Good Practice Think Tank

What follows are the minutes from a good practice meeting attended by a number of colleagues in the Creative Arts faculty. I put the session together after being inspired by presentations delivered at a recent Quality Day held at Stevenson College. The main idea behind the meetings, held once every academic semester, is to share good practice across different curriculum areas in a relaxed setting. The first meeting was attended by 13 members of staff on a voluntary basis. It is hoped that some other areas of the College will pick up on this idea and adopt a similar strategy.

I put together a rationale for the first session as follows -

It is important to identify good practice and to embed it as the required standard within all curriculum areas. It is expected that the teaching staff of the College will continuously seek to improve their teaching methodology so that good practice becomes the norm and excellence is the aim. The main challenge is the dissemination – not just the identification – of that good practice.

The reasons for convening meetings once a semester to discuss good practice within the Creative Arts Department are to:

Ensure that interested members of the lecturing staff understand what good practice can be and apply it across the curriculum.
Discuss the benefits of sharing good practice with colleagues.
Assist staff with the identification and dissemination of good practice.
Ensure that learners are engaged in the identification and promotion of good practice in learning and teaching.
Discuss how technology is used in the classroom to disseminate good and innovative practice across the curriculum.
Embed good practice across different curriculum areas.

These are the minutes from the first meeting.

Good Practice Think Tank Event, meeting 1
Wednesday 17th June 2009 at 15.30 in MB 1.23

In attendance – Mark Hetherington (chair), Anne Young, Karen Lawson, Alan MacCorquodale, Rab McCahill, Jerry O’Neill, Carol Fyfe, Walter McCrorie, Madeleine Brown, Stuart McCorkindale, Gail English, Deborah Harris, Fraser Mansell

Apologies – Pam Donaldson, Jo Whelan, Matthew Sowerby

1) Welcome and rationale for Good Practice events

The Chair welcomed the attendees to the meeting and gave an outline of why the ‘Good Practice Think Tank’ meetings had been set up. The Faculty Quality Day on the 20th March had been his inspiration after listening to many excellent presentations highlighting the innovative practice across four sections within Creative Arts. A short meeting suggesting the idea was set up with Morag Campbell who agreed that the sessions would be a good way of showcasing and openly discussing and sharing good practice within the faculty. The Chair highlighted several key points from the rationale document as being of particular importance.

‘The main challenge is the dissemination – not just the identification – of good practice’.

‘Ensure that learners are engaged in the identification and promotion of good practice in learning and teaching’.

‘Embed good practice across different curriculum areas’.

2) Madeleine Brown – ‘Synergy in action (core skills)

Madeleine delivered a talk on her work with different groups of learners. She clarified what synergy is and began by creatively demonstrating the idea as a visual and auditory concept using iTunes. She showed the group her CPC (College Preparation Class) yearbook, which included photographs of students in each class along with their profiles and samples of written work produced in the Communication class. The yearbook was piloted last year and is now produced for all CPC classes across both semesters. It has proved to be very popular with students as it not only provides them with a record of their experience on the course, but also showcases the work that they have produced. The plan is to develop the idea further and possibly include other aspects of students’ studies as well as material produced over the entire year. Madeleine’s work with various departments and the work achieved through the Action Learning Set were detailed and how this sphere of learning had a positive impact on the learners. The merging of content between writing and the new technologies was demonstrated, using a variety of working examples, such as using the Guardian’s ‘pieces of me’, ‘where does it all go’ and ‘we love to eat’. Madeleine showed examples of a student’s work who demonstrated some very good self-evaluation in his learning. The learner had reflected on his dyslexia and stated that he regarded dyslexia as his greatest strength. The merging of core skills as a project based concept was examined and some discussion surrounding the main points of the presentation ensued afterwards. The Chair welcomed the idea of taking abstract concepts such as newspaper articles to inform and develop valid, reliable and up to date instruments of assessments and noted he, as well as other members of the Communication and English team, were using these ideas to good effect. He also thought that this was a very good example of working effectively with a variety of contacts cross College.

