This morning my alarm went off at 6am as it does every day, and it interrupted a vivid dream in which I was teaching a large class of students, and my technology wasn’t working. I had an old cathode ray tube TV which I was trying to put the slides on, whilst explaining to the fractious students that I was allowing one of my tutees to join remotely. Nothing was working and in the end I tried to show whatever it was I was trying to show on my very small laptop!
I’m not sure if it was a nightmare as such, but it certainly wasn’t my best teaching either.
The dream almost certainly relates to teaching on this unit, whilst I don’t have hundreds of students – I just have 18 – I am teaching in a room that, instead of a large screen, has small repeater screens dotted around the room, and on my first day of teaching I did spend a good 30 minutes trying to set up the tech as I discovered that:
1. I didn’t have my HDMI dongle, then;
2. The room didn’t have a computer I could easily log into, then;
3. The laptop left in the room, I assumed to replace the missing computer wouldn’t log in. So I had to borrow a laptop from the faculty office – the only small mercy was that the office was in the same building.
So not my finest hour… in fact the worst start to a unit I can ever remember.
Why am I telling you all of this? Well, because I think on this unit I made a simple, fatal error. I had spent so long planning the online content, I didn’t really have a plan for what we would do in the room. I just hoped it would work.
So what does a session look like? Well, every week we have two hours together, and each week I subdivide each session into two roughly equal parts. We then have a mix of the following:
Lectures – just two for the term, one is the introduction to the unit and myself. Introducing myself is something I have been doing since I started teaching way back in 2004, the aim is to give a sense of both what the students will learn and how it could be applied in a work context, whilst also trying to establish credibility (credibility is one of the 6 key features of a sticky idea in Chip and Dan Heaths “Made to Stick”) – the other is on a new topic – regenerative design, which we will come back to.
Assessment sessions – There are also four assessment sessions, one explaining how to track evidence of the different learning objectives, one on reflective writing and then a feedback session for each based on student submissions. This also creates lots of Q&A time. The feedback sessions included me sharing snippets of student work (which I asked permission to do before hand) which I put up anonymously on a screen – explained what I liked about them and also where they could be improved. I was careful to select work which I could say lots of positives about – but also provide constructive feedback that the whole class would find helpful – linking it back to comments I had made about everyones’ work.
Project sessions – Finally the majority of the in-class time is spent working on projects and I would spend time with each group each week discussing progress, challenging assumptions, giving feedback and answering questions. Typically, this would be 10-15 minutes a group a week for each project. We also had a presentation session where groups presented their design, which for me was one of the highlights of the whole unit.
Another feature of my teaching generally, which I tried to create on this unit, is to make myself approachable – so that during sessions students could ask individual questions, either in front of the group or privately. The BLUE rating for the question “How easy was it to contact teaching staff and ask for help if you didn’t understand something in this unit?” was 4.5/5, which suggests it went well, although only 11% of students have filled in the questionnaire so maybe it didn’t go so well after all…
Coming into the unit it was hard to know how structured to make the in-person times. I didn’t want to be over-prescriptive, reducing the opportunity for innovation and different ideas – after all, the students had all studied engineering, from a diverse range of different organisations from across the world. So they wouldn’t need the same scaffolding as first years. But maybe in my attempt to give them freedom, I was also a little too hands-off. This is something I will reflect on at the end of the unit.
One thing I would say, which is a good indicator of success I believe, was that at most we had two students not attend a session, so an attendance of 87.5 – 100%/week which is pretty good – especially as it didn’t dip as the unit progressed.
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