Mentoring - Stephen Colbert

This is an excellent piece of observation from Stephen, on a subject that I am sure all members of the team can relate to. As the author of this blog, I believe the points within to be as important as ever as we move into difficult times in the FE sector, and where Quality Assurance mechanisms are under scrutiny. No words have been altered in this piece of writing whatsoever. Thank you, Stephen, this is both strong and necessary. 

Mentoring

When I began teaching in FE in 2004 I was informally mentored by my line manager. His knowledge, experience and approachable nature made my transition from community based to classroom-based tuition much easier.  His help has stayed with me.

Supporting new colleagues is important and mentoring can play a valuable role in this. Mentoring already takes place in New College Lanarkshire, mostly in an informal manner. I think putting into place a basic, but flexible framework would be useful for both the mentor and mentee.

The process shouldn’t be overly bureaucratic and time will need to be allocated in order for it to be successful.

Mentoring should not be part of the normal manager-staff relationship but should be a peer to peer guidance, support and feedback process.

Departments should have a number of senior lecturers who could be provided with remission to act as mentors. However, we should be open to using colleagues from other departments if appropriate.

Both parties should agree to meet regularly (weekly or bi-weekly) during the initial teaching period and less frequently as the academic year progresses. 

The sessions would provide a safe space for the new lecturer to discuss anything and everything that concerns their teaching practice.  

Only significant issues of concern should be brought to the attention of the manager.

Once the formal mentoring process has ended one would hope that a positive, collegiate working relationship has been built between both parties. This should help embed good relationships within teaching groups and integrate good practice throughout teaching teams.

Teaching formal register to learners - easy to follow guides - Stephen Colbert and Mark Hetherington

One of the areas of our work as a team, is the import of teaching writing in a formal manner, which can often be a difficult concept for learners to grasp.

We use a range of teaching and learning techniques, such as using dummy reports with errors in them for learners to analyse in groups and pick out where the errors in form, content and language are, PP teaching pinpointing common areas of discrepancy and discussions about different types of register and tone.

Mark created a report with numerous deliberate errors in them, where groups of students try to identify problems in writing style, spelling, punctuation, syntax, proofreading and so on. The group task becomes a light-hearted but competitive and healthy intra-group task, but crucially, it is an active and relevant part of the lesson, as they will be writing formally on an individual basis in the weeks after. 

Stephen created an excellent resource which outlines a great deal of common problems we encounter as educators. Feedback on this document has been universally positive from groups who have used it, and some screenshots of this and some writing for learners to self-critique are displayed below.

In the case of Stephen's well crafted short document, he raises the following specific points. This can also help when teaching reading analysis too. 

His document is entitled 'Formal Writing Voice' and is broken down into the following areas for learners:

1. Using formal writing voice
2. Do not use first-person pronouns
3. Avoid addressing readers as 'you'
4. Avoid the use of contractions
5. Avoid colloquialism and slang expressions
6. Avoid abbreviated versions of words
7. Conclusion

The document uses lots of interesting and helpful working examples for the students to refer to and is very user friendly indeed.

Adapted from: http://facultyweb.ivcc.edu/rrambo/tip_formal_writing_voice.htm

Below are screenshots from both documents as a clear signpost. Please click on the image to view the documents in part. 

Using videos to introduce reading - Stephen Colbert

For classes traditionally less confident studying the reading element of F3GB 10 and F3GB 11 (levels 4 and 5 Core Skills Communication), Stephen introduces the topic by using videos.

He shows a brief two to three-minute clip of a sector relevant video and ask the class what they notice about it.

Then he circulates prompts and sometimes a worksheet depending on the class level and competence. They watch the video as a group and Stephen asks them to work in pairs to write down some of the main things that they noticed (key points).

This makes it easy to introduce the more formal approach of Summarising a piece of writing.

Counter-intuitively this works better for the Evaluation as it allows students to express their opinions on the piece thereby building confidence. Stephen then asks questions about how visually appealing the video is, who is it aimed at and finally ask them would the intended viewed find it useful? This leads to discussion and allows him to ‘plant’ terminology and explanations that he reintroduces when teaching the formal reading element.

To finish the lesson, Stephen shows a glossary of words and terms that could be applied to the video and which also could be used when summarising and evaluating pieces of writing.

There is no doubt that this is an excellent and well thought out, cogent strategy which helps learners to make obvious connections to the analytical exercise at hand. 

