Keynotes
I provide keynotes at conferences on a range of things connected with teaching, learning, feedback and assessment. These are invariably interactive, involving the audience in at least some activities, and I usually like 90 minutes or so to make room for this. Typical keynote titles include:
- ‘Smarter feedback: giving better feedback to more students in less time’.
- ‘Towards assessment as learning’.
- ‘Making teaching work: addressing how students really learn’
- ‘Teaching in the recession: ten things we can do to improve the student experience, which don’t cost money, and take less of our time’.
- ‘Smarter assessment: making assessment more manageable, as well as more valid, reliable, authentic, transparent and inclusive’.
- ‘Making learning happen in large groups: smarter lecturing’.
Workshops
Much of my time is spent running workshops on learning, assessment and teaching methods. I travel around the country (and beyond), often running whole-day workshops or consecutive half-day workshops for lecturers and college staff. My workshops are highly participative, and are based on ‘learning by doing’ and feedback – with usually a fair bit of fun thrown in for good measure (I think anyone learns better when happy!).You can download my current ‘Workshops Prospectus’ from ‘popular downloads’ page. There are full details of a dozen or so 1-day sessions, and many half-day sessions – but regard these as indicative as I can easily custom-design specific events similar to those listed.
Typical staff development workshops are summarised below.
Making learning happen
Exploration of the principal factors underpinning successful learning, and how we can help learners to take control of them to make their learning more effective, efficient and enjoyable. Building on the critical review by Frank Coffield et al (2004) I think it is important to move beyond learning styles and learning cycles, and work with the factors which underpin everyone’s learning. Some of the main slides I use in these workshops are available as ‘Ripples model’ on the ‘Downloads’ page
Refreshing your lecturing
For me, the most important thing to achieve in lectures is learning payoff for students. They should leave with more in their heads than they came in with – and not just with a load of information on handouts and nothing in their heads. My workshops explore what students actually DO during lectures, and what we DO ourselves. We then look at which actions (theirs and ours) are most likely to result in learning payoff.
Making small-group teaching work
Students learn an enormous amount from each other – if only we give them time, place and opportunity to do so. My workshops on small-group teaching focus on how best we can get students communicating with each other – arguing, discussing, debating, prioritising and so on. I try to make this workshops an experience in their own right, and keep participants really busy!
Assessing Smarter!
Assessment is the engine which drives learning (John Cowan), so it is vital that we design assessment processes, instruments and practices well. We need to make assessment valid, reliable, authentic and transparent to learners, and to align assessment to intended learning outcomes and teaching processes – to achieve the sort of ‘constructive alignment’ advocated by John Biggs. Sadly, however, assessment remains the weak link in the chain. In a nutshell, we tend to assess far too much, yet not do it very well! We often end up measuring the things that are easy to measure (e.g. information recall), and sometimes don’t actually measure directly enough the real achievement of intended learning outcomes. I am also keen to help colleagues to reduce the burden of assessment (for students as well as for us) while at the same time improving its quality.
My workshops on assessment look at ways of diversifying assessment, so that the same students aren’t repeatedly disadvantaged by the same old processes (notably too many time-constrained unseen written exams, which often only measure how good students are at doing time-constrained unseen written exams!).
Smarter Feedback
Feedback is the lifeblood of successful learning – particularly formative feedback. We need to make sure that feedback really helps students to improve their work, and does not stop them dead in their tracks! In the UK National Student Survey 2005 to present, the worst-scoring data from students has been their response to the statement ‘I have received detailed comments on my work’ and we didn’t do much better regarding ‘Feedback on my work has helped me clarify things I did not understand’. There’s room for a lot of improvement here. The subtitle of my workshops on feedback is ‘How can we give more students better feedback in less time’ – and indeed we can.
Designing Training Workshops
Increasingly I’m enjoying running workshops on workshop design, both for trainers in industry and commercial organisations, and for staff in colleges and universities who need to develop their approaches to workshop design.
Getting yourself published
How to identify and counteract your writing avoidance tactics, and maximise your hit rate with journal editors!
