All 8 entries tagged Pcapp

New idea

Follow-up to PCAPP Assessment Practice and Strategies workshop, June 24th; post–workshop reflection from Alison's blog

I have continued to ponder on this session in the couple of weeks since it took place. I have been wrestling with the fact that such a great variety of needs, expectations, preferences, subject disciplines, backgrounds, nationalities, ages... are generally represented in these workshops that it is a huge challenge to get positive feedback from everyone and indeed, a huge challenge to organise a session in which everyone will benefit to the maximum for themselves. Yet this is a challenge I want to rise to and I'm not content simply to shrug my shoulders and say 'Win some, lose some', or 'I can't please everyone'.

I recently did a Return to Teaching course organised by the Training and Development Agency. It's a course intended to get erstwhile but qualified school teachers back into the classroom after a lengthy period out. It attracts women who want to get back to teaching after raising their children, people seeking to return to the classroom after redundancy, or a career break, or various other things. I found it really useful. One complete morning was spent on 'differentiation'. Geoff Petty (http://www.geoffpetty.com/differentiation.html) states that:

Differentiation is the process by which differences between learners are accommodated so that all students in a group have the best possible chance of learning. We used to teach subjects and classes - now we teach students.

I was intrigued and inspired by some of the ways in which some of the teachers I observed managed to keep all the children in their classes motivated and stretched, often without having to put significant extra effort in, or providing a huge number of additional resources.

I wonder whether the same idea could, even should, be applied to PCAPP. Can I 'differentiate' between the participants so that all of them are stretched and motivated, learning the maximum they can by attending the session. It's a tall order, and I need to do quite a lot more reading about differentiation in order to see what I might be able to put into place.

One idea that I am playing with now, though, is the idea of using Problem Based Learning PBL) for my Assessment session. Wikipedia actually provides quite a good introductory summary to PBL, as follows:

Problem-based learning (PBL) is a student-centered instructional strategy in which students collaboratively solve problems and reflect on their experiences. It was pioneered and used extensively at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada as well as the Monterrey Institute of Technology ITESM. The Materials department at Queen Mary, University of London was the first Materials department in the UK to introduce PBL.^[1]

PBL is based on the educational theories of Vygotsky, Dewey, and others, and is related to social-cultural constructivist theories of learning and instructional design.

Characteristics of PBL are:

• Learning is driven by challenging, open-ended, ill-defined and ill-structured, practical problems.

• Students generally work in collaborative groups. Problem based learning environments may be designed for individual learning.

• Teachers take on the role as "facilitators" of learning.

• Instructional activities are based on learning strategies involving semantic reasoning, case based reasoning, analogical reasoning, causal reasoning, and inquiry reasoning, These activities include creating stories; reasoning about cases; concept mapping; causal mapping; cognitive hypertext crisscrossing; reason analysis unredoing; analogy making; and question generating;

In PBL, students are encouraged to take responsibility for their group and organize and direct the learning process with support from a tutor or instructor. Advocates of PBL claim it can be used to enhance content knowledge and foster the development of communication, problem-solving, and self-directed learning skill.

PBL positions students in simulated real world working and professional contexts which involve policy, process, and ethical problems that will need to be understood and resolved to some outcome. By working through a combination of learning strategies to discover the nature of a problem, understanding the constraints and options to its resolution, defining the input variables, and understanding the viewpoints involved, students learn to negotiate the complex sociological nature of the problem and how competing resolutions may inform decision-making.

Support systems, which include resources germane to the problem domain as well as instructional staff, are provided to scaffold students skills "just in time" and within their learning comfort zone (Vygotsky's Zone of Proximity)

Could I adopt a PBL approach for my workshop? How would it work... I would need to think about how to set up the problem itself, or probably have two or three problems so that participants do actually encounter thinking about a range of assessment-related issues. But it would mean that those who prefer a more formal 'lecture-style' session could possibly get that through video-casts, podcasts, and even a specialist lecturer who comes in for a short time; while others could get immersed in group work, finding the answer to their problem through engagement with a diverse range of resources that I could provide, including myself. Something to think about. If anyone has an observation or comment, please do contribute!

