Teaching, Learning and Study Skills

A Guide for Tutors

Tom Burns, Sandra Sinfield

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9781412900690, 9781412900683
• eBook ISBN: 9781446223970
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

?This is an essential guide for anyone aspiring to teach in Higher Education in the UK. Not just because it is packed with practical tips and even lecture notes but crucially because it explains the nature of university teaching in the wake of the ?widening participation? agenda... In summary this book is well worth reading? - Educate Journal

This is a book for tutors, lecturers and teachers in further and higher education, who need to teach their students how to study, learn and communicate effectively. Based around the same techniques and contents as Tom and Sandra?s book Essential Study Skills, which is itself based on many years experience of teaching and mentoring students in higher education, this book is intended to work with traditional and non-traditional students.

The material will be suitable for institutions concerned with widening participation; with student retention; with quality enhancement; with equal opportunities and with professional and staff development.


SAGE Study Skills are essential study guides for students of all levels. From how to write great essays and succeeding at university, to writing your undergraduate dissertation and doing postgraduate research, SAGE Study Skills help you get the best from your time at university. Visit the SAGE Study Skills hub for tips, resources and videos on study success!

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1	Introduction and how to use this book

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Coverage

 

• Welcome
• Background
• Learning development
• How to use this book:
  • build study skills programmes
  • build skills into subject teaching, especially seminar activities
• Links with Essential Study Skills: The complete guide to success @ university
• Lesson structure

Welcome

Welcome to Teaching, Learning and Study Skills: A guide for tutors. This is our second book for Sage and while it operates as a completely autonomous text, it can also function as a companion text to our student handbook Essential Study Skills: The complete guide to success @ university.

Background

For over thirty years (combined) our practice has revolved around facilitating the academic success of those that were typically not expected to succeed: older students and those from working-class and minority ethnic communities. We have undertaken this work on GNVQ, AS, A level and access programmes and across the whole continuum of university programmes – from foundation to postgraduate. There is no one stereotypical non-traditional student to whom we can point and say, there, if you can understand him or her you will have the key to teaching in this climate of widening participation. As with traditional students, our students come in all shapes and sizes, with various degrees of motivation, commitment and study ‘readiness’. However, if forced to generalise, we would say that, yes, we have found that typically the more mature of our students do tend to be more highly motivated and committed towards their studies. At the same time, while mature students bring strengths and experiences with them from the worlds of work and home where they may have already proven themselves powerful or successful, they tend to experience often crippling self-doubt in the academic context. This latter is the rationale for Chapter 6 on how to promote self-confidence.

For non- or traditional students there is no one quick fix with respect to promoting study success just as there is no one correct way to teach. Typically teaching and learning involve a complex interplay between aspects of the learner (personal, political, social, psychological, philosophical) with the various academic contexts in which they find themselves, including personal, political, social, psychological, philosophical and pedagogical aspects of the tutor. However, the activities, exercises and lecture contents detailed in this text have proven themselves to be useful starting points in dialogues and engagements that we have had with our students over the years, and we intend this handbook to operate in very practical ways to support further and higher education tutors with their practice and their personal professional development.

Resources

We have designed photocopiable resources to support the activities and exercises detailed throughout this guide. For ease of photocopying these are all gathered together in the Resources section at the end of the book.

Study skills, teaching and learning development

The authors of this text have both worked in further and higher education with a special focus on working with non-traditional students. Both now work in learning development in London Metropolitan University. The university itself has some 30,000 students and has a commitment to following a widening participation brief.

Learning development, as with teaching or professional development and alongside psychological and pedagogical research, is perhaps gaining a greater ‘voice’ as universities embrace widening participation in the move towards a mass higher education system.

In our university learning development itself operates:

 

• practically with students – running drop-in workshops, teaching accredited and unaccredited study and academic skills programmes and developing learning resources including on-line resources;
• practically with staff – contributing to staff induction and staff development activities, producing staff newsletters, generating and disseminating teaching and learning resources and working with staff to design and deliver integrated skills and HE orientation programmes;
• strategically with respect to groups across the university that contribute to the development of teaching, learning, retention and diversity strategies and practice, and that operate on a continuum of levels from practitioner discussion groups to academic committees;
• nationally with respect to learning development practitioners across the country – in the South East England Network and the Learning Development in Higher Education Network (http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/LDHEN.html).

And while this text is the practical manual that we suggest above, we do reference out to wider educational debates especially where these transect with issues relating to widening participation and the experiences of the non-traditional student.

How to use this book

This handbook has a special focus on HE orientation, that is it is designed to make transparent the forms and processes of academic discourse and to introduce a variety of strategies that enable students to become successfully inducted into academic practice, especially within higher education. The majority of the chapters contain suggestions for teaching practice and particular activities that, with the photocopiable resources, can be delivered straight from the page to supplement your subject teaching at any level. This is designed to be a very practical handbook and it is intended that tutors could teach a particular topic using the lesson plans, resources and lecture notes that are given here either as complete source material or as a detailed guide or introduction to a specific topic.

Further, the materials in the book can be drawn together to compose an accredited study and academic skills programme – and we offer a model of one such programme in Chapter 15. While our study and academic skills programme is accredited at preliminary or first-year level, it is a programme that we have delivered to access and foundation students to prepare them for university, and that is also undertaken by postgraduate students in a bid to either refresh or develop their personal skills and practice; we take this as an indication that the practices described in this text have been proven to work with (university) students of all levels.

Tutor tips: Lesson structure

When we teach the various activities laid out in this text we tend to adopt the following strategies:

 

• Agenda: Write the lesson agenda on the board before students arrive. Eventually students utilise the agenda as a way of focusing on and tuning into the session.
• Brainstorm: Prior to commencing a session, we require that students brainstorm either individually or collectively on the session topic such that they become focused upon and tuned into the topic. Occasionally we vary this by getting students to write one or two things that they expect to take away from a session or utilise in their assignment.
• Delivery + / − activities: Typically we teach a session via a mixture of lecture, discussion and some form of student interaction or activity.
• Check learning: where possible we circulate to check that activity – and hopefully learning – is taking place during the session.
• Student – reflect on learning: We utilise learning logs (see Chapter 14) to structure student reflection upon the session.
• Tutor – reflect on session: We reflect on the session ourselves along the lines of what went well and why, and what went badly and why, in a bid to continually develop our own practice.

Essential Study Skills

With all the sections in this text, we will make reference to the relevant sections in our companion student handbook Essential Study Skills: The complete guide to success @ university (published by Sage, 2003). For example, Chapter 10 on how to promote effective presentations contains references to ESS 9: How to prepare better assignments and ESS 7: How to build your confidence, indicating that Chapters 9 and 7 of Essential Study Skills (ESS) will offer supporting material. This is for your convenience; it is simply a means to quickly indicate which sections of that handbook relate to this one. At the same time, while students can use that text to facilitate their development and support any study and academic skills work that you undertake, you can teach from this text separately from that one.

Finally

We do hope that you enjoy using the activities in this handbook with your students – and we would be interested in gathering feedback on your experiences of doing so. You can contact us, Tom Burns and Sandra Sinfield, via the Learning Development in Higher Education Network, e-mail: [email protected].

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2	University teaching, widening participation and study skills

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Coverage

• What is happening to university education?
• Widening participation
• The skills debate
• Bibliography and further reading

Introduction – but is it ‘education’?

While traditionally higher education may pivot around pure research or be linked to social prosperity and social justice, many of our fellow practitioners argue that, government policy notwithstanding, universities are concerned with ‘Education’. Here tutors speak of the something ‘other’, the something indefinable, un-pin-downable and almost unknowable that happens for students in the best of circumstances (Noble, 2002; Satterthwaite, 2004). This is a something that perhaps cannot be captured and measured in our current audit culture nor in government white papers, teaching and learning strategy documents or the sorts of aims and learning outcomes that we are expected to generate to define our teaching and learning goals (Clegg and Ashworth, 2004; Noble, 2002). Whatever your own thoughts about the role that higher education could and should play in society today, in this section of the text we explore some of the key issues affecting higher education (HE) at this moment, paying particular attention to the government White Paper, The future of higher education (2003). In the process we consider the relationship between government policy and university practices and how this may impact on tutor – and eventually on student – experiences.

What is happening to university education?

For many lecturers these are challenging times. Traditionally, university lecturers have enjoyed considerable autonomy in their research with their pedagogical practice part of their personal remit as domain experts and recruitment strategy a matter of departmental policy. However, ongoing governmental intervention has worked to change the HE environment. The White Paper (2003) urges universities in effect to focus either on research, associations with business or their approaches to teaching and learning. At the same time that all universities are supposed to generate an access policy and play their part in the move to a mass HE system, there is a drive to concentrate research into the Russell Group of universities with a focus in the newer universities on the implicitly lowe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of resources
• 1 Introduction and how to use this book
• 2 University teaching, widening participation and study skills
• 3 How to assess – a short preface on assessment
• 4 How to understand our students
• 5 How to promote an effective transition to HE
• 6 How to promote student self-confidence
• 7 How to promote effective organisation and time management
• 8 How to promote effective research and reading strategies
• 9 How to promote effective note-making
• 10 How to promote effective presentations and seminars
• 11 How to promote effective writing
• 12 How to promote effective revision and exam techniques
• 13 How to promote effective group work
• 14 How to promote reflective practice
• 15 How to promote overall success
• A: Bibliographic and online resources for ‘HE orientation’
• B: EA199 An introduction to academic studies: reflecting, learning and communicating
• Resources
• Index