Bristol Institute for Learning and Teaching

Teaching is often a lonely affair. Let’s share more of our teaching ideas with colleagues, including Senior Tutors!  

Senior Tutors come into play when our students are struggling. Is this too late? Are there ways to get Senior Tutors and academic teaching staff to think in a more joined-up way about a learning environment that is conducive to everybody’s mental health? I’m putting these questions to Amy Lewis, Senior Tutor in Modern Languages.  

Amy, first of all, thank you for all your work! May I ask whether there’s a framework for you to be consulted on teaching matters in our School?  

In the Arts Faculty, Senior Tutors also serve as Disability Coordinators, so we take part in discussions around inclusive teaching and assessment for disabled students. The last time I was in a UoB classroom was as a student teacher in 2007 though! I would love to be more involved, and I’d be interested in exploring what this involvement might look like, especially when it comes to issues around diversity, the attainment gap and inclusive practice. I’m particularly interested in how race, class, educational background, disability and gender (and the intersection of these) affect how individual students experience the classroom.  

You have actually got a background in teaching, don’t you? Tell us a bit about that experience.  

I remember clearly the experience of teaching Othello to a ‘difficult’ Year 10 class. I’d been warned about the class’s poor behaviour, and two students – the two Black students – were singled out as particularly troublesome. I was a new teacher, and I’d come from a youth work background, so I approached the class and individual students in the same way I always had – as fellow humans who I needed to meet where they were. I remember that goosebumps moment of resonance: watching the play do something with them as, rather than asking the set questions on language, plot, theme etc. My class discussions were led by questions such as: How does it make you feel? What do you think? Once we’d connected to each other and to the play, we could explore how language had led to our feelings of injustice, sorrow, anger and so on. Thinking back to these moments almost makes me miss secondary teaching!  

Do stay in Modern Languges – we need you here! A lot of our students are super smart, but they don’t always the confidence in their own ability. When someone comes to you and says they don’t know where to start, say, with an essay, what do you advise?  

The problem is often perfectionism. I would encourage the student who comes to see me to stop writing and start talking – I encourage them to explain to me what they find interesting, what they’d like to know more about, what the hook is that they’re going to hang their argument on.  

Don’t we want them to be “perfect” though, when we suggest to them that 100 is the perfect mark?  

Yes, assessment is a big issue. I’ve recently been reading around ungrading as a (radical?) approach to inclusive assessment. The current graded assessment and classification model often tends to feed perfectionism and social anxiety: terror around failure, around being judged, and being found wanting. ‘Compare and despair’ is rife in the student body: “Everyone else is so much better than me.” Could ungrading be a counter to this?   

This does sound like it would require a comprehensive overhaul. What do people in Education say about wide-ranging assessment reform?  

I’ve been following the work of Jesse Stommel, at the University of Denver. He says “Grades frustrate intrinsic motivation. Students work to the grade rather than doing work for the sake of learning. Students ask questions like, ‘what are you looking for,’ ‘how many points is this worth,’ not ‘what will I do,’ but ‘what should I do, and how will it be graded?’” He says without grades his conversations with students are completely changed for the better, and tuned more toward genuine curiosity. Stommels also says that “too often teachers fail to ask students how, where, and when learning happens for them.”  

So, without grades and assessment, how do you know that intended learning outcomes have been met?  

We would need to look at this kind of framing of our units as well. Stommel says he finds it “strange that teachers and institutions would pre-determine outcomes before students even arrive upon the scene.” He prefers “emergent outcomes, ones that are co-created by teachers and students and revised on the fly. Setting trajectories rather than mapping in advance the possible shapes for learning.”  

I’d love to look into this in a lot more detail with you. A lot of this maps quite neatly on my own work on Resonance Pedagogy, but it also seems to chime with work that others at the University do. I find it ironic that teaching is often quite a lonely affair, and I think we should share a lot more of our teaching ideas with colleagues, including Senior Tutors.  

Let’s!