: 07 Jul 2010 15:02 |  Tags: Course Design Curriculum Pcapp Reflection Reflective Practice Teaching Grid |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

PCAPP Assessment Practice and Strategies workshop, June 24th; post–workshop reflection

Follow-up to PCAPP workshop, Curriculum and Course Design, June 24th 2010 from Alison's blog

There are various things to comment on about this workshop. I shall start with the participants' feedback.

• The most useful aspect that was almost unanimously identified was the discussion with peers throughout the session but particularly in the last part which made use of the clickers in a whole-group setting.
• The clickers were generally liked, although one participant felt the activity had gone on too long and that more specific input about how to use them for increased interaction would have been useful.
• The opening activity where participants circulated and initialed the sheets with a variety of assessment methods on was liked, but a number of people felt it should have been built on and developed.
• The Deliberations website was appreciated and a number said they would refer to it again after the workshop.
• The areas not covered in the workshop which they would like to have been addressed were:

• More practical examples, and discussion of how to use the more unusual examples
• How to design questions for exams and essays
• Which assessment methods are appropriate for assessing what kind of knowledge
• More practical ideas of how to improve assessment
• Too much articulated consideration of the teaching method I had adopted (which also overlapped with the morning Exploring Course Design session)

It was also clear that the workshop had not met the needs of one participant who stated that he/she had found 'nothing' ('nil') the most useful, and that the session had 'not been his/her expectation at all, sorry'. Oh dear... But how disappointing not to get any constructive feedback to accompany this observation.

I was specifically interested and appreciative to receive feedback about the Deliberations exercise since that had been my experiment that I was unsure about. My own experience of it had been mixed as I moved between the groups. (Interestingly, everyone chose to work in a group and no one opted for an individual laptop.) I think I had done well to design a series of questions to direct and give a purpose to the reading but the questions also seemed to be a bit of a hindrance. There were probably too many (something confirmed in a conversation with a participant at the end) so on a future occasion I need to cut them down to two or three. Some groups seemed to feel pressured to find the answers in the time allowed (whoops, inadvertently, I slipped into the 'surface learning' format), and some seemed to think it was very important to obey the task to the letter, looking for the answer to each question, when I think I had anticipated that they would use them as guides and prompts, skipping any they weren't particularly interested in and/or couldn't find the answer to quickly enough. So if I adopt this approach again I need to think about all these dimensions. Some of it can be easily addressed by clearer instructions at the beginning, of course.

I have done the individual assessment sheets that opened the session before, and have never really engaged with the participants' felt need to follow it up. I have received this feedback before. I must now give it some concrete thought. I wonder what would be most appropriate. Options include:

• Asking the individuals who were the only ones to use a particular type to talk about it (if I do this activity early, might they feel intimidated?)
• Link the activity to ways of evaluating assessment and to constructive alignment, finding some way of equipping people to do this for themselves (an important and relevant skill for their own practice, in fact)
• What else??? I will go on thinking...

Lastly, I wonder if I do try to articulate my own thinking about the session structure and pedagogy too much. Maybe I overdid it, especially for those who had attended the morning workshop. However, I think it is important, especially in a PCAPP context, for participants to engage not only with the focus of the specific content, but also the 'how' of the workshop. After all, that's what we're asking them to do in their own practice, and I want to explore how that might be modelled, especially for those for whom it doesn't come naturally. More to think about.

The clickers seemed to work well, and I liked the opportunity to refresh my own use of them. I think I need to work at thinking how they can be made to work harder in my workshops.

