Category Archives: Delivery reflections

Chewing over our professional standards…

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Sarah and I chose to look at the UKPSF together as it felt like a topic that would benefit from chewing over and discussing. I think it was a really useful exercise as, although we talk a lot, in this context, we had a really focussed, small amount of time to be with our thoughts, to feed of each others’ thoughts and to get to somewhere new. We didn’t rehearse of have any of the conversation beforehand so it’s interesting to me how quickly and consistently we got to somewhere new.

Areas of Activity: A3 Assess and give feedback to learners

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Core knowledge: K3 How students learn, both generally and within their subject/disciplinary area(s)

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Professional values: V1 Respect individual learners and diverse learning communities

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Take-aways:

Broadening out ways to facilitate staff development e.g. peer observation, reflection, follow ups, etc. to improve both ‘assessment’ really of the effectiveness of our provision and also the feedback (and assessment) for (mostly) staff who attend to deepen their understanding.

The role of compassionate and constructive feedback – connected to the thought above, we need to ask ourselves, how we fold this into our context given we don’t offer formal feedback and assessment.

Thinking critically about where and how we deliver training, especially for students – not online by default!

Advocacy – going to people higher up in CSM to advocate for accessibility and inclusivity. After the conversation finished, we discussed revisiting our previous plan to create an accessibility focussed group at CSM with the Exchange, Disability Services, and the Library. I wonder if we can include the Students’ Union? I’m going to follow this up…

Proactivity – going to the Programmes that we look after and auditing their Moodle pages for accessibility and making recommendations. We do currently make suggestions, and nudge course teams in this direction, but we could be more proactive in this area for sure and Sarah is making a start.

Things that might help a student…

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Just to help me with my day job, I’m going to try and keep a list of things that I think might help people on other courses. It’s just for me to keep in mind during this time as a student, which is so valuable. (I realise these things might be coming up on this particular course, just making a note in case I forget. No criticism intended, I’m obviously not aware of the full rationale 🙂 )

  • Participation tick boxes on Moodle to help me keep track of what I’ve done/need to do. Not for testing, just personal time management.
  • Inductions – Library, myblog, workflow, Moodle, who can help in the library and academic support?
  • Clickable reading lists? and ensuring material is in the library. This would be great, alongside a library induction. Even for people who know the library well, understanding how it is for students would be great.
  • Signposting on Moodle – the signposting that there is for each session is great, but a little more for the other sections would be good. The tone of voice on Moodle is also v useful, explaining what is/isn’t necessary and what should be prioritised
  • Lots of support and questions answered, very quickly via the forum. Good to set up email forwarding early on and to gradually bring this in so everyone had a chance to do it. Friendly, informal tone. Peer to peer support.
  • Assessment How are we being assessed? What is the criteria? Can we fail? If so, how? It would be good to have a more detailed overview of this in advance. Doing one of the case studies earlier on and linking it to one of the observations, would provide useful feedback and help us understand what is required. It would also get us more focussed on exactly what we want to read, earlier. I wish I’d started this earlier.
  • Unit brief, course handbook and maybe other key documents – there are loads of useful materials in here but it would be good to be part of a Moodle induction.
  • Be specific about what is required/advised/etc re reading – The unit brief gives some reading and says that we will be informed about any required reading in advance (which is great), but doesn’t help with whether we need to read these things or if they will all be used later. Just a detail, but it would help with time management.
  • Lots of reading recommendations personal to particular areas of study.
  • Myblog and Workflow inductions, plus ongoing support. Some short videos showing just how these platforms should be used on the PG Cert would help. Maybe less so for Workflow (just the getting set up?) but definitely for myblog
  • Everyone loves the face to face sessions – how to maintain this or maintain contact when we’re online.
  • Lots of interaction in the face to face sessions and also some social time in quite long breaks
  • Some people really like the dates on the collapsed topics on Moodle

It’s interesting to me that this felt much more pertinent at the start of the unit, I guess while you’re trying to process a lot of information and get to grips with a lot of different things. As things have settled down this feels less urgent – something else to keep in mind, about the timing of support/information.