Judy Robertson PGC LTHE

Thoughts on which model of reflective writing I prefer

2006-01-11T09:51:00.000-08:00

Which of these models do I prefer? Hmm. I feel like a child in a sweet shop.

Moon's model is probably described in most detail, and therefore easiest to do. I also think the stage of additional ideas, where you seek factual input and ideas from other sources is extremely valuable.

The Disappointed Student (Smyth style)

2006-01-11T09:35:00.000-08:00

The poor disappointed student. Here are her woes and mine, this time in the style of Smyth.

Stage 1 description - What do I do?

Stage 2 information - What does it mean?

Stage 3 confrontation - How did I come to be like this?

Stage 4 reconstruction - How might I do things differently?

These headings were taken from Morrison (1996) who refers to Smyth (1989b). There is no further explanation of what Smyth might mean and I refuse to speculate. In particular what kind of information might I be expected to write in "How did I come to be like this?".

I tried gettting Smyth's original article, but our library doesn't stock it. The publisher doesn't archive as far back as 1989, and I don't have time to get an inter-library loan. So our poor disappointed student can rest in peace.

The Disappointed Student (Gibb style)

2006-01-11T09:32:00.001-08:00

Description of the event

I arranged to meet a student (A) in my office to discuss the mark I gave her from an RIM assignment. My office mate JM was also in the room. The student was unhappy about her mark (48%) which she considered to be a personal failure, although it is objectively a clear pass. My part was to go through a copy of her work, along with my allocated marks, and explain my reasons for marking as I did. In cases where I would have liked more information I asked her for it verbally and discovered that she was able to tell me the material although she hadn’t written it. She acknowledged the points I made in all but two cases, which I agreed to look into. I spent around 40 minutes with the student. When she had gone JM remarked that it was unwise to spend so much time with one student or to negotiate on their mark, as it would set a precedent. The result of this time and energy was that the student took her complaint further to the module leader. The ML checked the school policy on second marking, and the student had no reason to doubt our marking. We took the matter no further, apart from to have her work included in the sample for the external examiner later in the year.

Feelings

When the event started I was tired after four tutorials in a row. I was a bit alarmed when she made the appointment but I checked over my marks before she arrived and I was happy that my marks were fair. At the time I was thinking “does she understand this” and “Oh dear, she is setting up this as a conflict between me and E.G. her supervisor.” Also “Hmmm. She isn’t used to getting poor marks”. She was particularly offended that I thought her grammar was poor, and I was a bit irritated at myself for not explaining a grammatical rule very well, but I showed it to her in “Elements of style”. At the time as the student seemed convinced apart from in the two areas I agreed to look into, I thought that would be the end of it, and I was pleased about this as it had taken up a lot of my time. My heart sank when the module leader emailed me to say she had raised a formal complaint. I was annoyed with the student for not telling me she was still unhappy, and for her arrogance in assuming that my marking rather than her work was at fault. I was pleased that the university policy was on my side, and that the module leader was supportive. The significant emotion would be frustration that my time and patience were not rewarded.

Evaluation

The good things about the experience are that I behaved in a professional fashion to the student and was patient and constructive as I knew how to be. It was also good to find out the department policy on this, and get reassurance and support from the module leader.

The bad things about the experience are that my time was wasted and that the student is presumably still miffed.

Analysis

It’s not clear to me what I could have done better during the meeting with the student (apart from explaining a grammar rule more clearly, but that’s easy enough to work on.) I did ask her if she had any more issues, and whether she felt better about the mark. She said yes. She seemed genuinely to agree with my arguments. What went wrong was that my diagnoses that she was now satisfied was incorrect and she complained. But even if I noted she was unsatisfied, what could I have done differently? I suppose I could have been firmer and more critical of her work to make sure she knew it wasn’t worth pushing her luck, but I don’t think that would have stopped her complaining. I also think it was important to try to boost her confidence by helping her to see how to do better next time given that she was upset with her performance. I could have caved and given her more marks for making the effort of complaining but I have an in principle objection to that.

Analysis of my personal behaviour is less useful, I feel, than analysis of the teaching and assessment strategy in this module which I discussed in my initial reflection on this incident. After all, my personal goal for this course is to become a better teacher to help my students to learn better. I didn’t sign up for personal development.

Conclusion

The conclusion I draw (based on analysis in my initial reflection) is that our students are not equipped for the challenges of the RIM course based on their previous experiences as computing students and that there are number of ways we could help them bridge the gap: a) by structuring the project differently and b) by providing more support in academic reading and writing.

