Good practice week: Round-up (May 30, 2008)
From Case Studies Wiki
The post is just replicated here to catch all the words for archive purposes, to read the post in its original form and see the links, photos, videos etc., go here:http://www.good.group.shef.ac.uk/blog/?p=261
Unfortunately, I was not able to blog from all the sessions I attended (particularly difficult to do at those I presented at). Thanks to all the presenters, participants and Dee MacCormack, Sarah Leavesley and Vicky Shaw for all their hard work in organising this event. It’s been an interesting week.
I ended my attendance this morning by seeing some of Phil Race’s Writer’s Forum session. Before having to rush off and put the final touches on an HEA paper that is due shortly. The top tip I’ll take away? Do not wait until you have “enough” time. Do it now. In little spurts. Make do with what you have until you find that it is enough. The secret to success perhaps. Realism.
This was the theme of yesterady’s Bad Practice session that Katie Noss Van Buren and I ran. Katie asked people to think about identifying bad practice: how do they identify it? What is bad practice? As people were giving their various responses, I wrote them into 3 different unnamed columns. We didn’t explain the columns. However, it was very clear that most of the answers were going into the first column.
As we were doing this, Penny Eley pointed out that with bad practice some issues are not actually the fault of the lecturer per se. For example, if there is a technical issue sometimes there is nothing that the lecturer could have done to prevent that. Sometimes, Penny pointed out, academics take on too much blame. Sometimes, it’s just not your fault. Sometimes the bad practice isstructural or simply somebody else’s fault. It was almost as if a sigh of relief went through the room.
Although the terms bad/good: problematic labelling in the first place for many I know, the different categories that Katie and I had come up with when categorising different types of bad practice (and reasons for it):
-module/classroom/student-related
-department/quality/community/university-related
-personal/external
We pointed out that sometimes bad practice is unavoidable. Certainly everybody aims for professional behaviour (there are certainly different definitions of this as well). However, extenuating personal circumstances for example may mean that at certain times in your life you will be able to achieve what you want to more or less easily. Pobody’s nerfect and all that. So, what can you take from this? Are pulling the covers over your head (possibly a necessary tactic after a particularly bad day) the only way to cope? Obviously, the answer is no. Reflective practice, looking at what is going wrong, figuring out the cause and what realistically (if anything) can be done to fix it in the future seemed to be the consensus solutions. For some people that would be a process they would prefer to do alone, for others it was one that necessitated the feedback of others.
Nadine Wills, LeTS