Student Voice - Denise McLaughlan

After every class, Denise collects information from students (anonymously on scraps of paper, or   verbally from class group) on the following questions:

 

1.  In one word, how did this class lesson feel for you? 

2.  What, if anything, will stick in your head about this lesson? 

3.  How could this lesson have been made better? 

Denise feels that this is a good tool for students because: 

• they get a chance to express themselves - expression being a core human need 
• they get a chance to use their imagination - good for all tutors to be stimulating their imagination 
• they get a chance to furnish the tutor with creative ideas for improvement - all from the vantage point of students - a rich seam of information 
• they get to hear that the tutor has 'heard' their expressions (as they are aggregated and shared in next class) 
• they get to hear that they are valued (as the tutor thanks them for their contributions, regardless whether contributions were positive or (arguably) negative answers). 
• students get to feel like someone actually cares about their opinions (in a world where so many are often not valued) 
• all above further aid effective communication skills
• more rounded students enhance society, within the community we live in

Icebreakers and the import of student engagement - Mark Hetherington and Denise McLaughlan

The importance of the icebreaker with any given class, whether it be in person or online should never be underestimated.

The team uses a variety of ideas, and some of the key reasons for using them are noted, succinctly, as follows:

Icebreakers warm up the conversation among the participants in an initial class.

Icebreakers can help improve the efficiency of first meetings by strengthening bonds between participants and reducing any (perceived) tension.

Icebreakers may stand alone, or they may serve as a segue into the class, activity or overview of the unit to be taught. 

The best icebreakers arguably reinforce the reason for the group coming together, in the case of the team and their teaching, to provide sound reasons for Communication being on the curriculum and how working with us will develop a number of lifelong skills, namely oral, writing and analytical skills, to name but three working examples. 

This post showcases two very different approaches to the conventional methods many of us might use when meeting classes for the first time.

Mark - moral dilemmas. This is something that Mark has used in a variety of classes over the years and is intended to get students thinking about why they might think a certain way, to defend their thought processes, consider the importance of joined up thinking and critical analysis (just a phrase at this point for learners), and of course, the necessity for sensible structuring. The ethos of the exercise has remained the same over the years, but the scenarios and how the introductory session is delivered changes each year, to freshen things up a little.

The idea behind the exercise is to assemble learners into small groups, and work through possible scenarios, and what factors might influence their individual decisions. Mark always clarifies that there is no right or wrong answer, but to consider WHY they have come to their respective decisions. He always provides what HE would do in that situation, which often leads to an organic line of questioning from the groups, which is exactly what he is looking for. The session is reflected upon afterwards, and the following two links provide the lesson itself and some student feedback. He has around 20 different scenarios, and they are often tailored to suit the needs of any given class. Please click on the links below.

Moral dilemmas session

NCL SWAP Science 2022-23: Moral Dilemmas Session

Denise - using music to convey meaning in communication terms. 

Sometimes Denise deliver an icebreaker lesson with a ukulele as the star attraction.  The idea is that she plays a few chords and ask the student if the sound conjures up any images in their mind. As she works with the class for possible answers they are often many and varied.  She emphasises that first of all, all students saw the perceived 'correct' image - given that this was the very first time they consumed this 'information', this 'vibration', this music.  

So what they saw in their mind's eye cannot necessarily be wrong - it was what it was (for them).  

Next, she shares what the actual artist was trying to communicate (eg Jason Mraz 'I'm Yours' - a love song) and they discuss how and why communication can be a "slippery thing" and how some people are (arguably) better at communicating; but reinforcing the need to learn and develop key communication skills. 

The initial class is then focused on what assessments the students will be learning in her classes and serves as an innovative and interactive opening session.

A collegiate approach and the necessity for open lines of communication - Fiona Thomson

It is a long standing joke that communication lecturers must be good communicators. Stands to reason, right? In this post, Fiona provides information on the part of the communication process she plays in the academic journey for herself, her students and the tutors and Academic Leaders.

At the start of every semester, Fiona makes it clear to the parent sections and the associated Academic Leaders, that is is crucial that she attends their course board meetings, which she does regularly. At these meetings, she listens to the concerns of the students about issues which may range from workloads, timings of assessment, not having access and knowledge of ICT to produce work and such like. 

This allows Fiona to see if she can help with student/staff concerns and at times provide solutions, some by requesting to have the Communication class timetabled in a computing room for example which is a request most of the teaching team have prior to delivery. 

Attending these important meetings gives Fiona the opportunity to hear what the students think about their communication unit and what benefit or not they got from completing this. On that note, it may be that the Communication unit it not the most appropriate unit for that class grouping and again, it gives Fiona the opportunity to provide information on other units that can be delivered as servicing requests in future. 

 

This is something that should be in the forefront of everyone's mind as we start to see the 'Next Gen' Qualifications being pushed out.  The traditional Core Skills and English Units are being embedded more and more, but there is much more report writing and research to be done in these new qualifications. It is advised, and the good counsel of the experienced members of the teaching team, that parent sections will need our help to ensure their students are capable of doing this as they progress to the next level up, apply to university or go out into employment. 

