My Time as a Student Project Partner on Psychology
My name is Gabe Strain and this year I had the pleasure of working alongside staff, teaching assistants, and fellow students (from all years of the course) on an innovative and exciting project. We were tasked with reviewing small group teaching, assessments, and feedback on the BSc Psychology course here at UoM. We did this by using the Scrum agile management framework to formulate what the course looked like at the time, what the problems and issues were, and how, in an ideal world, they could be rectified. The task specific to me was primarily documentation, although I really enjoyed the chance to collaborate with staff and students and try and come up with novel ways of doing things.
The Scrum framework is a set of agile management tools created in the 80s with software development in mind, although by now it has been applied to pretty much everything development-related under the sun. At the core of Scrum is the sprint, a “Scrum” word for iteration — our sprints were 3 hours long, and each consisted of two mixed groups of staff and students looking at a single course unit. Over the course of 3 of these sprints we managed to get through 6 course units, one of which will be used later as an example of what we did and how we did it.
I really enjoyed my time working with the group, it was nice to get to know both and staff and students a bit more, and the vibe was relaxed but focused. With the ongoing pandemic we didn’t quite finish everything off, but as a pilot scheme, I personally considered it a great success. We heard about issues people were having from both sides of the net; staff and students, and together we considered the best way to deal with them. The sprints were very much free-form idea zones — we didn’t burden ourselves with ludicrous considerations like would we actually be allowed to do this? and where would we find 10 extra teaching assistants? Our brief was to go wild — to boldly go where no student-faculty-partnership-project had gone before, and that’s exactly what we did. We came up with novel ideas that were (for the most part) very reasonable, but even if they weren’t, they were excellent jumping-off points for the future. The next section is a brief example of what I produced following the sprints: short precis that detailed (a) what the unit looked like at the time, (b) what problems we wanted to solve, and (c) how we could solve them and what that would change.
Year 1 Lifespan & Ageing Sprint
Lifespan and Ageing is one of the first units students take in semester 1, year 1. It has an essay deadline about 7 weeks into the first semester, on which is based 100% of the grade for the unit. It is unique in that it has 2 lectures per week (in order to cover all content before the essay deadline). Before we started sprint-ing, we came up with a “user profile”, or a picture of what the typical student might look like when they take on this course.
Once we had the user profile, we then came up with what the course looked like at the time. For this we used UCL’s ABC Learning Design model, which places an emphasis on regularly reconsidering aspects of different teaching units and improving them year-on-year. The ABC LD model separates teaching methodologies into the following learning types: Acquisition (blue), Investigation (red), Collaboration (yellow), Practice (purple), and Production (green). Below you can see how the Lifespan and Ageing unit looked with regards to these learning types.
Students who were involved in the sprint discussion highlighted that immediately having a full essay which was worth 100% of one of their units was quite daunting — more general problems with research paper seminars were identified as well:
Lots of students don’t bother reading papers, meaning at least 20 minutes is wasted waiting for everyone to catch up.
Sometimes the seminar isn’t that useful or relevant to the essay.
Students don’t get any training in how to search for papers or read literature.
We took a step back as a group and decided that we could exploit this unit and use it as a vehicle for teaching students skills like searching the literature, reading a research paper, synthesising clear, concise arguments, and joining together information from different sources. The course is taught by 2 members of staff, each handling different aspects of the topic; our plan was to give students a choice between 2 essays, one for each topic. To remove the anxiety surrounding having to search the literature for the first time, we decided we would give the students a pack of papers to use based on a lecture. Students would be divided into groups of 5, with each being asked to read just a single paper. Specific seminars would then be run going through exactly how to construct an argument (using prepared excerpts), how to critically evaluate research papers, and how to synthesise and bring together information from multiple sources. This process would be run twice — once for each lecturer’s topic — with the essay deadline being moved closer to the end of the semester to account for the extra time it would take. Below you can see what each session would entail and what it would achieve:
This really lets the student concentrate on learning how to write essays at an undergraduate level, instead of struggling with wading through literature. The point is to lead students gently through how to write an essay, instead of dropping them in at the deep end. After our changes, the unit looked like this:
I thoroughly enjoyed my time working as a Student Project Partner. The opportunity to have a say in how the course is run was brilliant — it really made me feel like a valued member of the team, and we ended up discovering issues that staff simply hadn’t considered before. Our use of the agile management tools and the ABC LD model was successful and contributed to a successful pilot scheme and a great amount learned for all involved.