Action Plan
My action plan, based on the analysis in the initial reflection is as follows:
1. We could give the students more opportunity to critically analyse existing research papers. We did something similar on the academic writing course I attend. However, we would focus on research content as well as written style. We could use examples from anonymised student mince and highly regarded journal articles. Each degree stream could work with papers relating to their subject area. This would help with both problems identified above.2. This is more controversial. I wonder if we are asking too much of our students in proposing their own honours projects? At Edinburgh the staff members propose projects, the students pick 'em and only the minority of really good students propose their own. Most students, then, start their projects with a summary page explaining the background to the area, some questions of interest and a list of references. Our students start their projects with a book containing staff interests which doesn't contain nearly the same level of detail. The staff at Edinburgh do the hard task of carving up the field for the students and highlighting areas of genuine research interest. As far as I know, Edinburgh's reputation is not suffering from this approach. :-) It means that they start with a collection of well founded student projects each year. It is worth noting, of course, that Edinburgh don't have any staff who aren't research active and are rated 5* in comparison to our 3. Could we pull this off? We may be able to by recruiting leaders of the research groups to propose more projects on behalf of their groups. We could trawl through "future work" sections of reputable journal papers. We could ask visiting speakers to propose a couple of projects in exchange for an extra cream bun at lunch. There are various ways to go about it, but my feeling is that we could improve student performance and raise our research standards simultaneously if we did something of this sort. I wonder what C.P. will think?

Reflective writing analysis - Appendix 2

2006-01-11T09:32:00.000-08:00

In this exercise, I am asked to evaluate 4 examples of reflective writing by the same author on an incident in a park. I am asked to consider how these accounts differ and which I think represent the deeper levels of reflective writing. Before this, I should consider what is the author's purpose in writing this account? What does she hope to learn from it? Moon offers some possible purposes for reflective writing in her guidance notes (p4) including critical review, considering one's own learning processes, building theory from observation and engaging in personal development. Of these, I think the last is least appropriate in my subject area (computer science). There are various metacognitive skills required of our students, and I believe that external representations are very useful in aiding meta-cognition. However, writing for personal development is not a valued part of the discipline and my time as a teacher would be better spent teaching traditional academic writing. Unfortunately, self development would appear to be the main purpose of the example author. The first example is mostly descriptive, without much mention of feeling or evaluation. The author's guilt about the incident is implied in the last sentence but not explicitly stated. There are no analysis, conclusions or personal action plans. In the second example the focus is more on personal reaction (both during and after the incident) than on objective details of the incident. The author doesn't engage in much analysis (although she raises questions, she doesn't answer them). There is no conclusion or personal action plan. In the third example the author chews over the incident and how it might relate to the rest of her life. She makes value judgements about herself. In my view, she is not analysing the situation in any valuable way. She is not making sense of the situation, and I would argue that she is not bringing in ideas from outside the situation to any great effect. She mentions other events in her life (the death of an uncle or the illness of her son) but this doesn't lead to conclusions or a plan for future action. The fourth example is the least palatable to my taste. The author indulges in more mental mastication about the incident and speculates about the reasons for her actions. It's just as well she didn't go for "reflection in action" during the incident or she would have been standing over analysing herself while the child entered a coma in front of her eyes! She has sought the perspective of someone else (Tom) but not theory or new information. Once again, there is no personal action plan. We do not know what she would differently if it happened again. A series of practical actions for change would have been helpful, e.g. going on a first aid course. Examples 3 and 4 are evidently meant to show deeper levels of reflective writing but I don't think they exhibit the features suggested by Moon on p5 of the guidelines, and it's not clear that the author used Moon's process in Appendix 1. Perhaps the author developed as a person from this writing, but it is not clear to me what she learned.

The Case of the Disappointed Student (Moon style)

2006-01-10T08:25:00.000-08:00

Purpose
The purpose of this reflection is to consider how what I can learn from an incident in which a student complained about a mark I gave her for a RIM module coursework.

Description of event

Context

Here is some background. I am involved in teaching an honours year research methods course (RIM). C.P , our head of school, is the module leader and has the happy task of delivering the lectures. I do some tutorials and mark half (around 50) assignments. The RIM course work consists of a research proposal, a presentation on the proposal and the literature review. It is closely related to the students' honours projects, which I think is a good system. I am Honours Project Co-ordinator so it is quite useful for me to keep an eye on the early stages of the projects in this way.C.P and I marked the research proposal course works independently according the CP's marking scheme which I previously moderated. The students get a good deal of feedback in 5 main areas of their proposal. The main purpose of the feedback is to enable them to put right early mistakes so that their honours projects don't go astray. It is probably the most useful marking I have ever done for this reason, but it is extremely time consuming.
a) Statement of observations
Student A got in touch with CP to discuss her mark for the research proposal. As I marked it, I agreed to meet A. A got a mark of 48%, and according to her it was the worst mark she had ever got. "I consider it a failing mark" said she. I pointed out that the pass mark is actually 35%, but she was obviously still upset. She told me her supervisor E.G. read her proposal for her, and implied that he questioned the mark too. I went through the proposal section by section with her, and explained why I marked it as I did. She appeared to accept my explanations as reasonable except in two instances: she insisted that CP taught that research questions support hypotheses, and that her grammatical mistakes didn't merit the reduction of 50% of the marks. I said I would reconsider these points, and she went away claiming to be happier. I checked that CP didn't have a brain storm and decide to teach research methods backwards this year, and establishing that she didn't, I email A to explain that she had a misconception and so her mark wouldn't change in this section. I decided to be magnanimous and award her an extra 10 marks for grammar etc, knowing that it would only take her marks up by .3% anyway! But I also pointed out some additional grammatical errors I didn't spot during our conversation. This whole procedure took about an hour. J.M. , my office mate warned me "You need to be careful about changing student marks like that or they'll all want it and you don't have time".At the end of the week, C.P. told me that A wanted to raise a formal complaint.
C.P checked with the programme organiser about policy on this. He said: "The RIM module coursework should follow the normal module moderation process. I.e. the coursework is assessed by the Module leader and moderated via another appropriate member of staff (or vice versa combination if the assessment load is shared). This should take place under the University regulations. The student has no right to question this process as long as it has been confirmed that it has been properly applied." As CP and I did moderate each others' work but as A's work wasn't in the sample we checked, we decided to get it checked by the external examiner in June. CP is going to meet with A to explain our marking procedure, and counsel her about the flaws in her project plan which are apparent from her proposal.

b) Comment on personal behaviour

I am happy with my personal behaviour in this case. I believe I behaved in a professional manner, and in the face to face meeting the student did too. I found out a bit more about university procedures from this.

c) Comment on reaction/feelings
I was sympathetic to the student when we first discussed it and spent a while trying to understand her point of view. After all, I would be upset if I got a bad mark too. The student seems to be under time pressure as she has a familiy to look after. But the I was extremely indignant that A took up my time and then put in a formal complaint anyway. Marking all those RIM proposals revealed to me what a stuffy old carmudgeon I am with respect to research. Turns out I feel strongly about upholding standards and such (maybe all those years at Edinburgh took their toll). I was actually rather shocked by the low standard of all the RIM submissions. I was also angry that the student was convinced that I had made an error of judgement in marking, rather than that her work was at fault. Such arrogance! To add an extra dimension to this situation, some tact is required when marking the proposals because the students' supervisors also see the marks and feedback, and some have been upset because they think I am marking their ideas harshly, rather than marking their student's garbled presentation of their ideas.

Additional ideas fed in

Relevant other knowledge
Firstly, in my opinion this student is not as bright as she thinks she is, and the more testing honours year material is making this apparent in her marks. She misdiagnosed her drop in performance to my marking. I encountered similar problems with masters level students at Edinburgh who were outraged at getting lower marks than they were used to on their first degrees. In both the msc and honours level examples, there is a change in the level of difficulty of the material and students have to readjust their perceptions of their abilities.I certainly don't think the solution is to mark more leniently for a number of reasons. The most important two are as follows. I don't think we can devalue the honours degree any further (given the stats presented at a recent Programme Board in which is was revealed that under the new Best 180 points sytem, 70% of students get first or 2:1s). For this particular assignment, a poor mark for the initial proposal alerts students to the fact that they need to work to a higher standard if they want to do well in the honours project.We can just accept that there will be disappointed students when they encounter significantly more difficult material. We probably have to get used to them like wasps at a picnic. But there may be something we can do to prepare the students earlier for the demands of the honours project.

Suggestions from others
Having marked a batch of poor -> mediocre research proposals in awful detail, and chatted about it to KH, another member of staff, I suspect there are a couple of areas which we can work on.1. Students don't know how to write in a formal academic style. Why should they? On most computing courses, they are unlikely to encounter academic writing until theystart reading for their projects. When they write their full proposals they haven't read enough academic writing to know the genre.2. Students don't know how to think in research terms. It is a tall order to think up a research project when you have very little knowledge of the area. No wonder I spluttered at so many preposterous ideas. They don't know the field well enough to know what is daft and what is genuis!

Reflective thinking

As honours project co-ordinator, I am in a position to address these issues to some extent. I will discuss them with C.P. and we can implement some changes for next year.
1. We could give the students more opportunity to critically analyse existing research papers. We did something similar on the academic writing course I attend. However, we would focus on research content as well as written style. We could use examples from anonymised student mince and highly regarded journal articles. Each degree stream could work with papers relating to their subject area. This would help with both problems identified above.
2. This is more controversial. I wonder if we are asking too much of our students in proposing their own honours projects? At Edinburgh the staff members propose projects, the students pick 'em and only the minority of really good students propose their own. Most students, then, start their projects with a summary page explaining the background to the area, some questions of interest and a list of references. Our students start their projects with a book containing staff interests which doesn't contain nearly the same level of detail. The staff at Edinburgh do the hard task of carving up the field for the students and highlighting areas of genuine research interest. As far as I know, Edinburgh's reputation is not suffering from this approach. :-) It means that they start with a collection of well founded student projects each year. It is worth noting, of course, that Edinburgh don't have any staff who aren't research active and are rated 5* in comparison to our 3. Could we pull this off? We may be able to by recruiting leaders of the research groups to propose more projects on behalf of their groups. We could trawl through "future work" sections of reputable journal papers. We could ask visiting speakers to propose a couple of projects in exchange for an extra cream bun at lunch. There are various ways to go about it, but my feeling is that we could improve student performance and raise our research standards simultaneously if we did something of this sort. I wonder what C.P. will think?

Reflective writing

2006-01-10T08:12:00.000-08:00

My homework for supervision topic 3 is to practice different models of reflective writing, as follow:

Moon's process (Moon 1999)
Gibb's model of reflection/ Critical Incident Analysis
Symth's model of reflective practice (Smyth 1996)

Given that life is short and I have much marking to do, I have decided to rewrite The Case of The Disappointed Student using these models.

I should also consider the examples of reflective writing in Moon's Appendix 2.

The Case of the Disappointed Student

2005-12-16T05:06:00.000-08:00

In the spirit of writing about critical incidents in my teaching life, I offer the case of the disappointed student (who we will call A.)

Here is some background. I am involved in teaching an honours year research methods course (RIM). C.P , our head of school, is the module leader and has the happy task of delivering the lectures. I do some tutorials and mark half (around 50) assignments. The RIM course work consists of a research proposal, a presentation on the proposal and the literature review. It is closely related to the students' honours projects, which I think is a good system. I am Honours Project Co-ordinator so it is quite useful for me to keep an eye on the early stages of the projects in this way.
C.P and I marked the research proposal course works independently according the CP's marking scheme which I previously moderated. The students get a good deal of feedback in 5 main areas of their proposal. The main purpose of the feedback is to enable them to put right early mistakes so that their honours projects don't go astray. It is probably the most useful marking I have ever done for this reason, but it is extremely time consuming.

Concrete Experience

Student A got in touch with CP to discuss her mark for the research proposal. As I marked it, I agreed to meet A. A got a mark of 48%, and according to her it was the worst mark she had ever got. "I consider it a failing mark" said she. I pointed out that the pass mark is actually 35%, but she was obviously still upset. She told me her supervisor E.G. read her proposal for her, and implied that he questioned the mark too. I went through the proposal section by section with her, and explained why I marked it as I did. She appeared to accept my explanations as reasonable except in two instances: she insisted that CP taught that research questions support hypotheses, and that her grammatical mistakes didn't merit the reduction of 50% of the marks. I said I would reconsider these points, and she went away claiming to be happier. I checked that CP didn't have a brain storm and decide to teach research methods backwards this year, and establishing that she didn't, I email A to explain that she had a misconception and so her mark wouldn't change in this section. I decided to be magnanimous and award her an extra 10 marks for grammar etc, knowing that it would only take her marks up by .3% anyway! But I also pointed out some additional grammatical errors I didn't spot during our conversation. This whole procedure took about an hour. J.M. , my office mate warned me "You need to be careful about changing student marks like that or they'll all want it and you don't have time".

At the end of the week, C.P. told me that A wanted to raise a formal complaint. She and her class mates conducted a straw poll, apparently, and thought they could tell who marked each proposal by the marks allocated. (The more alert among my readers my have spotted there are various methdological flaws in that poll. This student really isn't very hot on research methods, huh?) C.P checked with the programme organiser about policy on this. He said: "The RIM module coursework should follow the normal module moderation process. I.e. the coursework is assessed by the Module leader and moderated via another appropriate member of staff (or vice versa combination if the assessment load is shared). This should take place under the University regulations. The student has no right to question this process as long as it has been confirmed that it has been properly applied." As CP and I did moderate each others' work but as A's work wasn't in the sample we checked, we decided to get it checked by the external examiner in June. CP is going to meet with A to explain our marking procedure, and counsel her about the flaws in her project plan which are apparent from her proposal.

Reflective Observation

So much for the dry detail of the affair. Now bear with me while I reflect on this experience. I was sympathetic to the student when we first discussed it and spent a while trying to understand her point of view. After all, I would be upset if I got a bad mark too. The student seems to be under time pressure as she has a familiy to look after. But the I was extremely indignant that A took up my time and then put in a formal complaint anyway. Marking all those RIM proposals revealed to me what a stuffy old carmudgeon I am with respect to research. Turns out I feel strongly about upholding standards and such (maybe all those years at Edinburgh took their toll). I was actually rather shocked by the low standard of all the RIM submissions. I was also angry that the student was convinced that I had made an error of judgement in marking, rather than that her work was at fault. Such arrogance! To add an extra dimension to this situation, some tact is required when marking the proposals because the students' supervisors also see the marks and feedback, and some have been upset because they think I am marking their ideas harshly, rather than marking their student's garbled presentation of their ideas.

Abstract Conceptualisation

What can be learned from this incident? Is there anything which could be done differently to avoid it in future?

Firstly, in my opinion this student is not as bright as she thinks she is, and the more testing honours year material is making this apparent in her marks. She misdiagnosed her drop in performance to my marking. I encountered similar problems with masters level students at Edinburgh who were outraged at getting lower marks than they were used to on their first degrees. In both the msc and honours level examples, there is a change in the level of difficulty of the material and students have to readjust their perceptions of their abilities.

I certainly don't think the solution is to mark more leniently for a number of reasons. The most important two are as follows. I don't think we can devalue the honours degree any further (given the stats presented at a recent Programme Board in which is was revealed that under the new Best 180 points sytem, 70% of students get first or 2:1s). For this particular assignment, a poor mark for the initial proposal alerts students to the fact that they need to work to a higher standard if they want to do well in the honours project.

We can just accept that there will be disappointed students when they encounter significantly more difficult material. We probably have to get used to them like wasps at a picnic. But there may be something we can do to prepare the students earlier for the demands of the honours project.

Having marked a batch of poor -> mediocre research proposals in awful detail, and chatted about it to KH, another member of staff, I suspect there are a couple of areas which we can work on.

1. Students don't know how to write in a formal academic style. Why should they? On most computing courses, they are unlikely to encounter academic writing until theystart reading for their projects. When they write their full proposals they haven't read enough academic writing to know the genre.
2. Students don't know how to think in research terms. It is a tall order to think up a research project when you have very little knowledge of the area. No wonder I spluttered at so many preposterous ideas. They don't know the field well enough to know what is daft and what is genuis!

Active Experimentation

As honours project co-ordinator, I am in a position to address these issues to some extent. I will discuss them with C.P. and we can implement some changes for next year.

1. We could give the students more opportunity to critically analyse existing research papers. We did something similar on the academic writing course I attend. However, we would focus on research content as well as written style. We could use examples from anonymised student mince and highly regarded journal articles. Each degree stream could work with papers relating to their subject area. This would help with both problems identified above.

2. This is more controversial. I wonder if we are asking too much of our students in proposing their own honours projects? At Edinburgh the staff members propose projects, the students pick 'em and only the minority of really good students propose their own. Most students, then, start their projects with a summary page explaining the background to the area, some questions of interest and a list of references. Our students start their projects with a book containing staff interests which doesn't contain nearly the same level of detail. The staff at Edinburgh do the hard task of carving up the field for the students and highlighting areas of genuine research interest. As far as I know, Edinburgh's reputation is not suffering from this approach. :-) It means that they start with a collection of well founded student projects each year. It is worth noting, of course, that Edinburgh don't have any staff who aren't research active and are rated 5* in comparison to our 3. Could we pull this off? We may be able to by recruiting leaders of the research groups to propose more projects on behalf of their groups. We could trawl through "future work" sections of reputable journal papers. We could ask visiting speakers to propose a couple of projects in exchange for an extra cream bun at lunch. There are various ways to go about it, but my feeling is that we could improve student performance and raise our research standards simultaneously if we did something of this sort. I wonder what C.P. will think?

Well, I hope you enjoyed The Case of the Disappointed Student. I know I didn't. Next time, perhaps we will consider The Case of the Woebegone PhD student.

A wake up call?

2005-12-02T23:24:00.000-08:00

It's 7.24 on Saturday 3rd December. The reason I am writing this blog instead of sleeping is that I woke myself up by suddenly realising that I hadn't taught my students how to write a report with experimental findings AND YET I am assessing them on it! Shock! Horror! Where is my constructive alignment now, you might ask?

Sometimes if I have been working a lot my brain wakes me up early at the weekend and I can't get back to sleep so I may as well practice some reflective writing for my PgC LTHE until I bore myself back to sleep.

Concrete experience

You're meant to write about a concrete incident which surprised you. OK - yesterday some of my 3rd year students came to my office to show me their draft report for a coursework which was due in at 5pm. I looked at their evaluation section and it was extremely sketchy - with no report of the procedure and participants, and no summary data. I told them to put in more details and then went on with the other million things I had to do before going to the Away Day. This morning I woke up and realised that I hadn't explicitly taught the class how to report such findings. The class where they were going to do this was cancelled for various reasons and I forgot to put some example material on blackboard. "The class don't have this skill and it is my fault for not teaching them", I thought.

Reflective observation

Now I'm meant to do some reflective observation, not forgetting how I feel. I feel annoyed wih myself that I let this part of the teaching slip, guilty for letting the students down and worried that M.S the ADQ will sack me and beat me (a favourite phrase of my husband's. It's never happened to him yet either :-) ).

Abstract conceptualisation

Having confessed your sins, and analysed your feelings, you're then meant to apply some rational thought to the matter - to form some kind of theory to explain your experience which you can then test by experimenting on your students. Although, I'm not sure it can be considered rational thought exactly if you're trying to generalise from a single experience. Surely you need a few cycles of experimentation before you have any chance of forming a sensible theory? I suppose that depends on whether you believe theories should be inductive and built from data and observations (as in grounded theory) or deductive, where the theory is derived and then data is sought to support it. Perhaps in the early stages of experiential learning, this stage is simply thinking of possible explanations for the experience before testing them out in the next stage.

Anyhow, it strikes me as a sensible approach to seek out some more data before I begin to construct my "theory". How accurate are my perceptions here? Thinking about it some more, I realise that in fact I did give the students some feedback on a previous report (as I have just found in my lecture slides). The same points I noted missing in the students' report yesterday were mentioned on that slide. I have also given them examples of both qualitative and quantitative reporting in published papers. Although the lecture attendance happened to be poor that day, I did give copies to everyone at the next class and highlight the salient points.
Secondly, I need to mark the other submissions to see the extent of the problem. Was it just some of the students who didn't respond to the feedback?

My "theory" - wait for it - is that a better way to teach students how to write reports of this sort is to explicitly teach it from the first. Implicit instruction (giving them examples) is less effective, and for some reason some of them did not apply their feedback to the new situation.

Active experimentation

Now I am meant to come up with an action plan of ways to test my carefully constructed "theory". If I discover that all the students are weak on this area in the report, I will mark them more leniently than normal, on the grounds that there was a gap in the teaching. I will include a session on report writing in the next class (it's a revision period anyway), perhaps by asking them for their data and constructing a report of it on the big screen with input from everyone (it's a small group). Next year, I will include explicit instruction on report writing earlier in the semester. At some point I might investigate the extent to which students successfully act on feedback from tutors.

Ok. Having reflected my way to sleepiness I am going back to bed.

PGC LTHE

2005-11-30T00:57:00.000-08:00

This is Judy Robertosn e-portfolio for the PgC LTHE at Glasgow Caledonian