Planning for and supporting student learning through appropriate approaches and environments
Background
I have now secured in-person teaching sessions to support Year 2 Unit 7 as part of the plan to build library and research skills into the Camberwell BA Fine Art learning journey – having somewhat dropped out of timetables since the Covid19 disrupted period. I have completed recorded tutorials which are now loaded to unit Moodle pages and need to plan to what extent and in what ways the in-person sessions differ from the video materials. Students need to be equipped with the research-skills knowledge that enables and empowers them to independently acquire both their discipline, and critical context knowledge, and to feel that these skills and methodologies are personally meaningful and beneficial to their journey.
Planning
While I have worked to make the recorded tutorials more personal and engaging than some past sessions and have split them into shorter focused sections based on feedback, I now need to deliver in-person recaps to cohort groups that will both encourage students who have watched the video tutorials to use them in their work (revisiting as and when needed) and will engage students who have not yet watched them to begin their journey towards acquiring the skills and confidence they will need to achieve their potential and enjoy their research.
Moving forwards
I am going to review and edit the slide pack to ensure that anything very basic is shortened or removed, signposting to the video provision for those elements rather than trudging through them. I will vary the examples from the Moodle posted packs to try to avoid disengagement due to repetition, having had negative reactions in past sessions to re-used slides, and will try to upweight the examples used. This time I am switching to more culturally significant examples, having gone with personally relevant ones for the video tutorials. I think this will work well in an open setting – where I have seen more personal info sharing work well has been in a more intimate environment of small group sessions which like video tutorials feel more like a 1:1.
Now that the video resources are in place the purpose of the in-person sessions shifts slightly to be more about encouraging use of the materials provided and removing barriers, rather than a race to impart details, so I will allocate more time to answering questions and using student examples to recap on the skills and methodologies shown. I will also talk about ongoing ways to use the resources, revisiting and dipping in and out in tandem with progress, as a way to give clarity to the building blocks of research skills that they will continue to acquire over coming units – embracing the fact that some repetition is part of that layered learning experience.
References – to be added