1. My Disciplinary Commons
What have I gained from the Commons?

2. I joined the Commons because I felt in a rut and was bored in my job
Why I joined the Commons
In my earlier career I was highly motivated to learn the skills of my job and also very idealistic. I spent many hours over and above my contractual time preparing lessons and trying to do things perfectly. I tried to be very responsive to student needs and it at he end of almost every year I threw away that year’s work and wrote it again to try and improve it!
Over the years I managed to wean myself off the throwing away habit but was still quite a workaholic. I still tried innovating with new teaching methods and ways of presenting material. But in more recent years, there seems much less scope for experimentation and flexibility.
I can’t alter the assignment weightings on my module without it going through two committees in advance. Teaching material for next year has to has to be prepared and burned onto a CD onto a CD by the end of June as it is sent to our Distance Learning centres. Once prepared, it cannot be altered in mid-year. Fulfilling all the QA procedures leaves little time for innovation.
Somehow, the fun had gone out of the job for me and I felt bored and stale. So the from Sally that made its way onto my PC early last September seemed an ideal way to re-engage with the teaching and learning process.
02/05/2019

3. 1. Meeting with others over time and discussing how we teach ITP courses
Quality Time
Back in the 80’s I gained an FE teaching qualification by day release over 2 years. I really enjoyed the day each week spent out of the classroom and constructively thinking about what and how I taught. On my course were teachers from various different disciplines but whether we were trying to teach students how to construct an array or castrate a bull, the problems we faced were very similar.
At Sunderland, we do have training courses, planning days, T&L conferences and so on, which do give us the chance to get away from teaching and marking to consider our teaching from a different point of view.
But the Commons was different from these events in a number of ways:
meeting away from Sunderland, having a real distance from the job
meetings that stretched over 10 months, providing that much longer period of focus
and, of course, the monthly homework kept it all in the front of my mind
as everyone in the group taught introductory programming, there was a commonality of experiences and issues
02/05/2019

4. 2. The opportunity to take a more objective perspective of my work
The Reflective Practitioner
I can remember being quite inspired at a conference I attended some years ago by a presentation on ‘The Reflective Practitioner in education’. I thought at the time that although I did reflect on how I taught and what worked, what didn’t etc., it wasn’t in any focused or formal way. A good idea might come to me and I’d try it out when I next had the opportunity. But I had never formally evaluated whether my innovations worked or not.
Hearing from other colleagues here describe their teaching, reading the portfolios and doing peer observations has been of great benefit to me. It has provided a huge amount of comparative information on how, when and why - not to mention who and what.
Over this year I have been trying much more often to take that vital step back and look at my module objectively, rather than take what I do for granted. I am still happy with some aspects of my teaching. But the niggling problems with my module that I’ve lived with but haven’t got around to addressing have become loud calls for attention right now. I think I have become a little less complacent.
02/05/2019

5. 3. Motivation to innovate and seek feedback from peers and students
Asking questions, getting answers
As I mentioned before, I have often tried out innovative teaching methods in the past (with varying results) but less so in recent years. Partly this is due to the more restrictive climate in which I now work, as I mentioned earlier. Partly it is due to not wanting to ‘fix’ something that still works. After all, I don’t get paid any more for all the extra hours I would be spending doing a radical overhaul just for the fun of it.
But the environment doesn’t stay static; change is inevitable. For example, I am now expected to put all my lecture slides on WebCT the on-line learning environment. Students can download a lecture and read it before they come to the lecture. They can decide that having read the slides, why bother going to the lecture? They have VB.NET on their home computer, so why go to the tutorial?
So when my attendance rates fall off over the year, it’s easy for me to say, well they are choosing not to attend because they have what they need elsewhere. But is that really the case? Have I bothered to find out? Why are students not attending even though they are struggling with the work? Why do some students give up? I want to know the answers to these questions.
02/05/2019

6. Three innovations I plan to implement next year on my programming module.
Innovations for next year
1. Seminar class
When visiting Carole in February I was intrigued to see used a classroom seminar as well as a lab, so students could get help to design the programs which they then code in the lab following. This was like a blinding revelation for me – the missing link between teaching concepts in lectures and getting students to write programs.
2. Beyond bullet points
A method I came across a few weeks ago. This presentation was written in the Beyond Bulletpoints style. My students suffer from bullet-point overload; I use too many slides and put too much information on them. This new presentation method is a very radical step for me.
3. Informal feedback
As I said before, I want to find out why students don’t attend classes. We have formal mechanisms for student feedback, but they don’t capture the information in a timely manner. Students who have dropped out aren’t usually around to complete feedback forms. So I will do informal classroom feedback after each 6-week block of study to get a more ongoing picture of how the module is running.
02/05/2019