3) Rab McCahill - ‘Stevenson College You Tube site’

Rab outlined what You Tube is to the group and how he has been using it to great effect when teaching on the Media curriculum. He looked at how this media platform, (a natural place for this type of work), had been used by his students on the Stevenson College You Tube site -http://www.youtube.com/user/stevensoncollege
At present, the site has had 1039 hits and Rab showed the group how more hits could be achieved. He discussed the potential such a platform could have for showreels for students in the future, and used a former learner, (Dave Stewart, aka Seth Draven), to demonstrate how his work has been exhibited on You Tube. Due to the success of his You Tube site, the student has gained a lot of employment opportunities. Rab identified the benefits of using You Tube for the College, including marketing and recruitment. He outlined plans to set up a Stevenson TV channel which would be beneficial for a number of different student groups. He requested that students enrolled on Communication Units get involved with the You Tube sites, to provide comments and increase the hit rates. The successful integration of three outcomes with three different lecturers was noted in the 2009 academic session. He told the group how three lecturers, (Rab, Alan MacCorquodale and Pamela Donaldson), had met to discuss ways of utilising expertise in their respective areas to improve student achievement and improve the learner experience. He integrated three outcomes in his teaching of the ‘Contemporary Pop Music’ Unit. He stated that the written work produced had been of a high standard and that the students had proofread their work well and that the quality of video production was particularly good under Alan’s management. The Chair noted the positives surrounding the collaborative work displayed in Rab’s presentation and could see ways of using this model in other Units for the next academic session.

4) Jerry O’Neill – ‘Using communication delivery to prepare students for external exams in their vocational subjects or why I like to re-invent the wheel every time I get a new class and how that ages me prematurely’

Jerry’s presentation related to the success he has had teaching an Intermediate Two Business cohort across two semesters. He provided a clear overview of what this group studied in other areas of their curriculum. Jerry raised the issue that the role of the Communication lecturer isn’t to teach the students Economics, Accountancy etc, but to help the learners develop the skills needed to report on these issues with clarity and in a structured manner. Jerry highlighted the potential problems that accelerated progression from Intermediate Two Communication to Higher Communication in the same year posed for this student group. He spoke with the Head of Section to ascertain if there was a better model for the students to follow and informed the group that Hamish had been very accommodating and they decided that the Unit called ‘Oral Presentation Skills’ would be a more appropriate course of study. It was decided that presentations on exam revision were assessed and he showed an example of some student talks. These working examples highlighted the position of the learner in the teacher role as well as the obvious consolidation of learning this improved programme of study had provided. The development of skills was discussed and Jerry saw great improvement in the way the students had approached the study of Communication. Jerry gave an example of where a student was delivering a formative presentation on his knowledge of Economics where his peers had corrected the learner on some inaccuracies. This enabled the student to reflect on gaps in his knowledge and provided an agenda for further research. It was agreed that there were benefits to students having the same lecturer for both sessions, but it was acknowledged that this is rarely possible with varied Programmes of Study.
The Chair reinforced the importance of consolidation of learning and welcomed the idea of using subject expertise and knowledge of a group of students to improve curriculum design.

5) General Good Practice discussion

The group discussed the success of the session and representatives could see many ways to embed good practice across different curriculum areas. The benefits of sharing good practice were discussed and it was agreed that all staff should continuously seek to improve their teaching methodology so that good practice becomes the norm. There was discussion about the positive impact the ‘Illuminating Practice’ editions have had and some examples from the latest copy were highlighted in a general discussion. It was noted that although ICT can enhance the learning experience, it shouldn’t be the sole motivator for effective teaching practice.


6) Agenda for future meetings

The Chair announced that Jo Whelan had agreed to deliver a presentation at the next Good Practice meeting on recording techniques within audio web platforms.

He asked that colleagues think about suitable titles for presentations for the next meeting.


7) AOB

The Chair thanked all attendees and especially the presenters for their excellent presentations and anticipated that the concepts from the talks would be used in integrated approaches in the future.

Some discussion centred around Curriculum for Excellence and Assessment is for Learning and how this could work in different curriculum areas.

Karen Lawson had some very positive comments to make about the session and saw great value in the ‘think tank’ and hoped that other Faculties might consider running similar meetings in the future. She felt that she had learned a lot from the talks and discussions, and believed there is a lot more scope for sharing practice in the future.

The next meeting is scheduled for semester one of the 2009/10 academic session, probably in October.