Stirling has the “Stirling model” of undergraduate degree. In the first two years you will have one or two core modules you have to sit to progress in your subject and then you can chose what you want from across the introductory modules offered by the University. Numbers of these modules are limited so the classes are commonly enormous. You specialise down in your honours years.
I was coordinating one of these mega introductory modules – Understanding Social Policy. It had 367 students. There was only one lecture theatre on campus big enough for it. If it was any bigger it would have had to be split in two. The constraints this imposes are immense – my timetabling options were nil. It had to be run as two lectures a week for 12 weeks with ten hour-long tutorials. Even the coursework essays had to have staggered hand-ins to prevent the student office being overwhelmed.
In these reflections I want to focus on two aspects: lectures and what I’ll refer to as “not teaching”.
Firstly, lectures. This was my first time when I felt I was properly lecturing in the old school style. I had 50 minutes and I had to broadcast out a group of students to begin their learning process. I was stood at a lectern with c.200 faces staring down at me. And, actually, boy did it feel good. I’m clearly a thwarted actor. In my lecture on poverty I got a little bit carried away and ended up shouting about the scandal that 40 per cent of children in Scotland experience poverty at some point before the age of five. The faces in the audience looked visibly shocked as I boomed into the microphone and banged the lectern.
However, the limitations of the lecture as a teaching medium were very apparent during the exam period. Even in the run-up to the exam, the emails from students, mercifully few it has to be said, revealed that the students understood the exam merely as an opportunity to memorise a lecture and then dump these memories onto the page over three hours. On some of the answers to the exam questions, you could see this was exactly what students had done – not read widely, but regurgitated the 50 minute narrative they had heard as it roughly answered the question.
This is where my PGCap know-how and the idea of devising your assessment to the learning outcomes has really helped. As I joked on twitter the other week:
I'm tempted to set an exam question next year of "Tell me what your learnt that wasn't in the lecture slides"
— Peter Matthews (@urbaneprofessor) May 19, 2015
The basic learning outcome is to get students to read beyond the basic material in lectures. But this, although fun, would not be the ideal way to assess learning outcomes. Instead I’m going to shorten the exam and have the first half of it as comments on contemporary sources – data, quotes from policy documents, the Daily Hate Mail etc.The second issue I wanted to talk about was “not-teaching”. By this I meant the strange sense of detachment from the learning process from being a coordinator of such a large module. I didn’t run the seminars/workshops, and didn’t do all the lectures (the modules are team-taught). I got to know literally a handful of students by name and only moderated around 15 per cent of the work. This was extremely different to teaching classes of 30-40 where, although you didn’t know every student well, you definitely got a sense of learning with them, rather than teaching at them. Therefore I ended semester with very little idea of how the students had actually got on during semester, except their performance looked like that of a group that were only marginally engaged with the subject (the majority of marks were below 60 per cent). I used a Google Form to get more feedback off my students and achieved an admirable 89 responses which were helpful, if not contradictory, as ever.
Anyway, it can’t have all been bad as I won this:
My award and my acceptance speech from last Wednesday: https://t.co/LfMdNE20Ff #lovehe pic.twitter.com/nRpe3wnsaq
— Peter Matthews (@urbaneprofessor) April 27, 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment