Session/artefact to be observed/reviewed: Creative Portfolio Workshop
Size of student group: 10–25
Observer: Linda Aloysius
Observee: Greg Orrom Swan
Part One
Observee to complete in brief and send to observer prior to the observation or review:
What is the context of this session/artefact within the curriculum?
- The Creative Portfolio Workshop sits in an auxiliary position to the curriculum, providing a contextual basis for the production for a portfolio for the students academic and professional development
How long have you been working with this group and in what capacity?
- The group varies each session, often I only meet the group once per year or even once per academic qualification, I work with both BA + MA.
What are the intended or expected learning outcomes?
- Learners understand in specific relation to their practice how to begin producing an appropriate, communicative portfolio for various different audiences
- Learners undertake how to utilize the software Adobe InDesign specifically for various techniques when producing a creative portfolio
What are the anticipated outputs (anything students will make/do)?
- Produce various pages of design layouts on InDesign
- Leave with key words based from reflections of their practice
Are there potential difficulties or specific areas of concern?
- I feel I am overdelivering in terms if lecturing and transmissive teaching, rather than allowing the “students themselves do the real work” Biggs (2007)
- The group I teach is often completely new to me, and so having to form new connections with students everytime
How will students be informed of the observation/review?
- We will be reviewing the session online through discussion
What would you particularly like feedback on?
- I think looking ahead I would like to increase opportunities to “allow the students to use their own activity to construct their own knowledge” Biggs (2007) in my lessons, rather than me delivering the content in lecture-format, which is very passive and overwhelming for the students
- How to reduce the content of me actively teaching, but increase the students doing work without literally removing or missing sections out
How will feedback be exchanged?
- Through recorded online discussion and via email through this form
Part Two
Observer to note down observations, suggestions and questions:
Thank you, Greg, for meeting with me to discuss your teaching. It was great to hear your insights and evaluations of your different teaching tasks and to reflect together on some of the challenges involved.
In our recorded discussion, we touched upon a couple of points that you are keen to resolve and consider further in your own time. These included:
- Providing / over-providing for students: You related that in one session only – and not any of the other sessions you teach – you find yourself offering what we agreed might be an overwhelming amount of slides and verbal input to students. We discussed how this could potentially negatively affect students’ learning and also considered why this might be happening. We discussed that it is possible to feel excessive pressure to provide and perhaps ‘prove’ oneself to students (which might lead to over-controlling sessions), particularly when this is in a field that is not the same as that originally studied by ourselves when we were students; in other words, something akin to ‘imposter syndrome’ can occur and we can incline to overcompensate for a perceived ‘lack’ on our part.
- Knowledge production and distribution: We discussed the possibility of you ‘reversing’ the way that knowledges are disseminated and produced in the above session, and what that might feel like for you. For example, what would happen if you send slide materials to students in advance of the session and asked them to present different sections of the presentation? Acknowledging some of the feelings you have around this seemed to help you to reflect really well and gain insight into why you over-provide; your humour, and self-deprecation, were delightful to see and I’m sure are a real attribute when this is brought into your teaching scenarios.
Part Three
Observee to reflect on the observer’s comments and describe how they will act on the feedback exchanged:
Firstly, thank you Linda for your time spent observing and conversing with me over this lesson. It was enlightening. It has, as mentioned in Case Study 02, crystallised and made obvious what the feelings of discomfort I was feeling and had been growing inside of me with this session (and only this session).
I also want to acknowledge and thank you for the clarity that you enabled me to have — historically I have (especially when feeling as if I’m lacking or imposing) an unnecessary urge to (over)explain and in some warped way hope to communicate that I do in fact know what I’m talking about. The focus was on me proving myself, rather than as we resolved, on how I enable the students to actively learn. The old-style transmissive teaching format (‘man-splaining’) was, although in short bursts I still believe is useful, utterly disproportionate when measured against the sessions intended learning outcomes. I had titled it as a Creative Portfolio Workshop, which suggests an active, participatory format of learning, and although there were some activities, as we discussed, the time proportionally to the lecture was not balanced to enable learning.
The next steps will be to, as mentioned in Part 1 design teaching opportunities and tasks/activities to “allow the students to use their own activity to construct their own knowledge” Biggs (2007). This will be through a constructive approach (Biggs, 2007) as I hope to re-build the lesson which means I do less speaking, and the students do more.
Some initial ideas and thoughts of how I might evolve the lesson are below, based on the format of me speaking shortly (10–15mins) followed by tasks 15–20mins.
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Considering the audience
TASK: Object Based Learning discussion based on which objects communicate to certain audiences if we’re trying to deduce what they potentially looking for in a portfolio or body of work.
Selecting and editing down content
TASK: looking at your collected documentation from a current or recent project, choose just 10 images which tell the story of your project, are they chronological? Should they be?
Typography Importance Introduction
TASK: Using Adobe Fonts, find a new font, design 3 different type formats, and layout 3 use cases
Graphic Layout
TASK: layout 3 pages with your content in 3 different ways using the principles shown and discussed
I will keep you informed of how this lesson evolves and to where it leads.
Please find in the addendum my pre-observation notes, as it is an interesting preamble.
Addendum
References
Biggs, Biggs, J. B. and Tang, C. S.-K. (2007) Teaching for Quality Learning at university: What the student does. Buckingham, England: Open University Press.