This post is here to provide more context for a courses which was the basis of a talk I presented with one of my students, Syeda Zainab Khaleel, at WCCCE 2023.
Design
The course is designed to be interactive, with each member of the teaching team working with roughly a third of the class (8 or 9 students) at a time.
Lectures are 165 minutes long, and highly interactive. Students take turns participating in discussions, presenting, or preparing for the same.
There are three main cycles of learning in the semester. In the first, concepts and readings about metacognition and learning strategies are presented and discussed. In the second, students iteratively refine their first study plan (with modifications based on feedback from their peers), execute it, and report on their results.
In the third, students create a new study plan (which can be an elaboration or extension of the first), again iteratively incorporating feedback from their peers, execute it, and report on their results.
Students are invited to complete reflections on a weekly basis, to ensure that they are prepared for discussions and encourage deep learning throughout the semester.
Assessments
Discussions (30%)
This is for participation and quality of participation in group discussions. Students meet in groups each class, facilitated by part of the teaching team to discuss and share their work.
Presentations (40%)
At selected points in the semester, students are asked to present their work. This may be to introduce themselves, as a checkpoint to ensure they’ve prepared for the week (for example, with independent study plans), or to debrief what they’ve learned throughout the semester.
Reflections (40%)
Most weeks that the class runs, students are required to write a reflection of about a page, based on a provided reflective prompt. The prompt is created based on established reflective frameworks (for example, Kolb’s Cycle of Reflective Learning, Schon’s Reflection In Action/On Action) to help guide the students through the reflective process.
Reflection and Reflective Frameworks
We chose two different reflective frameworks to introduce to students for use in structuring their reflections. These frameworks are commonly used in evidence-based practice and were chosen for their relative simplicity and ease of use for adoption in our learning context.
These frameworks help learners who may be inexperienced in reflective practice to organize their thinking, perform introspection, and organize their learning from reflection for the next step in the course. As the semester progresses, reflective prompts become more freeform, though introspection and depth of thought is still required.
Course Readings
- Brown, Peter. (2014) Make it Stick
- Heen, Sheila. (2015) The Art of Giving and Receiving Feedback, TED Talk.
- The University of Hull has some fantastic resources we used for the course.
