science Park, I redesigned them using digital scanning and 3D printing, adding anatomical finger rests, translucent resin for students who need to visualise instrument positioning in three dimensions, and progressive benchmark tasks informed by Rosenshine's principles of direct instruction.

What the Lesson Plans Revealed

Looking back across the lesson plans in this portfolio, the dental charting sessions, the murder mystery, the root canal Finding Nemo parody, the anxiety and communication session with an AI chatbot playing an anxious patient, the TV channel revision extravaganza, the haptics taster session a pattern is obvious to me now that I couldn't have articulated a year ago.

Every one of those lessons is built on the same convictions. Learning should be memorable, accessible, and authentic. Students should be in the driving seat wherever possible. Emotion, creativity and surprise aren't distractions from learning, they are mechanisms for it. Gamification isn't just fun; it creates the emotional anchors that make content stick.

The lesson on patient anxiety and communication is a good example. I began with calming music, a hushed tone, and a deliberately slow warm-up not just to set a tone, but because several learners in that group were neurodivergent and needed a regulated environment before they could engage with an emotionally sensitive topic. Then I used ChatGPT as a simulated anxious patient, which allowed students to practise reassuring communication with low stakes and immediate feedback. Not every student was comfortable using AI directly, so I modelled it on screen first and offered a group demonstration as an alternative. All students contributed in the end, either verbally or by submitting their chatbot transcripts. That flexibility matters enormously to me.

The observer feedback from my haptics session was equally interesting. His suggestion that I structure the progression of tasks more formally, building in intentional early errors so students can learn from them, was something I took seriously. I've since been developing clearer benchmarks for haptic tasks and want to expand the self-assessment elements so students can track their own progression over time.

What I've Learned About Myself

The SWOT analysis and professional development plan I wrote at the start of the portfolio were honest in ways I found uncomfortable to write. I named overcommitment as a genuine weakness. I named burnout as a threat. I had been diagnosed with burnout in the past year, and I was clear-eyed about the fact that my enthusiasm for innovation can tip over into unsustainable patterns if I'm not careful.

The PG Cert, oddly, was part of how I addressed that. Not because it lightened my load, it didn't, but because it gave me a framework for thinking about what matters most. It made me ask: which of the things I'm doing are genuinely aligned with my values and strategic goals? Which are just noise?

What Comes Next

My professional development plan is already in motion. I want D3 Fellowship. I want to publish on AI-enhanced teaching in dental education. I want to develop the Teaching with Teeth platform into a genuine collaborative hub where other educators can share and build on each other's practice.

And I want to keep doing what I've always done: walking into a room with an innovative plan, and the absolute conviction that dental nursing students deserve teaching that is as creative, rigorous, and human as any discipline in the university.

I'm so proud of this PG Cert. More than I expected to be. D2 Fellowship achieved, D3 in my sights. Now, on to the next thing.