So it’s done.
5 years after I started thinking about the content.
2 years after writing the unit outline.
6 months since I started drafting the notes.
12 weeks since that first, disastrous teaching moment.
I have completed the delivery of my new unit on Sustainable Design.
So it’s time to reflect on how it all went. Using the feedback prompts that I have been using on the formative projects that I have been giving to my students it’s time to take stock, ask what went well (engineers are notoriously bad at giving positive feedback/praise, I remember I knew if I had done a good job in industry if I received a report back with just the date and initials of my director on the cover and no comments inside!) so I challenge myself to provide positive feedback to my students, and now to myself.
Areas for improvement. This will be a much longer list! I will try and focus on actionable improvements.
One of the challenges on the unit was to try and help the students think outside the box. So when I provided feedback I tried to give them some “what if” questions to keep them thinking about how to approach a problem – I will do the same with my unit.
What Went Well:
This one is surprisingly easy. The formative work. Both the level of engagement and the quality of the work were excellent. All 18 students engaged in all of the formative work. Which is a win. The explicit link to the summative assessment definitely helped. The quality of the work was also excellent. The other really big win for me was that students did things, like presenting, that they didn’t feel comfortable doing, but went much better than they expected. The mix of joy and relief after they have presented is always a delight. As the presentations were formative it took away much of the pressure, which I think really helped. As did the size and the closeness of the class, I tried to create a supportive and encouraging space for them to learn in.
Examples of students’ formative work.
Areas for improvement:
The list could be very long, but let’s keep it simple and focus on actionable areas for improvement.
First up – always check the room you are teaching in and make sure you are aware of what technology is available (and what is not). I always do this when I teach in other buildings, but the room I was teaching in for this unit was a one-minute walk from my office and I assumed I knew how it would be set up.
Second – be really really clear in your communication. Say everything multiple times and write it down. From talking to a student I thought I had been clear that I was essentially teaching them three different definitions of sustainability, with three different measures and three different design process’s. The three different design process’s were understood, but the three different definitions and three different measures were less clear. Leaving the students wondering what definition of sustainability they were working on. Looking back at the slides, notes and project briefs I had not been as explicit as I should have been about what I was expecting from each project. Next year I think I will add a clear statement around the definition of sustainability we are using, and how it will be measured for each project.
Three – create more structured teaching times. As I noted in week 4 I took a very relaxed view to what was going to happen in the classroom, maybe too relaxed. Some students suggested they would like some more structure, and whilst I don’t want to over structure the classroom time, as many deep and rich conversations came out of the discussion about the projects, we could have done some more simple activities to better define the topics we were looking at and give students more practice in what they were doing (see four). Note, this is not a suggestion to revert back to 2 hours of lecturing, but instead some smaller activities to help reinforce the learning/behaviours that I was hoping to bring out in the four to five week long projects.
Four – this is a big one – I was guilty of assuming that students had a clear understanding of how to both follow a design process and articulate it afterwards. I had fallen into the expert trap! Just because I know how to do it doesn’t mean they do. This created a tension as much of my feedback was on the articulation of the design process, rather than the sustainability side of the content. Next year I would definitely run some short design workshops which focus on: creating a brief, coming up with a/some concepts (depending on the process), proposing a solution and reviewing the solution against the brief. There would also be a requirement to clearly (and simply) articulate this, along with a statement around what design process was used, what definition of sustainability was assumed etc.
Provocation/what if:
As noted before – I like to challenge my students with an out-of-the-box thought. So here are some of my “what if” questions for my own unit.
What if I can’t teach the unit next year? Will someone else be able to run it with the content (and blog posts)? I really hope so.
What if the unit was offered to a much wider range of students, including those that are outside of engineering, would it still work? This is tricky to answer. My gut reaction is to say yes, after all, it’s not very engineeringy but, I also struggle to have an awareness of how much maths and engineering is in a unit like this. It doesn’t have stress and strain, but it does use lots of engineering language, thought and behaviour. Maybe one to trial at small scale with lots of scaffolding.
Of course the question most line managers will want to ask is can you deliver the same unit for 180 students (or 1800). And the answer is yes but! The thing about scaling is that whilst the preparation time may not increase that much (although I think it would increase more than people might think as simple problems with 18 students become more complex with 180 and huge with 1800, so need designing out in advance). The thing that doesn’t scale easily is feedback. The time spent giving feedback on 30 projects would be more than ten times the amount for three, due to the fatigue you get from reviewing something similar over and over again. And for 300 the time per project goes up again as you now need a team, and that team would need careful management and multiple sessions to ensure some form of consistency of quality of feedback. All of which adds to the time required per project. So, you may need to think creatively about how to maximise feedback but at the same time manage staff workload and mental health.
The big question of our age is “could AI produce a comparable result?”. I must start by saying: 1 – I am not an expert in AI and; 2 – I haven’t tried to get AI to create a submission, so it is hard to say, but I suspect, in the right hands, with the right prompts and the submission of the three projects, an AI reflection could be created which would be of a good standard. I guess then the question becomes, if someone has used AI in a deep and reflective way to draw out their learning is that a good or bad thing? Answers on a postcard!
Q&A from comments
Q – Can’t wait to hear what happens! Especially what the formative assessments are – is this full on problem based learning (PBL)?
A – I didn’t approach it as a PBL but, based on the description I found online (here) it looks a lot like PBL. The only caveat is that I started by stating the areas I want them to cover and give them guided reading before they tackle the problem – so it is maybe a little more directive.
