Observations of teaching practice – seminar

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. 

Evaluating teaching

Royal Institution Christmas Lecture, 1932. [Photograph]. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Retrieved 5 Mar 2023, from
https://quest.eb.com/search/132_1507062/1/132_1507062/cite

Evaluating – Chapter 6 of Macfarlane, B. (2004) Teaching with integrity: the ethics of higher education practice. London: Routledge Falmer. 

I read the case studies first.  

I could relate to Professor Stephanie Rae experience in many ways; however, I found her reactions quite defensive. She took the comments very personally and I think this could cloud her judgment and prevent her from thinking about using the feedback in a constructive way. I think we all can feel a little embarrassed about someone else seeing our students’ feedback or be a bit frustrated with the comments that we find unfair. These are some of my fears and feelings that I experience now knowing that my sessions are going to be observed and commented on this term. Reading about Stephanie has helped me to prepare for the coming evaluations, or dare I say, even looking forward to them. 

Stephanie made a few assumptions that I think could prevent her from evaluating her teaching methods. For example, when learning that students would like more handouts and the slides available before the lecture, she thinks that this would be ‘spoon feeding’ them. Instead, she could think why it is that they asked for the extra material and how to design the handouts that they can inspire further inquiry rather than provide a ready answer.  

Another assumption that Stephanie made was when she learnt about the students still not understanding the assessment and thought that the comments were coming from the students with poor attendance and low marks. I believe it would be much more constructive to look at the assessment format and evaluate if she could make it more accessible, without making any judgments about the students. 

After reading the case studies I came back to reading the whole chapter. I agree with author that a variety of methods should be employed to evaluate the quality of teaching. Very interesting point made here is that students “are not always best placed to make evaluations in areas where they have no expert knowledge (…).” Additionally, the learners may actually mark down our teaching methods when we introduce a problem-based approach, or one based on a critical pedagogy. Very interesting! 

Creative education

Reading “Killing the Goose: Conflicts between Pedagogy and Politics in the Delivery of a Creative Education” by Ruth Dineen and Elspeth Collins

Lorenz, A. (1997) Binding ties. Bologna: Sintesi Edizioni.

I was inspired to read this article from the reading list provided for our introductory workshop, as I am preparing a teaching session for the Research Season 2023 The Value of Creativity. I thought that the theme of the event corresponds well with the subject of the article. 

The article defined creativity and the creative process first. It offered a comprehensive definition by Osche (1968) which states that creativity involves ‘bringing something into being that is original (new, unusual, novel, unexpected) and also valuable (useful, good, adaptive, appropriate)’. I was surprised that the outcome of the creative process must be judged as ‘valuable’ by the definition. The explanation that this judgement should be carried out by individual, or a group of experts clarified this bit for me further (still leaving me thinking how many issues it can pose). 

Further in the article the authors highlight the importance of the creative process itself and the fact that assessment of the outcome and time constraints present in the higher education can restrain creativity itself. .

Within education the most salient factors affecting creativity are: 

  • the environment and atmosphere 
  • teaching styles, methods and strategies 
  • project types and outcomes 
  • the use of rewards, assessment and evaluation 
  • learner motivation and learning styles 
  • personality traits of the learner 

What a huge responsibility we have as teachers! To repeat after the article: “The biggest single influence on the atmosphere in any classroom is the teacher/lecturer. Successful lecturers (in terms of fostering creativity) are themselves self-motivated, creative thinkers, acting as models for their students.”  

I agree with the authors that diversity, ambiguity, and uncertainty may support creativity, but it can be increasingly difficult within a target-driven culture of the current education system. However, my reading focus remained on the place of creativity in learning and teaching part of the article. 

I found the research about creativity itself and how we can influence it within education, presented here, highly informative and inspiring. It provided me with some ideas for the session: focus on the atmosphere, leave space for speculation and fantasy and provide/facilitate for active or even playful participation. I think that an OBL session using special collections items would give me an opportunity to use and test the above ideas. It would also fit well The Value of Creativity theme of the research season.

Introductory presentations and first PgCert online seminar

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. 

Kasia-Session-1-presentation

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.  

Starting my journey on the PgCert Academic Practice

Preparing for the first online seminar

Creator: Ley, Macey, book artist.

I read two articles on object-based learning (OBL) using special collections. It was inspired by my interest in special collections librarianship and experience I have in running zine and artists books sessions from when I worked at LCC Library. I am based at WCA Library now and thought that looking into OBL would give me an opportunity to get to know our special collections here, especially that it has just become available after being for months and months in the storage, while the library was undergoing a major renovation. Our special collection at Wimbledon is quite small in comparison to the other bigger UAL libraries’ collections and I am a bit concerned about how I can use it for my research on the PgCert. However, I would like to prepare at least one OBL session for my students while on the course using the WCA special collections. Not committing to anything yet but would like to explore the collection to see where it will take me.  

Articles that I read for the workshop have provided me with some ideas on the session itself – how I could design the questions to make the session more inclusive and which key words I can use to provoke students’ engagement and response. I was especially drawn to what Lelkes wrote on formulating the questions that can make the OBL relevant to the participants’ lived experience. We can increase the session’s meaningfulness to students and their socio-cultural awareness by considering “what the objects says about gender expression, heteronormativity, racism, ableism, social class, faith, and LGBTQIA+ inclusion, homophobia, biphobia and transphobia.” (Lelkes, p. 80) 

Articles I read on OBL for the first week workshop:

Lelkes, J. (2019) ‘How inclusive is object-based learning?’, Spark, 4(1), pp. 76-82. Available at: https://sparkjournal.arts.ac.uk/index.php/spark/article/view/110/196 (Accessed: 12 January 2023). 

Winston-Silk, J. (2019) ‘Deaccessioning and reimagining: a novel approach to object-based learning’, Spark, 4(1), pp. 51-57. Available at:  https://sparkjournal.arts.ac.uk/index.php/spark/article/view/130/211 (Accessed: 12 January 2023). 

Hello!

My name is Kasia Idzi and I am an Assistant Academic Support Librarian at Wimbledon. I provide library support on the Performance Design and Technologies undergraduate courses, and for the CCW researchers and PhD students. I am interested in information literacy and teaching with library and special collections. This blog  records my learning journey on PgCert in Academic Practice.