As always, open lines of communication is at the forefront of this success.

Student creativity - showing US the way!

Whilst the respective teaching teams pride themselves on creative learning and teaching strategies, illustrated within this blog for example, we should never forget the role that our learners play in this process.

Often, learners will 'take a chance' when delivering an oral presentation, whether it be asking a specific question to a peer within a presentation delivery, return a question to the floor in the q and a session, perhaps raise a controversial subject within a piece of research or challenge conventional thinking. All of which are encouraged in our classes, as long as the content is not offensive of course.

Two such ideas came from a learner in a current SWAP STEM class taught by Mark. He authors that cohort's blog and students were quick to see the benefit of the workings of it, where he encourages members of the class to share good ideas, news stories to discuss, or anything that will generally provide added extras to the group's learning.

Example 1 - one of the students mentioned a very handy resource called Instapaper (I have added the link to the useful weblinks section of this blog too). 

The link to this gem is found at: Instapaper

The idea behind this website is that you can save anything, and read anywhere, in a handy all in one place bookmark if you will. This is a very neat website which we could all use, to save time and is 'electronically portable' as it were. 

Save anything - save all of the interesting articles, videos, cooking recipes, song lyrics, or whatever else you come across while browsing. With one click, Instapaper lets you save, read, and manage the things you find on the Internet. 

Read anywhere - Instapaper syncs the articles and videos you save so that they’re waiting for you on all your devices - iPhone, iPad or Kindle. You can read anything you save, anywhere and anytime you want, even offline.

Create notes - Find that great quote you want to remember and share? Instapaper makes it easy to highlight and comment on text in any article so you can easily store it, retrieve it, quote it and share it.

Example 2 - one of the students was keen to incorporate a learning strategy she enjoys in one of her Science classes, which is kahoot. We had a discussion about how she could utilise a quiz at the end of her talk to assess and evaluate the learning of the audience and we agreed we would do this after the q and a session, so that she could control the length of the actual delivery and not have to worry about the duration of the Kahoot quiz eating into valuable delivery time. 

The results were great and a winner emerged. I have to report, that the students didn't know about the quiz prior to the student delivering her talk but she informed the audience at the start of her presentation, thus ensuring active listening throughout. This was highly impressive. 

The topic of research was 'How reading affects the brain' and naturally, the student was successful in the assessment.

The link to kahoot can be seen here, and the website can be easily located in the 'Useful weblinks' section on this blog - Register - Kahoot!

This is the final slide with a clear signpost for learners.

We should encourage more of this. Who says learning can't be fun!

Stressing the importance of Communication teaching, learning and assessment to learners - Fiona Thomson

A number of members of the Communication and English teaching team have accumulated many years experience servicing various vocational areas and understand the importance of specialist teaching. Fiona is no exception and in this post outlines the value of communication skills for learners.

One of the main things Fiona does is to ensure students gain an understanding of the importance of English and communication skills and the part it plays not only in a college setting but also in their wider employment possibilities. She makes it clear form the get go that their communication class is not a stand alone unit; what skills knowledge and understanding they learn in the Communication class are useful and easily transferred too within all other units on their Programme of study. 

In general terms, most of the Communication Units we teach are broken down into three distinct learning areas, namely Reading, Writing and Speaking. Fiona has broken down the three outcomes below to provide some context.

It has always been a strength of the teaching team to ensure that contextualisation of materials is at the forefront of the learner's journey, whilst being careful not to over assess. 

Reading - in Communication units at all levels, learners analyse and evaluate a piece of text; these skills can, and indeed should, be used in all their other class when reading course handouts and text books. That is to say, the learning has value and is not therefore a stand alone skill. All of our students should be able to say, without fear, that the skills learned in our classes are transferable.

 

Writing - in this outcome, aspects such as layouts, referencing, front covers, using spell checks especially looking at grammar and syntax are taught. These skills should be applied to any written work for their other lecturers. Again, the sense of transferability is at the forefront of our meaningful teaching and assessment philosophy. 

Speaking - in this outcome, learners will present an individual oral presentation using PowerPoint or similar visual anchor, participate in a discussion, or contribute to a formal meeting where decisions are encouraged. Often this is the skill where learners have concerns about their ability, but in more cases than not, a well structured talk can produce excellent results. This helps with oral deliveries in their other units as well as in job interviews, which often includes a presentation nowadays.

All of the aforementioned should make perfect and logical sense to the students, and provide other staff members with a higher quality of responses in written format, and hopefully allow the parent staff members to concentrate on their specific content (subject) and not have to point out spelling and referencing errors and how written work should be set out. This sounds somewhat theoretical, but it most definitely does happen in practice!

For this cyclical teaching ideology to work, members of the English and Communication team must engage with the staff from the parent section. Fiona does this continually and has formed very close working relationships and have explained in detail what she can do to help them, and their students, with course work/assessments. 

As way of working example - vocational teams often ask the students to write a report, Fiona then gets a copy of the report brief from them, and work with the students to produce a good quality report - well set out and in a clear easily readable format, that is well researched and correctly referenced. This then allows the parent section staff members to direct their teaching to their subject matter and not have to worry about spelling grammar and explaining formatting issues.

  

This ultimately reduces stress for students and staff, as the student now has two lecturers 'singing from the same hymn sheet' as it were and not giving conflicting or confusing information.   This also helps reduce the burden of assessment for students as the one piece of work can in most cases cover two separate assessments, thus diminishing assessment overload for our learners.

Proper planning prevents poor performance - Jen Neville

One of the hallmarks of a successful educator is placing importance on planning the curriculum, classes, assessments, feedback and much more.

Jen focuses on such clarity with all her classes and what follows is her well established strategy. 

Students are provided with a 12 or 18 week plan (dependent on the needs of the home team) of what will be covered each week in class and when assessments will take place. All learners are encouraged to make personal notes each week (noting tasks to do/questions to ask/areas to work on, etc.) If they are absent, they can check what is covered on that date and access the corresponding week's folder on Moodle. 

Jen uses her own Moodle page that students are given a specific enrolment key for (so that their sections are restricted to their class only). There is generic material at the top of the course that all students can access and works well for both lecturer and learner. 

Jen also uses her own version of the weekly planner to reflect on tasks, make notes and such like. This all augments the preparation strategy in an efficient manner. 

Students are encouraged to duplicate/edit as they see fit to include tasks/assessments that relate to other classes (helping them to notice assessments/tasks that are close in date and to plan/manage workload).

This strategy is incredibly relevant, as Jen recognises that it helps students to take responsibility for their learning and use it at the beginning of most classes to recap on what's covered and to signpost learning.

Below is a screenshot of how this works in practice. Please click on the image to see the schedule and the clear coding strategy adopted. 

Another great example of active learning, where the student is at the centre. 

Retrieval Practice exercise - Sharon MacGregor

At the beginning of every class, it is always advisable to establish students’ prior knowledge on a particular topic via questions. This helps both teacher and learner to focus and engage. It sometimes reveals that the students know little about the topic; at other times, that they indeed have good knowledge of learning intentions for the lesson about to be delivered.

Given the importance of tapping into the knowledge that students have already required, and its importance for establishing that knowledge in long-term memory, Sharon has been looking at retrieval exercises as a tool in class teaching. This is a very useful resource indeed and one worth bookmarking (and I have, on this blog, in the useful weblinks section on the right hand side!):

 

RetrievalPracticeGuide.pdf

 

Sharon's students have just read and discussed the play, Men Should Weep, by Ena Lamont Stewart, for Higher English.

 

Students were given a sheet with character names and themes such as poverty, gender roles, unemployment. They then spent five minutes on each, writing down as much as they could remember about this aspect or character in the play: in terms of character, who the character is and their relationship to others, character traits etc.

 

Once they had completed this exercise, they had then to find techniques (dialogue/stage directions) within the play to back this up.

 

Encouraging students to engage with the topic in this way will develop skills of recall. This is a necessary skill in the final exam when they have to refer to the play and analyse techniques in relation to a given theme.

Although the context in this instance is within the field of English, this technique could easily be adapted for use in any of our classes. 

Thank you for sharing, Sharon, this is a fantastic resource.

Guest lecturers and fostering links with vocational professionals - Mark Hetherington

The respective teaching teams are always keen to form meaningful professional relationships with key industry personnel, the rewards are obvious in terms of teaching and learning. 

Below is such an example from a Counselling cohort who were taking the Communication (NC) FA1W 12 Unit. 

NCL were very grateful for Sarah Austin's input into two Zoom calls with the students and her subject expertise and natural engagement with the learners created a very interactive learning experience for all attendees.  

Facilitating and writing a record of the meetings was a challenge, but it was important to keep a log of the events and they can be seen below in the class blog link.

The students were extremely grateful to have access to an experienced Counsellor. Both Mark and Sarah contacted the students' Lecturers and Tutors beforehand out of professional courtesy to ensure there was no 'stepping on any professional toes' as it were, but the initiative was welcomed with open arms as you might imagine.

It is hoped that more of this will occur throughout the team as the session progresses and beyond.

Access to Counselling 2021-22: Thank you so much, Sarah