I’m in Poland this week, for the annual conference of UACES, the world’s largest European Studies association, of which I’m very proud to be Treasurer.
As part of the conference, we run an L&T workshop on the day beforehand. We’ve been doing this for some years now and it seems to be a good way of ensuring some critical mass on things teaching-y and for giving an opportunity to try out some different formats.
As such, each year, we do different things in a very deliberate way: it not only keeps it fresh, but also demonstrates to participants how they can reconfigure their practice.
Last year, I was tasked with an ice-breaker task, so I tried out an activity that sought to marry ‘getting to know you’ with ‘talking about teaching.’
Obviously, I used post-it notes to achieve this.
As we started, we gave out a post-it to everyone and told them to write one idea that they have found useful for improving their teaching practice. I was keen to stress that should be no limits to this, so it could be anything at all.
Once they’d done that, I got people to stick their post-it on to their name badge and then go and introduce themselves to someone they didn’t know, and explain their idea to each other.
Within minutes I had a room of people chatting away.
After a while, as chat began to die down, I got everyone to swap around, to meet a new person they didn’t know and repeat the exercise. We did a third cycle too.
Having broken some ice, I then asked everyone to stick their post-it on a whiteboard, which I’d marked up with two axes: a horizontal one of small things-big things, and a vertical one of degree of subject specificity.
The final stage was to talk about what had been posted and using it to flag some points that fed into the next part of the workshop.
As an exercise, I’d observe that it was very helpful for getting a bunch of people who mostly didn’t know each other to start conversations, but also in getting me to think about the variety of what people bring to such sessions.
I’m very fortunate that I have a great community of people with whom I exchange regularly on L&T: we share a lot of language and range of considerations.
But that’s not the only way of doing things, as this exercise demonstrated.
I’d made some assumptions about what people would write: my own contribution was ABC feedback; small, quick, generic. Surely everyone would do the same.
Well, as you can see in the photo, there was a load of that (group 2), but we also had a lot of other stuff too (see list at the bottom of this post).
In part, this reflected some debate about “what’s ‘small’/’big’”, but it was mainly about the different backgrounds of the people. A browse of the list will show that all kinds of things are there.
So it’s a good moment to remember that we have to check our assumptions, not only with our students, but also with each other.
Now to find out more about what inverted learning might involve.
That list in full:
1: Quite small, relatively subject specific
- Innovative assessment (e.g. briefing papers, not always essays)
2: Small and generic
- Student field trips (with prep talks)
- To do the work at the best/highest level, to bring to discussion new, sometimes challenging ideas
- Find a balance between interaction and structure and guidance
- Inverted learning, leading to advanced study, leading to connections of experience and debates
- Tell jokes
- ABC feedback
- Role play
- Tell jokes
- Get students to use Moodle in class
- Good use of first and last 5 minutes of the class
- Involving participants in the discussion
3: more substantial, but still generic
- Meetings to exchange experience/knowledge
- Tour de table: get students to hear their own voice
- Discussing current news by linking current problems with EU studies
- Setting up workshops
- Role play exercises
- Brain-storming sessions
- Use professional exchange: people of different scientific and professional backgrounds address cross-cutting issues
- Working with students’ practical experience
- Using self-reflection as a teaching method: students reflecting their performance during an internship, classes
- Engagement through debating
- Introduce student-run blog
- Using study visits to enhance students’ experience and understanding
4: big, and quite subject-specific
- Teaching EU business (school) students
- Visit Brussels
- Mixing masters and undergraduate cohorts in same unit