#15toptips for Student-Centred Teaching 15: Develop your pedagogical ‘tech’ toolkit – it could be the key to enhancing the learning of your students

Let me make one thing clear from the outset. I am not a ‘techie’. I rely on my oldest daughter to sort out my Wi-Fi hub when it crashes occasionally at home, and I never did figure out how to set my old VCR recorder to record a TV programme in advance. Needless to say, I also haven’t as yet figured out how to record TV programmes using the ‘box’ that replaced my old VCR. Some things never change.  I’m aware of this failing, and keep promising myself that I’ll do something about it – but as long as my daughters are still living with us, I guess there is little urgency to develop this particular skill. Online banking remains a complete mystery to me. So I think its fair to say that my relationship with technology in my personal life has always been a ‘troublesome’ one. If I confess that I’m now thinking of investing in a record deck with an old fashioned diamond-tipped stylus so that I can play my old vinyl albums which have lain forlorn in my garage for the best part of 30 years, I think you’ll have some idea of my attitude to technology. I’m not one of the ‘early adopters’ that new gadgets are marketed at these days – I’m more of a ‘reluctant adopter’ who uses technology when it becomes difficult to avoid it.

#15toptips for Student-Centred Teaching 14: We gotta get out of here…. Get your students out of the classroom and see the difference it makes

Student-centred teaching and learning isn’t just about strategies you can use in the classroom or via online virtual environments. It embraces activities that extend beyond the formal university learning environment and that might be termed ‘learning outside the classroom’. If student-centred teaching is about creating learning opportunities that place the needs of the student at the heart of the process, then learning outside the classroom is one of the most effective tools in the toolkit of the HE teacher.

#15toptips for Student-Centred Teaching 13: Consider how your pedagogical approach can be aligned with the needs of your project students

At this time of year many university lecturers and tutors will be meeting with students who are undertaking major projects or dissertations of various kinds.  Whilst some university and college departments have withdrawn major project or dissertation modules from their undergraduate courses in recent years (and some may never have had them), they are still one of the most common features of the undergraduate experience in the UK higher education sector, and it is most often the case that students undertake them in their final year of study. This is an appropriate time, therefore, to consider what ‘student-centred teaching’ might mean when considered in the context of undergraduate project supervision.

#15toptips for Student-Centred Teaching 12: Remember to think about you! Be kind to yourself, learn more about your university and engage with continuing professional development – your students will benefit

At this time of year many academic colleagues are fine-tuning their modules – developing their teaching materials and tools and putting the finishing touches to the learning resources they will be using to support their students. It’s a busy time of year during which the focus on preparing to teach and the start of the new academic year can fully absorb both our attention and our energies. This is entirely understandable. However, its also a good time of year to take stock, to reflect on how you ‘feel’ about yourself as a professional educator, and to think about how you are going to develop yourself. In other words, it’s a good time to take a little ‘you’ time – to think about yourself and your own needs as a teacher. Aiming to be a student-centred practitioner, or one who embraces cutting-edge approaches to teaching and supporting learning is a laudable aim, but it is not a goal that one normally achieves by single-mindedly focusing on our students. This may sound counter-intuitive, but its true. In order to maintain a dynamic, creative and enthusiastic approach to student-centred teaching we need to also set aside some time to reflect on our performance, to think about our own professional development needs, and – perhaps – to ‘refresh’ our engagement with the research discourse on student-centred pedagogies. Taking time to think about you and your needs is NOT selfish – rather, it is in the best interests of your students, since if you are clear about your own needs, and address them, your students will be the beneficiaries.

#15toptips for Student-Centred Teaching 11: How much work should I do at home? Using directed independent study to promote effective learning

As academics we tend to have an inflated opinion of the value of what we teach. By this, I mean that we tend to assume that it is what and how we teach that will have by far the greatest impact on how much learning our students do and the quality of this learning. This is understandable of course. We invest a considerable amount of expertise, time and effort into designing courses and modules, and some of us sweat blood thinking-up new and exciting and engaging ways of working with our students and explaining and conveying ideas, concepts, problems, arguments and key aspects of content etc. We develop creative learning materials, beautifully designed PowerPoint and Prezzie slides, lecture notes and lab exercises etc. The creative effort required to deliver a single module is, in many cases, awe-inspiring. However, the reality is that despite all this magnificent effort and laudable commitment to ceaseless quality enhancement (i.e. what John Ruskin might have referred to as ‘intelligent effort’) the fact of the matter is that much of the learning that students do – in many cases the lion’s share of the learning – is developed and conducted outside of the classroom, in-between the ‘bits’ of formal teaching that we work so hard to design, refine and polish. In his seminal work Dimensions of Quality (2010) Graham Gibbs concluded that class contact hours had very little to do with educational quality. Of much greater importance was the quantity and quality of study. It was the student’s commitment to study, their active engagement in the learning process, and the quality of the effort invested in study that determined the value of the educational experience and the amount of real learning that had taken place. In other words – and this is a difficult thing for some academics to accept – it is what the student does that is of much greater importance than what we do as teachers. In particular, it is the independent study that students engage in – and the quality of this study – that drives their learning.

