Category: TPP additional

Reading Alan Davies’ Learning outcomes and assessment criteria in art and design. What’s the recurring problem?  

At first, I thought that the article may not be relevant to my practice, because as librarians we do not assess students’ work. However, a big part of it deals with outcome-led teaching and learning theory, which I found interesting. The author talks about Bloom’s and Bigg’s taxonomies and I was inspired to read more about both (see the PDF).

Learning about replacing nouns with active verbs when we talk about learning outcomes is especially useful for my practice. Looking into revised Bloom’s taxonomy gave me a deeper understanding of the learning outcomes devised for the UAL Library Services. It was done primarily with the Libraries own offer and
priorities in mind, however, they have been loosely structured under the UAL creative attributes.

I am excited to have this space on the PgCert course to explore them in more depth and make sure that I am using all available tools to improve my teaching. 

Another thought by the author made me more aware about the context in which I teach. Davies states that over-specification of the outcomes can be counter-productive in art and design and other creative disciplines. The outcomes in art and design are not achieved just once. Assuming that once addressed they are completed would not reflect the pedagogy of the discipline that is constantly evolving. 

When I teach about Harvard referencing standards there is not much room for not being specific. However, when teaching with objects, I can support students in creative learning by keeping in mind the disciplines that are taught at UAL and their evolving nature.

This was a highly successful online seminar. The 2 hours just flew by. 

I loved that we started with talking about how we feel about being observed. Learning that the other students share my fear or doubts about evaluating each other and being observed by tutors made me feel more relaxed about the process. Additionally, having read the case study for this seminar made me understand the need for this exercise better and I look forward to taking part in it.  

I think using whiteboard to record our thoughts was a fantastic way to share the opinions and have something that we can come back to after. I have never used the whiteboard in my sessions and will keep this technique in mind for the future. 

We could clearly see that we experience mixed emotions about having our teaching observed – we were excited, curious, open, fine but also self-conscious, feeling watched, vulnerable and worried. I definitely feel less anxious about evaluation part of our assessment after having discussed it in the session. 

I liked that we used Padlet to share our thoughts on the case studies we read for the seminar. I feel that I could take away from the reading more by having to respond to it by thinking about opportunities for development and tips for the teacher and what further questions I can ask about it. I use Padlet in my teaching and learning practice already. However, this seminar has thought me how I can follow up with discussing some of the responses further by asking participants to vote and choose the most popular ones. 

I felt a bit nervous about this first workshop. I thought that as a librarian I may not (and most probably do not) have as many teaching hours as other students on the course. It is because teaching is only a part (however I think that it has become much more pronounced in recent years) of my job. At the same time, I run several events, workshops, online and in person information skills sessions and library induction every year. I also support students with their research daily, whenever they come to the library and ask questions or in one to one tutorials. Thinking about this has helped me to stay positive and deliver my presentation with relative ease. I kept it quite short concentrating on my main interests within librarianship and teaching. 

I left the session very inspired by the other participants’ presentations that were followed by questions and discussions. I found sharing our experiences of teaching and our professional identities thought provoking. It has been great to meet everyone and hear about our roles within UAL and where our focus for this course lies. I found that despite coming from different occupations, we have a lot of shared interests. It is amazing how much we could learn from each other during this first (and short) workshop. I cannot wait for our in-person sessions.  

Key words and themes that stuck with me: object-based learning, learning through play, not knowing in creativity, empathy, pedagogy, trust, online vs face to face, overwhelming, practice as research.  

This coming week I plan to come back to some basic theory of pedagogy and watch a video that fellow student had shared in the workshop.