: 25 Jun 2010 10:52 |  Tags: Course Design Curriculum Pcapp Reflection Reflective Practice Teaching Grid |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

PCAPP Exploring Course Design June 4th; post–workshop reflection

Follow-up to PCAPP workshop, Curriculum and Course Design, June 24th 2010 from Alison's blog

Teaching is a funny business! I had somewhat naively anticipated that because my approach and structure to this workshop had been successful the last time I ran it, it would be equally successful this time. It was different, which of course is to be expected simply because the participants were different, but some parts, most notably the mind map exercise was less successful. Only 7 of the 9 people registered turned up, so I divided the class into 2 groups rather than 3, one of which found the mind map activity easier and more fruitful than the other. Feedback confirmed that it hadn't scratched where all of them were itching, with some identifying it as the 'least useful' aspect of the workshop. Others, however, indicated that it had been the 'most useful', so I suspect this was as much a case of group dynamics and, in one case, an articulated dislike of groupwork as a teaching method. However, there was also the comment that 'there was not enough knowledge in the group to be able to do this exercise, especially re policy', which I need to think about for future occasions. The experience has not put me off doing the activity again, but next time I might try to prepare a more formal approach to offer alongside the mindmap, offering participants the choice of which they would prefer to do. I am reminded of the 'differentiated' teaching I needed to incorporate into school classrooms when doing my Return to Teaching course, catering for people of different levels, as well as the need to meet a variety of learning styles.

The discrepancy between the expectations and learning styles of individual participants was also evident when it came to the design of a hypothetical module. One participant stated 'The workshop-based construction of a hypothetical new module was excellent. This is the best way (for me) to understand some of the issues involved. I especially liked and appreciated the feedback at the end from everyone else. I think more time for this would be appropriate (as a % of the session)', while another wrote: 'I don't find 'unreal' examples useful in workshops'. I had suggested that the groups might like to focus on PCAPP itself as the one common denominator between them, and also as a 'real' example rather than hypothetical, and one group took that option up. However, on a future occasion I might actually take a PCAPP (or other) module descriptor in and ask participants to choose between constructing a hypothetical module, or critiquing a real life one. That might meet the variety of likes and dislikes better. In general, the practical module design was given the thumbs up, with most participants citing it, and Katherine Gray's input and feedback, as the 'most useful' part of the workshop.

Feedback apart, my own experience of the workshop was positive, and I appreciated the willingness of participants to throw themselves into activities which needed them to do that, or things would have fallen pretty flat. I have a developing awareness of the fact that I adopt a high-risk approach, and perhaps need to develop some specific risk-management strategies. I think differentiated learning activities might be a useful thing to explore, although it's quite demanding both in preparation and in execution. I like the idea of the challenge, though, and maybe this will provide me with my next 'innovation' to try out in the Teaching Grid, hence honouring the spirit of the TG.

: 25 Jun 2010 10:11 |  Tags: Course Design Curriculum Pcapp Reflection Reflective Practice Teaching Grid |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

PCAPP workshop, Curriculum and Course Design, June 24th 2010

Writing about web page Pre-workshop reflection

The last time I ran this workshop the feedback was very positive. Some of it (together with my pre- and post-workshop reflections) is posted into this blog, so check back to my previous entry at: http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/alisonlecornu/entry/pcapp_workshop_exploring/ if you're interested. For that reason, I think I will adopt a pretty similar approach for this session. My workshop plan is available here. Looking at the list of participants I see that there are 8 people attending, and with the exception of one person from Engineering, everyone else is from either the Business School or the Medical School. That has its pros and cons. One Pro will be that there will be there will be a 'critical mass' of people there to provide a common experience (although with the one exception) which might help address the frequent feedback that PCAPP workshops struggle to meet the specific needs of individual Schools and Departments. Another Pro might be that people come with friends and colleagues who are already known to them, and there is less need to ice-break. A Con, however, could be that the session becomes 'cliquey' if people from individual Schools band together. For that reason, I anticipate splitting the group up, although I will also go with the flow at the time. Close colleagues attending together has occasionally presented quite a challenge if there is a sense of reluctance to attend which is expressed in lack of cooperation or motivation. I have worked hard at finding ways of addressing this, many of which once again are recorded in this blog, and I have been gratified to have ever-increasing levels of enthusiasm during sessions. Roughly summarised, I have moved towards implementing a new approach which has been characterised by:

