Monthly Archives: December 2018

LearnHigher: teaching your students about learning

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It’s the end of the autumn term, which means my office has a tin of Roses and cake available, and last week I came in dressed as a Christmas pudding. But for the students you’re teaching, the university closure period might entail stress about January assessment deadlines and exams as well as catching up with friends and family or seasonal indulgence.

Often, as a teacher, you notice the worries your students have about how to prepare themselves for exams, or how to research or write their assignments. It’s not always easy, however, to work out what you can do about it. It’s also common to assume that students might have come to university fully cognisant of what it means to revise or write a report or essay – but they will only know how to do these things if someone has explicitly explained to them, so it’s best to discuss this in class.

The website LearnHigher can help with both of these things – it includes an array of free, peer-reviewed resources for teaching students about different aspects of learning in Higher Education. LearnHigher has got a whole section on assessment. This includes items that focus on exams: such as a revision podcast that you could recommend to your students, or slides that you could use to teach your students about memory and revision. It also has lots of useful material on writing assessments: from teaching your students how to interpret their assessment questions, to brainstorming ideas and then paraphrasing the research they use.

It’s worth taking a look around LearnHigher to see if there’s anything that you could use or adapt when teaching your students, or provide to them as a resource. And if you have anything relevant, as a member of the website’s working group I can confirm that we’re always looking for new materials if you’ve got something you’d like to share!

Giving everyone a chance to share and reflect

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We all might like to think that the students leave our teaching sessions and then spend some time reflecting on what they’ve learnt, but it’s probably more common that they’ll be rushing off to another class, lunch, a job or back home with their mind  focused on what’s next. So it can be really useful to provide some space within your lesson to get the students to reflect. This can be done alone, with the students thinking or perhaps recording their thoughts in some free writing. It can also be beneficial to enable students to share reflections with each other – but how do you ensure that all students get an equal chance to speak?

One way to do this is by dividing students into pairs, and giving a set amount of time (perhaps 3 or 5 minutes) for each of them to speak. During this time, the other student only listens, and is only allowed to interrupt if the speaker has lost focus. After the time has elapsed, the pairs then switch round and the other student gets to talk whilst the first student listens attentively. Although some students might feel intimidated at first, the chance to have someone’s undivided attention is a rare privilege!

I’d suggest giving them prompts for the reflection, by providing questions such as:

  • What are the key points you’ve learnt today?
  • Is there anything you’re still confused by?
  • What will you do to prepare for the session next week?

You could do this in small or large groups – in a large group, this will get noisy so I’d recommend having some sort of buzzer to provide a clear prompt for when to switch between listener and talker.

You could also extend this activity by asking students to spend a final couple of minutes at the end recording some of the points from their reflections, perhaps by using an online tool such as Padlet – that will show you if there are any common areas of misunderstanding, and give you an indication of what students have learned.

Have you tried anything similar? How did it work for you?