The student ‘lens’ for viewing teaching and learning
If you become more aware of your students’ beliefs, assumptions and expectations about learning, you will be able to take appropriate action where any conflicting beliefs are identified. Try investigating approaches to learning directly with your students.
Target a specific area of studying (taking notes, learning from lectures, writing essays ...). Either frame a few questions to elicit the students’ ideas, or ask them to come up with their own strategies.
The University of Birmingham’s Guide to Effective Learning site gives links to other universities’ Study Skills materials
METHOD
- Set aside 15-20 minutes of class time to ask students what learning strategies or techniques they normally use when studying (either self-generated, or from your prepared list). They should rank these in order of usefulness.
- Ask them to work on this in small groups to compare and contrast their ideas. They should try to say why they find particular strategies effective.
- Ask the groups to highlight any disagreements over the usefulness of strategies and why they have differing views.
- Open discussion to the whole group and take brief notes (or record the discussion).
- Go through their responses on your own later and decide which of the strategies suggested by the students support your own beliefs about how your subject can be learned effectively. Where the students’ methods conflict with your own beliefs, consider why you would not use these strategies yourself, especially in the light of explanations given by the students.
Consider how you will cater for differences in preference of learning strategies among class members, or between the students and your own beliefs about approaches that facilitate learning.
Other techniques for eliciting the students’ perspective on teaching and learning include:
- Evaluation questionnaires –using those of the institution, purpose-designed ones to evaluate a specific piece of learning, or using or adapting questionnaires on websites
- Student focus groups - critical conversations
- Analysing students’ assessed work
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