• A move to the Teaching Grid which gives all sorts of 'added value' to sessions, including allowing participants to try out technologies such as Smart Boards, Clickers and Digital Imaging thingies(!!!). The TG also lessens the sense that people are coming to be 'instructed' and allows them to behave like adults, moving around the space without inhibition, helping themselves to coffee or tea when they would like, and generally owning the experience in a way that is far more difficult in a conventional classroom. This raises, for me, real questions about the use of space, and as I write I make a mental resolution to engage more with the work of the Reinvention Centre. How lucky we are at Warwick to have the Teaching Grid, Reinvention Centre, CAPITAL Centre, and so many more resources that contribute to excellence in teaching and learning.
  
• A move away from adopting a 'formal instruction' approach towards a 'reflective practitioner' approach which embraces and makes use of participants' existing experience.
  
• A willingness to make myself vulnerable in letting participants know that/if I am uncertain about an approach that I am going to adopt with them, and asking them to work with me and feed back so that we can all learn together.
• The use of this blog in which I can record my own reflections and invite others to dialogue with me (thanks to those who have!)

There are, of course, challenges to this approach. The one I am most conscious of is how to ensure solid and appropriate content is communicated so that participants really do leave the session with an enhanced knowledge and understanding of the subject. I guess my response to that is (a) to make sure I am well prepared and can play the role of 'expert' if required; (b) to assume the role of facilitator who engages with the experience and content that individuals bring in the same way as other participants; (c) to continue working hard on finding ways of providing solid content which doesn't necessarily mean people simply sit and listen to me and watch a set of powerpoint slides! I have got quite a lot further to go in this area, and am trying out something new in my Assessment workshop which follows this one.

So this workshop will be highly interactive. I have tried to design it in such a way that I provide a structured framework that will allow participants' experience to play a significant role. I am, of course, dependent on their cooperation, and there may always be a time when my approach doesn't quite work for someone. However, my experience thus far suggests that for the majority this is a successful technique and I am looking forward to the session.

: 23 Jun 2010 11:07 |  Tags: Course Design Curriculum Pcapp Reflection Reflective Practice Teaching Grid |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

PCAPP workshop 'Assessment Practice and Strategies': post–workshop reflection

Follow-up to PCAPP workshop 'Assessment Practice and Strategies': pre–workshop reflection from Alison's blog

I find reflecting on this workshop quite challenging. At one level it seemed to go reasonably well. 8 of the 10 people who had registered for it turned up, three of whom had attended the morning session on course design. There was a general mood of interest, engagement and cooperation and participants contributed well to the various activities I had organised. Discussion was focused and on task, and in general terms I think the learning outcomes for the session were achieved. Feedback too was good. All the participants indicated that the teaching and learning methods used had either been effective or very effective, with none ticking the 'neutral' box or below. There was a range of things which people indicated they had found effective, useful and would take away to use in their professional practice:

• Discussion with others, sharing experience
• Handouts that I can refer back to and which I will use to improve my essay and exam question composition
• Good mixture of lecture and group work
• Great mix of task types; kept me engaged and interested. Delivered mirrored principles.
• Opportunity to reflect and focus on this aspect of my practice
• Disseminate some of the information provided to colleagues
• Small group work was very effective
  
• ...
  

So what am I dubious about? One participant commented (correctly, I think) that 'the activities could have been a bit more challenging' and another said 'maybe we spent too long in our small groups discussing only one of the three issues'. That groupwork activity was probably the least successful dimension of the workshop and I need to revisit it. The intention was to provide content, but rather than transmit it from the front, to get the participants to engage with it on their own terms and then teach each other, but it needed more careful planning. I think I still consider the approach valid, but the way I constructed it didn't really gel.

