In the first of this mini-series on academic engagement, we wanted to explore a little bit on sharing expertise and how this can contribute to a culture of engagement, as well as aspects of active learning.
So the starting point for this is a video clip from ‘The Great Pottery Throw Down’.
Here is the clip – we’d really encourage you to watch it before reading our reflections:
What are the features of practice which we felt drew our attention?
- We firstly recognised the tone and mood of the music as conveying a sense of ‘ease’ (charm?) in the learning process (1)
- Our attention was drawn to the balance between talk and modelling and moments where these were discrete and integrated (2)
- We appreciated to the introduction of personal anecdotes which gave the learning a wider context (3)
- We valued the way in which demonstrating the process created a different aspect to experience rather than a ‘here’s one I made earlier’ approach (4)
What we also recognised strongly is that there is a substantive difference in the type of our learning here.
We were not sitting at a potter’s wheel and therefore all of our feelings of engagement are diffracted between ‘learning about’ and ‘learning to’.
Often it can feel as though we are consuming learning rather than producing our own learning and whilst we can recognise the quality of instruction, we need a wider angle to consider the quality of learning which complements this.
Despite this, what implications does this have for our own academic practice/experiences?
- What are the ways to create a suitable atmosphere through aspects supplementary to curricular content? (1)
- What is the optimum level of talk in explanation? (2)
- How often are personal experiences shared and planned to be integrated into learning contexts? (3)
- What time is allocated to modelling processes and particularly drawing attention to specific ways of bridging thresholds which are typically problematic? (4)
We’ve posed some of these reflection questions to invite further discussion and sharing of approaches. If you’d like to join the discussion, share your experiences or offer another example for consideration then we’d value hearing from you.
Elliot Green is BILT’s 2025/26 Student Fellow for Active Learning.
Joe Gould is a Senior Research Associate/Senior Education Developer in BILT.
