Designing, Planning, and Approaching Teaching in Multiple Ways

The largest aspect of the PgCert that I have taken an interest in is the designing and planning of teaching within Higher Education. As a relatively new teacher (commencing December 2019), my knowledge of curriculum and learning outcome design was minimal, but it has advanced over the years, and during the PgCert, in a variety of ways.

At the centre of my teaching practice there has always been a learning outcome-based employability curriculum. All of the one-to-one interactions, tutorials, and lectures that I teach, I have created learning outcomes for. However, when I first started teaching I was inclined to create the presentation and activities for the session, and then highlight what the learning outcomes were based on this. Now that my confidence is growing as a practitioner, I have more confidence in outlining the outcomes from the outset, which then informs the content of the sessions I am delivering. One area that I developed is our teaching evaluation forms, where I have linked outcomes with the Creative Attributes Framework. In these forms, students can select which outcomes they believe they have achieved through my teaching. This further reiterates to the student what they have learned, but also highlights how it relates to the Creative Attributes Framework so they can monitor their personal and professional growth themselves.

My confidence in this form of teaching has been gained through multiple platforms such as weekly catch-ups with my colleagues; bi-weekly consultations with my manager; and through collaborative efforts with academics from the relevant courses I am engaging with. Most recently, my collaborative efforts have expanded to including students in the design of my sessions, ensuring they understand how these topics relate to their overall course learning outcomes. By engaging with these colleagues in multiple ways, I am exposed to a variety of knowledge, information and insights into improving delivery and engagement in my lessons. Using online tools such as the Creative Attributes Framework, the Intellectual Property module, and UCL’s Learning Designer have also been vital in improving the content and development of my teaching.

When reading about planning and design, one area that stood out to me was of deep learning and surface learning. Prosser and Trigwell (1999)’s statement that ‘deep learning is the type of learning that is sought because it is the learning that remains after lesser quality outcomes have been forgotten. This is the learning that can be drawn upon in other and new contexts.’ My collaborative efforts with my team, and at course level, have been purposely trying to develop this deep level of learning within employability education, and I believe by including students in this, it will further improve how embedded this is in curriculum.

Currently, my learning outcomes for my sessions tend to be the same across years and study level. This is the area that I am most interested in developing further – how my learning outcomes from different year groups and study levels can advance into more bespoke, tailored, progressive outcomes. The issue with this is that my teaching is not linear, as a student’s first interaction with me could be in their third year, meaning that “third year outcomes” could be redundant. This further reiterates why employability education should be embedded from the students’ first year at university, as this can highlight personal and professional progression across the years.