I guess I feel therefore that I didn't really introduce the participants to some of the basic, and essential considerations when thinking about assessment. That's pretty crucial! Yet I also need to listen to that good feedback. I had deliberately designed the session in a way which acknowledged and took advantage of people's experience. Although some participants were relatively new to lecturing in HE, none of us gets through our national educational system without experiencing assessment from the other side of the fence, and all had something to contribute. My role therefore became one of guiding discussion, filtering in my expertise at appropriate points, and making sure that as far as possible people moved on in their 'informed' thinking about their practice.

I can probably leave it there. But my musings feed into my bigger questioning about how best to impart scholarly content in these workshops. I am beginning to explore the idea of a 15 to 20 min 'This is what scholars are saying' slot. PCAPP is a post-graduate certificate, and it is important that I do give participants content appropriate for that level. It becomes attractive to them too because it gives them a leg-up for their PCAPP assignments. I shall have to give that more thought.

Comments welcome!

: 17 Dec 2009 10:42 |  Tags: Assessment Pcapp Reflection Reflective Practitioner |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

PCAPP workshop 'Assessment Practice and Strategies': pre–workshop reflection

As I've planned this workshop (see outline here) I've become increasingly aware of how dependent I am on the participants wanting to contribute and being prepared to engage and discuss. Without that, the whole thing will fall on its face! Unlike the Course Design workshop, however, I think I can assume that all the participants have experience both of being assessed and of setting assessments. So I think it will be crucial to take advantage of that bank of resource(s) and fully acknowledge that experience right at the start. That's one of the reasons why I've begun the workshop by asking participants to circulate round the whole Teaching Grid space and to initial each of the A4 sheets which outlines a form of assessment they use in their discipline. The point of that is not only to value their experience, but also to demonstrate to them that there are many types of assessment, some of which they may not have come across but which may well be routinely used in another discipline. I did the same exercise the last time I ran this workshop, but not at the beginning, and I was poor at following it up with the result that all the richness was not made available to everyone. This time I'm using it to kick the workshop off and it will lead immediately into a time of discussion. This will focus on questions such as, 'Why are different types of assessment used?', 'What's the difference, from a learning perspective, between an exam and an essay?', 'How do we evaluate the quality of essays?', and the more personal 'What assessment practices are you particularly proud of?' and 'What have you struggled with?'. If participants (I think about 9 of them) are unwilling to speak in front of the whole group I will divide them into smaller groups and have a feedback session after. I will follow that up by brainstorming the times when we need to be able to evaluate assessment practice (and hence introduce the need for this workshop), introducing occasions such as external examining, being an external member on a validation committee, following best practice for marking procedures, and responding to student feedback.

From there I want to go into some of the meat of the session, eliciting from the participants some of the key considerations when assessing. For me, those key considerations are:

• Constructive alignment
• Formative and summative assessment
• Good practice when designing assessment tasks and activities
• Responding to student feedback.

There may be more that I need to add as I go on reading and reflecting.

I am keen to avoid as much as possible asking participants simply to sit and listen. For one thing it doesn't cohere with my understanding of how people learn best; for another, feedback (spoken, written, and in body language) has indicated that this is rarely appreciated in the context of PCAPP. So how can I 'deliver' this content?

I decided that I would try a technique that can really only happen in the Teaching Grid given its fantastic array of technology. If I were in a traditional classroom or lecture theatre I would have to think about how it could be achieved in a different way. However, since the TG has a lot of computers available, and there is a good amount of material on the web about Constructive Alignment, I plan to divide the participants into 3 groups, one of which will use the computers to find out as much as they can about CA. Another group will brainstorm good practice when designing assessment tasks and activities, and the last will look at a photocopy of Phil Race's chapter on 'What has Assessment Done for us--and to us?' and evaluate his suggestions. Each of the groups can use a Smart Board to make notes and compile a 'poster'. After about 15 minutes I will ask the groups to reform and tell the others about their findings, going on to discuss the relevance and critique as well as find the good in all the ideas.

Then a break.

After the break the session will become more creative. Ask the participants firstly to design an assessment for this workshop. Once they have done that, then ask them to design the assessment for the whole of the PCAPP programme.

