A short one today, as I’m in the middle of the UACES conference in Lisbon, trying out my novel panel formats and I’m worrying about the tech side of it all: more on that next week.
On Sunday, we had our regular pre-conference L&T workshop, which was structured to let us discuss in small groups what and how we teach. The initial idea had been to focus this on different substantial specialisations, but it was evident that we all ended up working more general issues and questions.
One of the most useful thoughts in this was the notion that this kind of sharing is really helpful, because it lets us avoid having to do everything from scratch.
Rather than building from the ground up, the exchange of ideas can mean both the avoidance of things that don’t work and the opening-up of new vistas.
To take the latter, I got a couple of really interesting ideas from the discussion, that I’m now looking to see if I can implement with my students.
The first is assessing student’s lecture notes.
This could be as simple as just checking they’ve made such notes, or – as this is where I can see real potential – you could ask for those notes to be augmented with further reading/noting-making, or framed with some elaboration of how different elements hang together, or coupled to a reflective piece of writing.
The second is getting students to present each other’s work.
This forces students to think/act a lot more in making their work understandable enough for someone else to talk it through, and to appreciate how others interpret your work: did they stress what I wanted them to in their presentation?
Neither is such a radical idea, but they contain the core of some new things to explore.