#15toptips for Student-Centred Teaching 10: Build into your modules or courses a ‘negotiated learning’ element that enables students to align their studies – at least in part – with their enthusiasms. They will be more engaged, will learn more, and produce better work.

Sometimes teachers – both in schools and universities – find that it pays to follow the line of least resistance. Learners are often most predisposed to learn and to engage enthusiastically when they are really interested in the topic or theme they are learning about, so sometimes it pays to allow for some flexibility within the curriculum and to explore the value of developing an ‘alignment’ between what the learner finds inherently fascinating, and the learning process itself. My partner –a HLTA in a local primary school – knows that little boys sometimes find it easier to develop a love of reading when they are reading what they love. Invariably this means allowing them to read and write about super heroes, transformers and power rangers etc. The same principle holds true for older children. I found studying A Level history a joy because the syllabus focused on the Tudor and Stuart periods – a period which held a fascination for me that I retain to this day. It also holds true for adults. I remember one of my mature students (a highly skilled carpenter) become ‘engaged’ on a whole new level when given the chance to get to grips with the complex carpentry joints in a sixteenth century timber-framed house as part of a higher education assignment. Many readers will have encountered the concept of ‘constructive alignment’ – a term normally used to describe the relationship between learning outcomes, content and assessment. But there is another form of constructive alignment – the alignment of content and assessment with students’ passions – that can unleash the desire to learn, and supercharge engagement. Some might refer to this concept as ‘personalised learning’ – the creation of learning opportunities that reflect the preferences and interests of the student. But it is generally – at least in my view – a matter primarily of introducing an element of ‘negotiated learning’, where each student is able to influence either what is taught, what they learn, how they learn, and/or how their learning is assessed. Sometimes it can encompass all of these things.

#15toptips for Student-Centred Teaching 9: Reflect on the value of reflection and build this capacity with your students – they will need it

Over the years one of the things that has struck me about the nature of teaching and learning in higher education is the emphasis given to ‘teaching’ as opposed to ‘learning’. Most of us now routinely include learning outcomes in our course and module information, which places the emphasis on what students will ‘know’ or be ‘able to do’ upon completion of said course or modules. In many cases, learning outcomes will have been ‘mapped’ against modules and assessments at course level, often as part of the course validation or approval process.  I wonder how many of us, however, then routinely and repeatedly revisit learning outcomes with students and encourage them to reflect on whether they are able to demonstrate them? I wonder too, how often we discuss with our students the success of our courses or modules in helping them to achieve the ‘Graduate Attributes’ which most universities now publish on their websites? Indeed, I wonder how often students are encouraged to reflect at all on their learning and on their progress towards achieving these ‘attributes’? Is reflection, and the development of reflection as an intellectual capacity, actually at the heart of our approach to assessment, for example, or at the heart of the module student evaluation processes we put in place? Put simply, is ‘critical self-reflection’ an embedded aspect of the learning culture?

#15toptips for Student-Centred Teaching 8: Time is precious, so try to avoid ‘re-inventing the wheel’ by reading about learning and teaching and learning from your colleagues

Sometimes it’s worth reflecting on how many of our colleagues ended up involved in this rather strange world of higher education teaching, since teaching may not, in reality, have been the thing that motivated many to work in the sector. Some of us may have started out very much focused on our research, and have had teaching commitments foisted upon us. Some may have become involved in teaching whilst we were post-graduate research students. This was certainly how I first started teaching – I needed the money and an opportunity to do some teaching part-time on adult education courses provided a good ‘fit’ with my study commitments.

#15toptips for Student-Centred Teaching 7: Build peer mentoring into your students’ higher education experience

In my previous blog I highlighted the importance of building collaborative group-based assessment into your courses and modules since these are one of the most effective ways of ensuring that students develop the kind of skills, attributes and experiences that will prepare them for work in professional settings and roles of various kinds. In this blog, I’d like to articulate the case for integrating peer-mentoring opportunities.

#15toptips for Student-Centred Teaching 6: Build peer learning opportunities into your teaching

Students learn via a range of different ‘learning pathways’. These can be usefully reduced to four key pathways. The first is the formal curriculum (what we teach and the curriculum learning materials and learning support we provide), the second is students’ own independent study and background reading (i.e. what they learn outside the classroom in their own time, and often in informal settings such as the home), and the third is the learning they engage in via practical or clinical placements, internships and other work-related activity outside of the normal University environment. These provide crucial insights into the world of work and help students to gain experience of professional settings. The fourth of the pathways is what they learn from each other – i.e. peer learning. In order to engage in peer learning students need to be given opportunities to work collaboratively either in forms of group-work, or via more structured forms of peer-to-peer mentoring. I will consider peer mentoring in my next blog, but in this one will focus on assessment-based group-working.