I have never tried the approach of what is effectively peer to peer teaching in this context before. I am not sure what I think about it for this workshop, although I am certainly convinced of its efficacy in other situations and have experienced its strengths. I have decided to go for it here because I really want to avoid the 'sit and listen to the expert' scenario, but also because I hope it will encourage participants to engage with the material at a deeper level, asking questions, sharing discussion and applying it to their practice. Much depends, as I said when I started this blogpost, on their willingness to cooperate...

: 11 Dec 2009 16:23 |  Tags: Assessment Pcapp Reflection Reflective Practitioner |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Assessment Practice and Strategies web ad

August 3rd 09

Last week I worked on the advertisement for the PCAPP workshop 'Assessment Practice and Strategies'. It will provide the general information about the workshop that potential participants will see when they first start looking for information on the LDC website, so it is important that I compose something appealing. It's also important that it reflects transparently what the workshop is aiming to achieve and the way it will be conducted.

With my developing desire that these workshops should be highly reflective, I am concerned that this web ad communicates this. Composing it was an interesting exercise. The first issue which it raised was what the role of the content of the workshop was, and therefore what the purpose of the workshop was. So I grappled with questions such as:

• Is this really a session in which I plan to transmit a fair bit of information about assessment practice and strategies to the participants?
• Is that the primary goal of the session?
• Clearly one of the purposes of the session must be to transmit information, since this is important and relevant, but can I do this in a way in which reflection is also fostered and engaged in?

It seemed to me that I needed to bring in an additional dimension but without sacrificing the content completely. Content and reflection on content and practice needed to walk hand in hand, but in many ways the reflection needed to have the upper hand. A number of participants at these workshops have had relevant experience in designing assessment tasks with their students and one of the things I wanted to do was to respect this, to treat all participants as adults by not simply expecting them to sit behind desks (feeling diminished?) and dutifully take notes about something they were already familiar with. Instead, I wanted to capitalise on their experience, hopefully getting them to share it with others who either had less experience or whose backgrounds (especially those from abroad) meant that they really needed the introduction and the content. But even this is not enough: for those with this type of relevant experience, I wanted to develop their ability to reflect and evaluate on their previous and present practice, with a view to enhancing it in the future. In short, I wanted to develop reflective practitioners, and potentially a community of reflective practitioners.

I decided to state that in the web ad. In response to the prompt, 'What for will the workshop take?', I wrote the following.

The workshop will focus on a range of issues relating to assessment. Although it will introduce material derived from the scholarship of teaching and learning, its primary emphasis is on developing reflective practitioners. You should come prepared to discuss and evaluate aspects of your practice through dialogue with others and engagement with educational theory and research, with a view to developing your thinking in this area.

I hoped that this outline appropriately highlighted the fact that participants would be introduced to content and some of the relevant scholarship on assessment that needs to inform their practice, while at the same time emphasised that this content in some way took the form of a tool rather than an end in its own right.

The learning outcomes were a further challenge. I tried to compose LOs which prioritised the reflective aspect of what I wanted to achieve, but to my dismay, everything that I put on paper sounded rather weak. I realised at that point that 'reflection' can sound insipid, worryingly empty, and hence unattractive, especially for colleagues whose subjects are very content-focused. I came face-to-face, again, with the realisation that so much of my subject discipline, education, is about process. How to communicate that in such a way that participants can grasp what I'm getting at? Maybe this blog is one way in which I'm addressing that... In the end, I opted for a longer list of LOs which had a mix of content- and process-focused goals, as follows:

By the end of the workshop you will:

·        Be able to state the major reasons why good assessment practice is crucial within Higher Education and compare this thinking with your own practice

·        Have engaged with current thinking about how to ensure good quality, and appropriate, assessment

·        Be able to identify a range of methods of assessment and associate these with desired types of learning

·        Have reflected on your own practice through interaction with peers and educational theory

·        If appropriate, have formulated ideas about how to enhance and improve the assessment methods you currently employ

