It’s funny how things align. I think up until this moment I had felt a smidgen of insecurity about my ‘supporting role’ within the University, and not being attached to a proper course. This week made me realise quite how important this course will be to my role.
For this week’s pre-task we were asked to read a piece by Allan Davis – Learning outcomes and assessment criteria in art and design. What’s the recurring problem? (2003). Despite being written 20 years ago, it still feels particularly relevant to me. I am regularly witness to conversations about the students’ understanding of the learning outcomes, and how we can help them to understand how they are being assessed.
So then on Monday, we joined the workshop with Cath Caldwell, an educational developer working in Academic Enhancement, fora BA Architecture Writing Feedback workshop.
It was interesting how important it was for these Associate Lectures to have this training. They needed to agree a format, a tone, agree a length and emphasize the feeding forward – so as to ensure the feedback was for learning, rather than relying on describing the work that students had done. It was also agreed that they should reference the learning outcomes – this was an important step for students to understand what they were being assessed on.
We were there to help consider how we could use technology to improve the process of giving feedback. The following conversation stood out for me. One of the tutors confided that because they are dyslexic, they struggle to read the essay work and find it very time consuming. This is something I relate to. My first instinct is that perhaps there is some work here about promoting assistive technology for our staff. For example, both Microsoft and Apple have integrated assistive technologies into their operating systems. Text to speech and speech to text software is easier to access than ever before.
It also got me thinking about the flip side of the coin. The UAL Course Designer chapter on inclusive assessment tells us that diversifying the assessment methods is an important part of creating inclusive assessment. It is especially important for reasons of accessibility. Technology provides us with ample opportunity to diversify the assessment outputs. For example, one of our colleagues has been working on a process to create video essays. It strikes me that if we diversify the assessment for our students then it would also benefit our staff.
All this thinking about assessment and feedback got me thinking about feedback in my teaching. How do we measure learning in our staff development sessions? I think this is something I would like to consider further.
References
Davies, Allan. 2003 “Learning Outcomes and Assessment Criteria in Art and Design. What’s the Recurring Problem? – Arts and Culture.” Accessed January 31, 2023. http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/projects/networks/issue-18-july-2012/learning-outcomes-and-assessment-criteria-in-art-and-design.-whats-the-recurring-problem.
Stephens, Tim. “Course Designer 5: Designing Inclusive Assessment,” n.d.