Category: Teaching
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Tip: Covering a Colleagues Teaching Last Minute. And their PowerPoint doesn’t make sense!
Most of us have been there. The threated call! “Could you cover my teaching for me? Because, *insert valid reason here*. Here are the slides for this session.” Here is a strategy that worked really well for me. I had a look at the slides beforehand, yet some of the slides still did not make…
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Looking Beyond: Thoughts on Teaching Models
Dr Vicki Dale and I are running a very hands-on postgraduate course around creative pedagogies. One of the core messages I think we still have to make stronger: take a step back from discipline specific pedagogies. Teaching methods are in the least interdisciplinary–although I vote for transdisciplinarity! So I am making a public plea: teaching…
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Evaluating learning: an uncertainty principle
Here is my hypothesis: The more we focus on one aspect of the learned, i.e. in exams we force the expression of learning into a specific way and the closer we look at that one specific factor the less we are able to see the effects of said learning more widely. A personal experience example…
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Academia and Buzz Word Bingo
One of the themes of our engagement in #ALTC Winter Conference and #LTHEchat was that the terminology we have chosen to use ‘disruption’ and ‘active learning’ smell too much of buzz-word bingo to sit comfortably with colleagues. And we agree. But … There is also a but … what else are we to use. We…
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The Power of Doodle
The origin of this post goes back to 2011, much has changed since, including my own personal development and career. But let’s get the pens out: I was rather keen on going back to the topic of doodles as I have become more and more interested in Sketchnoting, which you could think about as purposeful…
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SoTL Definition Conundrum
I have had a bit of frustration with getting a definition sorted. So I made a thinking thing … ‘definitions are living creatures’. That’s the premise.
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101 Photo Flash Cards for Teaching Prompts
The link below downloads a pdf document with 101 different photo flash cards that can be used as teaching prompts, for object based learning or story telling. Also available via the FigShare Link below: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12479438.v3
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Emergence
I am going on walks every day, often Nordic Walking–which in Scotland earns me strange looks and the occasional comment. As spring takes hold and the days become longer, if not necessarily warmer, I was thinking about emergence. As educators we are used to being in an autopoietic state (Kidd, 2015), but the process of…
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Remote Working First Insights
I won’t be writing about remote working ever day just when things emerge that might be useful to share. Plan and Accountability Buddy So the accountability buddy system is definitely worthwhile! I haven’t had much chance of planning due to ad hoc meetings. However, after the morning chat with accountability buddy. We decided to treat…
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Remote Working
Preamble: I love working from home. I am privileged to have a quiet space (not right now as SO is trying to video conference with stepson about fixing his PC and shouting as if he needs to physically carry the sound waves–both of them have to self isolate right now). However, working from home are…
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Coaching Supervision: and Course Development
An accidental insight. I had the opportunity to obtain coaching supervision, and this session led to a profound insight about one of my postgraduate courses: Creative Pedagogies for Active Learning. Brief background: The course has only been in its second iteration, after a complete restructure, and the first year went really well. However, the second…
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Bildung & Weltaneignung an Attempted Translation of Education
There are some terms and concepts in the Germany language which directly impact my day to day work, but I have no English words for them. And a translation seems impossible because not a single word I would choose would even come close to reflecting the complexity of these nouns. I meant to write this…
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12 Days of SoTL: Bonus
Useful and Quirky Tools In this post I share some of my favourite tools, most of which are open source, that help with motivation, stopping distraction, or staying organised. For Writing Battle your fear of the empty page! Written Kitten all the way! In this snazzy little Browser App you get a photo of a…
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12 Days of SoTL: Day 09
Data Collection On day nine we reflect that whilst we have chosen our methods, there are some considerations to take into account when it comes to actually ‘doing the collecting’ of data. For instance: If we are leading interviews, and instead of having open ended questions, or even just prompts to encourage a free flow…

