It’s really only fitting that the presence of the QAA at work that should drive this week’s reflection and activity. As their audit team spend the week meeting with staff and students, and working through the huge pile of documentation that we’ve given them, we’ve necessarily had to make some adjustments to our usual order of things. In my case, that meant bringing my class to an end a bit early yesterday, so that I could get to my meeting on time.
I’ll admit that when I first got the schedule, I did um and ah about whether I should simply move the class altogether: that would mean less rushing about for me, and more class time for the students. But since I’ve been prepping for this visit for about a year and half, I doubted that the extra time would do anything much to help. This is part of my classic model of exam-stress management: it’s usually too early to stress, until it’s too late to stress. As long as I don’t think about it in the transitional (‘it’s the right time to stress’) period, I’m fine.
Any way, more importantly, I was also thinking about what this particular session with the students was trying to achieve. It’s about negotiation in practice, following on from two sessions on negotiation theory, and is basically there to manage the transition into the much more active phase of the module, by highlighting the difficulties of using theory in practice.
In previous years, I did the following: recapped the key messages from the theory, then showed them a video that I made of a haggle, discussed how I was good and bad in using theory (bad mainly), then sharing my key practical tips on negotiation, then getting them to play a small crisis game (like this one). In short, build linearly from theory through my failings (to make them comfortable with reflective practice), then discussing their practice in the crisis game.
That structure made a degree of sense, but it also is rather gentle in immersing students into what will come, and probably unnecessarily so, on the evidence of all of the cohorts I’ve taught, who seem to grasp the need to look in on their practice and then articulate that externally.
So I chopped it all around. I got them to watch the video before class (also saving me the hassle of IT/speakers/etc.), then launched straight into the crisis game as they arrived in the classroom, debriefed them using the theory, before moving on to discussion of the video, and finally my tips.
This refocusing on their practice meant the session was a much more constructive opportunity for them to consider what they did and do, still with the knowledge that (via the video) I’m also capable of self-critique (not least of my acting/directing skills). Giving them the practical experience at the top of the class really helped to give them something to hang their thoughts on.
The bonus of all this was that it also shortened the session, because the video was moved out, so next year I can work on adding more content/activity to the session.
If there’s a general point behind this, then it’s to think about how and why we scaffold our students’ learning. Often, there’s sound reasoning in building up to more advanced activity, but it’s also worth reflecting on whether that later activity is really any more advanced, or just different from the norm. As I’ve discussed in other contexts, sometimes we need to credit our students with more resilience and capability than we do: isn’t self-reflection something we want to be developing in our students from day one?
You probably don’t have the impetus of a QAA visit to help you try moving things around, but it’s still worth a try.