·        Have reflected on and internalised the session as a whole so that your future practice is enhanced and you have developed the skills of a reflective practitioner

As I progressed, I realised that the emphasis (and addition) of reflection into the normal 3-hr workshop would have a major impact on time, and therefore on the amount of content that could be introduced or 'covered'. Another challenge! My concern to treat participants as adults resurfaced, and I decided the only way forward was to suggest that they did some prior reading. Glasgow University's equivalent to the LDC offers a good self-study course on assessment, and Brookes's CETL, the Assessment Standards Knowledge exchange (ASKe), has made a relevant Position Paper available on the web. I couldn't be sure that people would read either (everyone must be familiar with that difficulty!) but if some did, then once again it would give them material to work with during the session as well as a resource to turn to afterwards.

The full web ad can be found here:

http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/blogbuilder/admin/adminFiles.spr?blog=094d7399223072b5012254d5ca2d1000

It's just a draft at the moment. Please feel free to comment!

: 03 Aug 2009 10:07 |  Tags: Assessment Pcapp Workshops |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Why this blog?

July 7th 2009

This is a new venture for me. I've blogged a bit before, but never for this reason. I want to see if I can achieve something new, not only for me but also for (and with) some of those I work with.

Let me explain.

I came to Warwick on April 1st to take a post of Learning and Development Adviser. It's a job which matches all of my interests, although that isn't necessarily evident from my background as an academic working in theology! But my work in theology has largely been in distance learning, and that's because of my five years as an EFL teacher which gave me a brilliant foundation in student-centred learning. I started off in Spain with a class of fifteen complete beginners who had not a word of English and I not a word of Spanish. I had to learn very quickly how to communicate - 'teach' - in such a way that they would both understand and be able to own and reproduce. This was my introduction to what has been my passion ever since: not just the content of my subject discipline, but how to communicate it to people who might actually find it quite difficult to understand and even more difficult to reconstruct and make their own. Distance learning has many parallels to Teaching English as a Foreign Language: there is a 'gap' between teacher and learner which needs to be bridged, in one case the gap is linguistic, in the other geographical. However, in both cases teachers have to anticipate the difficulties learners will experience well in advance of the actual study time and find ways of overcoming them. This process lies at the heart of student-centred learning, although other features such as an individual one-to-one situation between learner and tutor and questions of choice and power are also significant. For a great paper on student-centred learning have a look at this one written by Geraldine O'Neill and Tim McMahon from University College Dublin.

I shall undoubtedly return to discuss student-centred learning from time to time. It underpins the whole of my approach to teaching. However, back to my main thread...

Part of my LDA role involves delivering workshops for academic colleagues. My first experience raised a whole range of issues which, although I had to a point anticipated, nonetheless set me off on a big reflective exercise. I am a highly reflective practitioner, always thinking through what went well and less well, tweaking and amending for future occasions, and sometimes I find it useful to write about it. I did that this time, and it allowed me to formulate a new way forward which I tried out in my next workshop on Assessment. I conducted the workshop in the Teaching Grid and once again wrote up a reflective evaluation using the TG's proforma. The TG asks this of all the people who make use of it and they publish the write ups on their website. You can see mine here. I thought it would be courteous to send it to each of the participants individually as well, and was delighted to receive feedback to it from one or two.

So the idea was born. Part of the PCAPP programme's aspiration is that participants become reflective practitioners. All of a sudden I seemed to have stumbled on a way of fostering that. By modelling my own reflection I could not only encourage good practice, but also hopefully encourage participants to reflect with me on my own practice. This blog seems a good way of doing that. I'd like to use it firstly to reflect in advance of a session so that anyone who is interested can see why I've decided to do something the way I have and what some of the issues I've grappled with were, and then to reflect following the session. Blogs are great because others can contribute, so anyone who looks at these pages, please do contribute. My (perhaps high?) ideal is that we can create a community of reflective practitioners. Let's see how this develops...

: 07 Jul 2009 13:13 |  Tags: Pcapp Reflective Practitioner Student-Centred-Learning |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem