It’s time for marking – but it’s the feedback that makes a difference.

Summer is here – students are handing in work and sitting exams and marking is getting under way; so this seems like a good time to think about the feedback that students will receive.

Feedback is integral to the learning process and is one of the main benefits that students get from assessment, but they are often dissatisfied with the feedback they receive, despite tutors spending many hours producing it. This post will try to unpick the essentials of effective feedback and suggest some of the things that you can focus on to make the best use of your marking time.

What is the purpose of feedback?

Effective feedback helps students to develop their understanding and improve their performance in relation to the standards of the university. So comments on work should identify the gap between the desired standards and the student’s achievement – then offer guidance on how to close the gap in future. It may be more useful to think of this as providing ‘feed forward’ because it is the next piece of work which can be improved with effective feedback.

What sort of feedback is useful?

To be useful to students feedback has to be accessible. That means typing or printing feedback if possible or making sure that handwritten comments are legible and using language that students understand. In future it might mean using alternative media such as audio or video to provide feedback.

Once students can read their feedback they are looking for constructive information that they can act on. For example, a comment like ‘weak introduction’ identifies a deficiency, but doesn’t help a student to strengthen the introduction in their next essay, whereas a few words referring them to guidance on writing introductions and pointing them towards the relevant criteria can be very helpful. You can save time here by producing a general feedback sheet that gives advice on common problems and referring students to particular points as necessary.

More feedback doesn’t always mean better feedback as students can become overwhelmed by a lot of comments; a simple message about one or two areas to work on for their next assignment can be much more effective. Rather than trying to tell a student how to make their work perfect, it can be more helpful to suggest ways in which they can achieve one grade higher next time.

In short, try to make your feedback:

• Accessible.
• Constructive.
• Forward-looking.
• Concise.
• Linked to resources.

How can we encourage students to use feedback effectively?

The ultimate test of feedback is if students can use it to enhance their learning and performance, and that will only be possible if it includes ‘feed forward’ suggestions. Even then, students will sometimes need support and guidance to get the most from the feedback they receive. The Study Success at Success (S3) website offers guidance to students on using feedback . When you are planning for the coming academic year you might want to think about activities that can be incorporated into assessment schemes and seminars to encourage students to make good use of feedback. For example, students could be asked to respond to feedback by writing a note saying what they will be doing differently in their next assignment, or teachers could refer back to previous feedback when marking formative assignments so that students see a direct link between feedback and future performance.

What are we doing to develop feedback practice at Sussex?

TLDU works with colleagues to improve the effectiveness of feedback given to students in a number of ways:

Events: The programme of Teaching and Learning Development Events which is open and free to all Sussex teaching staff and colleagues at partner colleges includes a range of workshops on feedback and assessment topics and a new programme will be running throughout the 2013-14 academic year. Some Sussex Teaching and Learning Conferences and visits from external speakers have also focused on assessment and feedback, notably the 2009 Sussex Teaching and Learning Conference, How am I doing? New approaches to academic feedback and advice which brought together external speakers and Sussex colleagues to share and discuss approaches to feedback. David Nicol gave a keynote on Principles into Practice: Enhancing feedback in higher education [PDF 211.20KB] and ran a Putting the Principles into our Practice workshop [DOC 37.00KB] and Kate Exley gave a keynote on Giving great feedback … but that’s just half the story [PDF 387.35KB] and a workshop on Giving really useful feedback [DOC 26.00KB] (these files are only accessible with a Sussex login).

Online resources and reading: The TLDU website has an Ideas and Guidance section which includes pages on Effective Feedback and Peer Assessment and Feedback. The TLDU library holds several useful texts on feedback which colleagues are able to borrow and the collection of weblinks includes many resources on feedback.

MAPS: creating learning spaces for passion to flourish.

Watts-Strogatz_small-world_model_100nodes by Keiono via Wikimedia (see attribution below*)

When thinking about learning at university it is all too easy to concentrate on the written curriculum and to forget that students come to university with their own set of interests and even desires and passions around the subject they have chosen to study. Student-led societies such as the Maths and Physics Society are a great way for people to come together across years and departments within a school to open up spaces between the formal learning situations to share their love of their subject and explore wider discipline-based interests together.

In the case of the Maths and Physics Society an initial idea came from Ali Taheri who was aware that there was not as much pure mathematics in the curriculum as some students wanted and that this area was one which potentially underpinned the whole of Mathematics and Physics and could therefore bring together students at all levels from across the school. There were plenty of keen students ready to get involved, so in the Autumn of 2012, MAPS was born. RUSTLE talked to Ali and students Mary Cassels, Harriet Couchman, Charles Kind and Victor Summers who, with Harry Williams and others, have been running the society. MAPS is an academic society that operates across physical and virtual space making the most of the social and teaching spaces in the Pevensey building as well as online opportunities for community building.

Colloquia

Every few weeks Maths and Physics students from first years to final year doctoral researchers (and some from outside MPS – everyone is welcome) gather to hear speakers from within the school give short talks. Beginning with refreshments and a chance to chat these are friendly gatherings where like-minded individuals hear their peers explore the beauties of their work. These are opportunities for students to learn from one another and also to develop their skills in presenting their projects to an audience. The impact of the colloquia seems to be considerable – not only are those with a desire for more input in a particular area being catered to, but others are taking the opportunity to explore an area new to them and discovering an aspect of their discipline that is inspiring them. Ali has found that several students have decided to take up topics broached in colloquia for their projects.

Many schools and departments run ‘research-in-progress’ seminar series for research students and staff but this sort of event, under the auspices of an under-graduate led society, bringing together a wider cross-section of students as audience and speakers (recent colloquia featured MMath students presenting their first class projects) can potentially do more to build a strong network of learners within a school.

Poster Competition

Another very visible manifestation of the society is the poster competition which runs throughout the year with posters by undergraduate and postgraduate students from across the school displayed in the foyer. At the end of the academic year a prize of £100 is awarded for the best poster from each department. The competition provides another opportunity for students to develop their presentation skills in ways that will be useful for conferences or future careers. It also widens the range of ideas that students are exposed to beyond those covered by their courses and creates a sense of disciplinary identity to the building.

Book of the week

The other thing to look out for in the foyer of Pevensey is the MAPS ‘Book of the Week’. This is where the physical space meets the virtual because each week during the teaching blocks Mary and Harriet choose one or two books that they have read, display them so that students can browse through them and write up a short review on the MAPS blog. The books tend to be suggested by lecturers, society members, other students or come from reading lists and the library provides the volumes to display but there is plenty of hard work involved in reading them and writing the reviews.

A weekly book choice and review is a significant commitment, but with a few students to spread the workload it could make an interesting and dynamic addition to any school’s foyer and/or website. In every field there are books that are important, exciting and interesting that somehow don’t quite fit neatly into any one module, these might be just the texts that students would love to explore and share with one another.

Blog

Increasingly, students are finding material online (blog posts, news articles, images etc.) that relates to their disciplinary passion yet doesn’t necessarily relate directly to the modules they are studying at the time – an academic society blog could be just the place to share and discuss those sort of texts. The MAPS blog includes items on the lives and work of ‘featured mathematicians’ and posts about exciting, interesting or simply pleasing things that the team has found in the course of their studies. But this is not a blog just for reading – the idea is to get engaged and for MAPS members to experience for themselves the ‘rush’ and ‘satisfaction’ from working through pure maths problems. Sets of 5-7 problems from a particular area of pure maths are set (sometimes related to the topic of a colloqiuum) that will allow students to see and experience for themselves some of the ‘real beauties’ of the mathematics that MAPS members love so much.

For those who may have been ‘switched off’ mathematics at an early age it will probably seem strange to hear the words ‘beauty’ and ‘love’ used in the context of this subject, but this is the language used by the students involved in MAPS. They share a real passion for this area of study and are clearly not alone because the blog is proving popular beyond the university as well.

What’s in it for us?

For Ali, MAPS biggest achievement is the way that it has raised interest in pure mathematics and theoretical physics amongst students, with several applying to be Junior Research Associates (JRAs) in pure maths and theoretical physics this summer and several finishing MMaths students aiming to do PhDs here at Sussex next year in pure mathematics.

The students involved have got something different from the society. For some, it was simply the opportunity to get ‘more pure maths’ which they acknowledge they could have sought out on their own, but they valued the guidance and structure that MAPS provided.

Others felt that it was ‘good to have something in the school outside of lectures … something informal and social’ where students could form a ‘pure maths community’ and support each other, creating a space in which individuals could ‘be a bit braver’. For some it was a source of project ideas and for others it was an opportunity to ‘shed light’ on an area close to their heart and to share the joy that they get from finding ‘wonderful proofs’.

The sorts of feelings that students have for their discipline will vary from school to school but there are likely to be many examples of similar passions amongst undergraduates and aspects of disciplines that underpin more specialised courses. Whatever those deeper, broader passions are in your area, they may well be the things that inspired your students to study at Sussex and helping those passions to flourish by supporting informal learning spaces like those introduced by MAPS can build a stronger, happier, learning community.

Academic student societies like MAPS operate in the gaps between the formal curriculum and the social whirl of student life, supporting and building on and around the curriculum to create learning spaces that can add enormously to students’ university experience. MAPS brings the departments of Mathematics and Physics and Astronomy together and welcomes others interested in pure maths from beyond MPS. Its success depends on the enthusiasm and hard work of the students, though support and encouragement from staff is a great help.

Is there an academic student society in your school? Are your students harbouring secret passions for an aspect of your discipline that they could be helped to explore together?

*Image attribution: 

• Title/Link: Watts-Strogatz small-world model 100nodes
• Creator: Keiono
• Attribution: I, Keiono [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

What else can we do with SyD? Making the most of Choice.

One of the less used, but very useful and versatile functions available in Study Direct (SyD) is the Choice activity. Designed for voting, this simple tool lets students choose one from a list of options – and those options could be all sorts of things.

For example, Choice could be used to book appointments with tutors to discuss feedback. The tutor would set up a Choice activity with options for each time slot then students would click on the one they wanted. In the tutor view a list of who has booked each session is visible. This method is used by TLDU to manage bookings for the Better Writing with the RLF programme and some colleagues use it for academic advisee meetings. 

Choice could also be used to save time when students are picking presentation topics or self-selecting groups. In this case the options could be set to allow a specific number of students to choose each one, and the tutor can decide whether or not to let students change their choices and whether they see who else has made a particular choice or just the total numbers. The tutor will see everything.

Choice is also a quick way of setting up a single question quiz – if there is just one question you want to ask students, such as ‘how well did you understand the lecture?’ or ‘which part of the lecture did you find most difficult to understand?’.

When it comes to the end of a module, if there is to be a revision session the Choice activity could be used to poll students in advance on which topic they most want to look at again, giving the tutor a clear picture, in advance of the final lecture of which areas need more or less attention.

Step-by-step to setting up a Choice

With editing on, click on ‘add activities’ and then under ‘student responses’ choose +Choice.

Choice Name: Fill in the ‘choice name’ box – this is the name that will appear on the site so make it something meaningful such as ‘Book a feedback tutorial’.

Choice Text: Enter some text in the ‘choice text’ box to explain to the students what the purpose of the Choice is and what you want them to do, for example: ‘Please choose one of the time slots below for your meeting with your tutor to discuss feedback on your essay. If you need to change your meeting you will be able to come back and change this booking if there is another free slot available.’

Limit: The next setting relates to whether or not you want to limit the number of responses for each option. In the case of booking appointments you would probably want to limit each option to one response (unless you wanted to meet students in pairs or small groups) but if you were asking about revision topics you would not want to limit the possible responses to any one option. You can enable or disable limiting options at this stage and later you can set individual limits for each option.

Choice 1  to Choice 4: You are automatically given 4 choices to start with but can add as many as you want and can leave some blank if you do not need as many as 4.  For each, you have a text box where you type in the ‘option’, for example: ‘Tuesday 1st May, 10.00-10.20’ and a limit box where you specify how many people can choose this option.

Restrict answering: If you want to, you can then restrict the time period in which students can respond. If you were using the activity to help plan a revision session you would probably want responses to arrive in time for you to prepare and if students were choosing presentation topics there may be a deadline for getting that sorted out.

Other settings: You can also choose whether options are displayed vertically or horizontally; under what circumstances and how results are published to students; and whether or not they can update their choices.

Save – either displaying on your site right away or hiding until you are ready – and your Choice is done!

Viewing Responses: When clicking on a live Choice activity the tutor will see how many responses have been made and can click on the ‘view n responses’ link to see them. The data can also be downloaded in ODS, Excel or text format.

What’s your Choice?

Are you using Choice with your students? Or have you found an unusual, interesting or effective use for any of the other Study Direct (SyD) functions that you would like to share with colleagues? RUSTLE and the Study Direct team are always keen to hear about ways in which Sussex staff and students are using learning technologies so please comment below or email tldu@sussex.ac.uk if there is something you would like to tell us about.

Teaching can lead to publication too: a tale of ethics and engineers.

Participants in the Sussex Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (PGCertHE) are required as part of their assessment portfolio to produce a piece of scholarly writing focusing on an issue in their teaching. Sometimes they choose to write up their scholarly piece in a format suitable for publication or use it as the basis for a subsequent journal submission. That is how Georgina Voss (SPRU) came to publish her recent article ‘Gaming, Texting, Learning? Teaching Engineering Ethics Through Students’ Lived Experiences With Technology’ in Science and Engineering Ethics.

The paper came out of Georgina’s challenges teaching an ethics course to engineering students, and her research around user-led innovation and design, and the social studies of science and technology. Many of her students could not see the immediate relevance of ethics to their studies but the key, as with so many supposedly ‘difficult to teach’ topics, was to find a way of making the subject material relevant (see previous posts on making library research skills relevant and interviews with teaching award winners) and in this case students’ own experiences with personal technologies offered a way in. As the abstract explains, the paper ‘reviews current teaching practices in engineering ethics; and examines young people’s engagement with technologies including cell phones, social networking sites, digital music and computer games to identify social and ethical elements of these practices which have relevance for the engineering ethics curricula’. Georgina was then able to develop three case studies to use with students, which can help them to make links between the ethical concepts they need to understand and their own experience. The first makes a connection between the ways that players relate and co-operate in multiplayer computer games with the sorts of communication and group work skills required in professional settings; the second looks at risk and safety through the lens of social media which ‘are “safe” in one context become risky in another, as the acceptability and control of the risks and harms changes’ and the third uses the example of the Napster file-sharing network to demonstrate ‘the uncertain uses, policing and long-term social impact of technologies’ (‘Gaming, Texting, Learning? Teaching Engineering Ethics Through Students’ Lived Experiences With Technology’).

Outputs from projects like this clearly have a wider audience and Georgina feels that public engagement about research, particularly in the social sciences is important. If she had been unable to find a journal to accept the paper she would still have published it on her blog or academia.edu, but as she always had dissemination in mind, she was looking for suitable journals while working on her portfolio. In her case, Science and Engineering Ethics was a good fit, but there is a wide range of journals publishing in the area of teaching and learning in Higher Education. Some focus on teaching and learning in a specific discipline, such as Social Work Education or the International Journal of Management Education; others focus on a particular aspect of teaching and learning such as Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education or The Internet and Higher Education while others look at HE as a whole, most notably Studies in Higher Education and Research in Higher Education.

For those new to publishing in this area the online journal Practice and Evidence of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education could be a good place to start. It ‘offers an opportunity for those involved in University learning and teaching to disseminate their practice …. [publishing] accounts of scholarly practice that report on small-scale practitioner research and case studies of practice that involve reflection, critique, implications for future practice and are informed by relevant literature, with a focus on enhancement of student learning.’

There is also the recently launched, Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice which ‘aims to provide a supportive publishing outlet to allow established and particularly new authors to contribute to the scholarly discourse of academic practice (both generally and in their discipline area) through the publication of papers that are theory-based and supported by evidence, as well as through the publication of Opinion Pieces and ‘On the Horizon’ papers on emerging work’. They have begun by organising a webinar for prospective authors and are committed to supporting new writers and reviewers.

If you are interested in getting involved in the scholarship of teaching and learning then you might want to come along to the ‘Taking a scholarly approach to teaching and learning’ event on Wednesday 24th April 2013 (14.00-16.15). There are two parts to this session, firstly a colleague will share their personal insights into the value and benefits of using pedagogic research to enhance and inform their own teaching. Part 2 will guide you on to how to access, find and approach educational literature. This session will be relevant for anyone who is looking to develop a portfolio, grant application or publication about teaching and learning practice in HE and of interest to anyone wanting to develop an area of their own practice in a scholarly way.

Scribing and reviewing – an alternative to student presentations?

Seminars are important spaces for students to discuss material and ideas they have encountered in lectures and their reading. Traditionally, seminars tend to focus around student presentations, but with larger groups this can eat up discussion time in a 50-minute seminar. Lynne Murphy (English) has come up with alternative activity which focuses students on the discussion itself.

Lynne explains that there is a possible risk with a seminar that ‘the students don’t know what to do with it after it happens’ and her ‘scribe’ activity gives it a bit of focus as well as producing documents from the seminars that are shared on Study Direct.

The activity comes in two parts. Each student takes a turn at being a seminar scribe, i.e. preparing a record of one particular seminar discussion. They also act as a peer reviewer for other students’ scribing of another seminar.

In Lynne’s module there were two students scribing each seminar and two reviewers. This meant that the reviewers were able to compare two approaches to the task, and the scribes received two lots of peer feedback.

The scribe’s task is to individually create a handout reflecting the main points of the discussion in the seminar. They are limited to two sides of A4 and the emphasis is on accurately and concisely summarising the seminar. Scribes are encouraged to reorganise the information and use appropriate formatting to make it more accessible and must cite sources and provide a references list. Long paragraphs are absolutely discouraged and students are warned that their handout should not look like an essay.

There are clearly some very specific skills being developed here, such as note-making, summarising, creating accessible handouts, and referencing, as well as a deeper understanding of the material discussed in the seminar.

But what impact did the activity have on the students’ learning in the seminars? Lynne says that they paid a lot of attention to the seminars they were scribing or reviewing with most of the students taking those seminars much more seriously in terms of reading and supplementing their understanding after the seminar by reading some more if they felt they needed to. In that respect it was similar to setting presentations as students ‘prepared for that seminar on the level that they would have prepared for one they were presenting in, except that we didn’t have to have the presentations’. But unlike presentation-based seminars it was not just the students who had prepared most (the scribes) who spoke during the seminars, because they were busy making notes.

In addition, of course, students were getting practice at peer reviewing and Lynne found that ‘the feedback they gave each other was beautiful – they did a fantastic job, essentially doing everything that we are supposed to do as tutors, which I take as an indication that they’ve learned something good from us and our feedback. They’d start out with something positive and they really did notice specific positive things … but they also had a really critical eye and made really concrete suggestions for improvement.’

The reviewers can get a lot from this activity too, becoming more familiar with assessment criteria and being critical will help them when they need to reflect on their own work and providing feedback to others should help them to think more deeply about feedback and how they might use the comments they get from tutors. For example, when they have received the feedback from the peer reviewers and made any changes to their own scribe handouts they will submit these to Lynne as part of their assessment for the module and will then receive feedback from her. Their earlier experience of giving and receiving peer feedback on similar pieces of work should mean that they are better able to reflect on and make use of the feedback that Lynne provides.

The scribe assignment makes up 30% of the total mark for the module (an essay accounts for the other 70%) and both parts of the activity contribute, with the mark split 80/20 between the handout produced and the feedback provided to others so that each part of the process is seen to have value.

Presentations have an important role to play in seminars, not least because they allow students to develop research and communication skills which will serve them well throughout their studies and into their careers, but there are other activities which can be equally useful and we need not make every module the same. Assessing oral presentations can be challenging, especially if student numbers means that there is not enough time for students to present individually so presentations have to be group assessments. So if you are thinking about alternatives to presentations as part of a coursework assessment in your module, a scribing and reviewing activity might be worth considering.

What else can we do with SyD? Giving feedback through online quizzes.

In the quest for more and faster feedback on students’ learning, Study Direct (SyD) quizzes can play a useful part. Online quizzes can give students an instant progress report on their learning and, with the right input from the tutor, concrete suggestions for developing their understanding in areas where they are struggling.

At a recent Study Direct Users’ meeting, Robin Banerjee (Psychology) presented a brief case study of the use of SyD quizzes to provide formative feedback to students and discussed some of the benefits and challenges of the approach. Hans Crombag (Psychology) has been using SyD quizzes for a few years and since Robin became Director of Teaching and Learning (DTL) there has been a coordinated strategy to roll out quizzes across the school to provide formative feedback to students on their learning during modules.

Robin and his colleagues see this as a developmental opportunity that is about much more than revision. By creating two quizzes for each module – one halfway through and one at the end – they hope to persuade students to self-assess their progress during the module and build on their learning as they go.

It was decided that the quizzes would be non-contributory and voluntary so it became important to publicize them and keep them in students’ awareness. The quizzes were put on the front page of the SyD site and information about them posted in forums. Students were also emailed and reminded in lectures. Seminar tutors explained the purpose and benefits of the quizzes and encouraged students to take them.

Each module convenor created their own quiz so there was variation between them. Robin chose to include a brief introduction at the start of his quiz setting out its purpose, how it would help the student, how they would get feedback on their answers and when the quiz would be available (in this case until the end of the module). Most quizzes used multiple choice questions but for the sake of variety some included true/false or matching questions and some included images.

Robin tried some short-answer questions and used wildcards to try to get around spelling mistakes but found that some students found bizarre ways of expressing the right answer that thwarted his attempts to allow for them so he suggests that this type of question really needs to be reserved for short numeric answers with no room for error.

Creating good questions is important, but as a significant purpose of the quiz is to provide meaningful feedback to the students the time spent writing the comments that will be displayed alongside the answers and in general feedback is an important investment in student learning. For each question Robin wrote a paragraph or two pointing the student in the right direction. The feedback that he has received from students who took the quiz is that they really liked being directed to the text and chapter or the part of the lecture where they could get the information they needed if they were confused. Robin was clear that he wanted there to be some activity on the part of the students to flesh out their knowledge and that he didn’t want to be just giving them the answers.

The quizzes have been a great resource for the students who chose to make use of them. Unfortunately, take-up was not as high as Robin and his colleagues would have wished, with early indications suggesting that about half of the students are making use of the quizzes during the module, though it is anticipated that many more will use them for revision before the exam.

Informal feedback from students who haven’t attempted quizzes yet indicated that they didn’t feel prepared and didn’t want to do them until they had revised for them, preferring to wait until they were revising for the exam and try the quizzes then. Robin and his colleagues are left with a definite sense that students who have really engaged with the course and are doing well are the same ones who have engaged with the mid-module quiz and those who need the help that the quiz could provide are the ones who haven’t engaged with it yet.

As the aim is to get all the students to engage earlier and get feedback earlier in the term it has been suggested that the quiz be made contributory to increase engagement. If the School decides that it wants the quiz done at a particular time to motivate students to get going with reflection on their learning early in the term then giving it a weighting of perhaps 5% might be enough to achieve that. But faculty are reluctant to increase the pressure on students by adding to the burden of contributory assessment. As Robin says ‘it is a balancing act… no one size fits all and the resources need to fit the pedagogic aims of each module’.

There are many interesting ways that you can use online quizzes in your teaching, to provide students with formative feedback and to develop their learning.
For example:

• very short quizzes for each lecture topic so that students can test their learning and get feedback each week;
• quizzes at revision times, perhaps as a way of identifying topics to cover in revision sessions;
• a quiz at the start of a module to find out about students’ prior knowledge of a subject or opinions on a topic;
• a quiz on discipline-specific vocabulary (see previous post);
• get students to write questions for a quiz as an interesting way of stretching their own learning.

If you would like to set up an online quiz then this handout on creating a quiz in Study Direct will take you through the steps. You can also get one-to-one help from a member of the Study Direct team on quizzes or any other aspect of SyD at the drop-in sessions held at the Shawcross Building IT Services Desk every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday between 2pm and 4pm.

Different situations, familiar challenges, exemplary approaches.

RUSTLE has been talking to some of the winners of the Sussex Teaching Awards 2012 to hear about their approaches to teaching and learning and the sorts of good practice that their colleagues and students appreciate so much. This post is based on conversations with Michelle Lefevre (Social Work), Pascal Stiefenhofer (Mathematics), Andrew Dilley (Brighton & Sussex Medical School) and Chris Stratford (Business and Management).

What came through strongly was that the different contexts in which Michelle, Pascal, Andrew and Chris are working nonetheless produce some challenges which are not only similar to each other but will be familiar to many people across campus. So their approaches, though quite individual and specific, should have something to offer to readers seeking to develop their own teaching.

Real life, examples and relevance.

Having an element of ‘real life’ in the classroom is an important way to bridge the gap between theory and future professional life to increase motivation and understanding. It is something that each of the four award winners we spoke to does in their teaching.

Michelle was nominated for a teaching award in recognition of her work over a number of years on Continuing Professional Development courses (CPD) in Social Work which are developed in conjunction with local employers and practitioners. Part of Michelle’s role was to support associate tutors who are service users, social workers or managers who bring their professional expertise and/or personal experiences into the classroom to enhance students’ learning.

Chris also works with associate tutors who are practicing professionals, in his case managers, who can draw on their own experience in business to inform their teaching. And he uses case studies and recreated business scenarios in lectures and seminars to put his students in simulated management situations.

For Andrew, lecturing on anatomy, grounding his lectures in the lived experience of his students can be as simple as getting them to flex a muscle or observe their own bodies, but it’s a bit more complicated for Pascal who teaches Mathematics to Economics students. He uses examples from the news and current affairs to illustrate the ways in which the mathematical principles that his students are grappling with relate in very practical ways to the everyday economics they see around them.

Student diversity, methods and resources.

For students studying outside of their core discipline and main area of interest it is particularly important to emphasize the relevance and applicability of the material that they are being asked to master so Pascal’s ready fund of topical examples is just what is needed. However interested the students are, however, there are still challenges to learning because mathematics is not their main subject so they come to the module with a wide range of prior knowledge of the subject. Some have a background in mathematics, with A levels in the subject, while many do not.

Pascal needs to do different things with different people, and gives students a lot of freedom so that they can engage with the lesson at the level they need to, without feeling singled out. A difficult problem on the board gives the more confident students something to tackle while Pascal introduces the concept, explains why it is important, what can be done with it and offers examples before setting a problem. No-one is allocated to a particular group and students can work the way they want to, choosing whether to listen to the explanation or work on the problem.

The others had their own examples of teaching diverse students. Andrew’s university teaching is in the medical school but he also gets involved in talking to groups of sixth-form students thinking about studying medicine, members of the public at events like Brighton Science Festival and patient groups related to his research into chronic pain. He believes that these lectures to lay audiences have helped him to improve his university lectures because they have necessitated simplifying explanations of his research, concentrating on the audience’s level of prior knowledge and thinking carefully about what he wants them to take away from the session. This is something that research-focused faculty often find difficult when they start to teach, with a tendency to try to tell students everything they know rather than what the students need at their stage. Andrew tries to simplify to a level that students can understand and avoids, in his lectures, much of the fine detail such as fine branching structures that can be memorized from text books.

Chris teaches a significant proportion of international students so he encounters diversity in terms of the social and cultural background of his students. He is able to draw on this in his modules, as examples explore business models in different international settings and students are encouraged to draw on their own knowledge to contribute to the learning of the class.

Michelle’s doctorate, looking at how social workers learn to be effective communicators with children, was based on her own teaching so she had the opportunity to scrutinise the teaching process and was interested in how diverse her students’ learning preferences were. Some want didactic input, some want role play, some want group work, indeed as a cohort they want every possible type of learning activity. Given the professional qualities that are being developed in Social Work courses group learning is central with an emphasis on creating a safe space where students can explore and deal with difficult emotional stuff. That won’t be true of many disciplines and so the range of innovative and creative methods that Michelle has used such as puppetry and storytelling may not be widely transferable, but the principle holds good – thinking about the graduate qualities that are desirable and being creative in coming up with a mix of learning activities that will engage a diverse group of students in interesting ways.

Sometimes technology will offer innovative options but there are lots of possible resources that can enhance student learning. Pascal likes using the SMARTboard and Chris extols the virtues of Study Direct as a means of providing students with online learning materials, which are particularly useful for international students. Andrew maintains that he is an  ‘old-fashioned’ lecturer preferring to engage his students with his own enthusiasm rather than adopt learning technologies, but has recently begun using ultrasound to provide better images of the insides of his students’ own bodies and makes the most of the hands-on learning opportunities provided by the dissection rooms.

So, whatever your discipline, here are some tips from the teaching award winners that you can adapt to your context:

• Make the material relevant and interesting: try using practical examples, case studies and/or real-life scenarios.

• Address different levels of prior knowledge with open-ended and/or staged activities. Individuals or groups could choose which part of the task to tackle or move between stages at their own pace.

• Use a range of activities to appeal to students’ different preferences and abilities. You can find out more about working with student diversity on the inclusive teaching  and internationalisation  web pages.

• Make the most of the resources available to enhance student learning. You can read more about the learning technologies that are available at Sussex on the e-learning web pages.