Points from Mentor Training on 12 November (Study Day)

First--many thanks to the more than forty of you who came. It was the biggest turnout we've had for a mentor event!

Second--a special thanks to those of you who have been mentors before, and who came anyway. You had a wealth of information and insight into how it all works out on the ground, and we got some useful ideas about how we might improve our communication and make the whole business even better--more on that later.

However, I'm sorry we didn't get round to the exercise of all observing the same session on video, and discussing it. On the other hand, we could only have got there at the cost of passing up on your questions and comments--I think we did the right trade.  Some of you did ask whether we could copy the DVD and circulate to Centres so that you could borrow it and do the exercise yourselves. I've checked, and I'm afraid that copyright restrictions apply, as I suspected. However, I'm pretty sure that all Centres have some equivalent material, and it doesn't really matter whether you watch the same stuff--it's the discussion which matters, so we'll notify Centre Leaders that you may be approaching them, and asking them to have something ready. I'll also prepare a list of questions to help structure the discussion (it'll be up to you whether you use them, of course).

Some more specific points:

Learning Styles

Coffield et al's 2004 review can still be downloaded from here. My page with links (some straight, some more contentious) is here. As I noted, the network is not dogmatic about orthodoxy in taught material, but this is egregious rubbish. Coffield (2008) notes:

The most worrying aspect of this movement is that it appears impervious to evidence-based criticism. Our detailed and systematic review found that ‘... there is no evidence that the model is either a desirable basis for learning or the best use of investment, teacher time, initial teacher
education and professional development’ (Coffield et al. 2004a: 35).
Put simply, it doesn’t work.

Yet the VAKT approach persists. For example, From theory to practice: using differentiation to raise levels of attainment by Cheryl Jones (2006), part of LSN’s 14–19 Vocational Learning Support Programme – so no straw man and part of the officially-funded advice to the sector – still blithely maintains in the face of the evidence we presented that ‘this does not mean that it is no longer relevant to consider learning styles’ (Jones 2006: 7).

How more explicit could we have been? Let me try harder this time. There is no scientific justification for teaching or learning strategies based on VAKT and tutors should stop using learning style instruments based on them. There is no theory of VAKT from which to draw any implications for practice. It should be a dead parrot. It should have ceased to function.

Even the most detailed suggestions for practice drawn from VAKT are based on over-simplifications of a misunderstood and discredited theory. Learning styles, like fish oils or brain gym, are part of what HL Mencken in an inspired phrase called the ‘pseudo-psychological rumble-bumble’ that infests education (1926: 177). It’s time to move on. Why do we expect to capture the full complex humanity of learners by dividing them into four categories which are so simple as to be patronising, if not downright insulting?

(Emphasis in original, available here (pdf) accessed 17 November 11)

Peer Observations

There did appear to be some variable practice on peer observations; the formal requirement is:

6. Two reports of peer observations; your reports of your observation of course colleagues, signed by them. If you would like to include copies of their observations of you, that‘s fine, but we don‘t insist. (p.42 or thereabouts in the course handbook--pagination varies from Centre to Centre.)

and the guidance; (diagrams omitted);

You should observe at least two of your colleagues on each year of the Course, which will of course involve being observed yourself.

You should start to arrange the visits as soon as possible: it can take time.

While simple pairings are obviously the easiest way of arranging visits, you may well get more from arranging a chain: it spreads the knowledge around, puts you in contact with more people, and avoids the gruesome twosome or mutual admiration society pitfalls. In a chain of six:

Round 1:
Anita observes Bert
Carole observes Debbie
Eric observes Farouk

Round 2:
Bert observes Carole
Debbie observes Eric
Farouk observes Anita

The chain then dissolves and re-constitutes with other group members for the next set of observations.

On completion of your observation, you will need to write a short report (around 500 words/a page of A4 or so), to be included in the portfolio. This should be signed by both of you. The report may be in any format which seems useful to you (and probably to the person you are observing). It does not have to use the Course's Observation Protocol, and even if it does, it is expected that you will also make a more general report. (about p.60 of the Handbook)

Mentoring Diploma

Several people expressed an interest in the University Diploma in Mentoring, which is offered at Barnfield, Bedford,  Grantham, Leicester, Oxford and Cherwell Valley, South Notts., and Tresham Colleges; contact the colleges directly for more information and to register.

Email contact

Those of you who were at the meeting provided your email addresses; we shall shortly be getting in touch with you to notify you of an email group we are setting up. You will need to confirm that you wish to join the group, if you do, so don't worry--we are not planning to spam you!

From our end it will enable us to contact you occasionally (probably only about twice a term) with information about students' assessment deadlines, mentor meetings and study days and to consult you about any changes to the programme. More important, it will also enable you to discuss mentoring issues among yourselves, and share ideas and advice.

If you are a mentor, tutor or student and were not at the meeting but would like to join, please email mentor@bedspce.org.uk, with "Mentor Email Group" or similar in the subject line. No further message is needed.

Evaluation of first Year 1 Study Day on 1 October.

Here is the summary presentation from the Study Day on 1 October--sorry it has taken rather longer than usual to publish. However, I think this has been a candidate for the most successful Study Day ever--many thanks for everyone's sterling efforts!

Evaluation of year 1 study day

Follow-up from technology session on Saturday

The link from the heading is to a useful short article from the Chronicle of Higher Education's (US) Faculty Focus column which makes some similar points to Mark's on Saturday and suggests some others. I particularly like the idea of a "just for fun" area of a bebsire or wiki...

Any further suggestions welcome, via comments.

Tech. resources to make study (and teaching) easier

This is a post to support the session Mark Tinney and I did at the first Year 1 Study Day on 1 October. The heading link is to the page we used as a portal, but all those links and more are accessible from this post.

The first techie thing is to back everything up. One brilliant way of doing that without ever having to think about it is to store all your files in on the net or "in the cloud". You can either do everything in Google docs, which of course require that you be on-line, or you can use Dropbox. This is an excellent free facility, which you can use on-line or you can download to any machine you have access to. All it does is create a new sub-folder in your Documents folder, which you use to keep any kind of file, just like a normal folder on your hard drive. Indeed it is a normal folder, but with a plus. When you go on-line, any changes you have made to the contents of that folder will automatically be synchronised with all your other Dropbox  folders. So you can go to your laptop, your desktop at home or at work, and find the latest versions of any file you want to work on, without you having to do anything other than save in that folder. (Of course, you'll want to take care about security.) And you can go online in the library, log in to the Dropbox site in your browser, and find all your files there, too.

As mentioned, Google Docs does require you to be on-line but as Mark pointed out, that makes it very useful for collaborative work, including overseeing your students' work as they are doing it. And it includes a good survey creator (Create>Form) which makes use of being on-line to contact respondents directly. So in some respects it exceeds the functionality of Microsoft Office (TM, etc. blah). In any case, you do not need to pay for an Office-compatible suite; OpenOffice and LibreOffice seem to me to be identical, but they are both heavy-duty packages, and completely free.


A reference manager is a very useful tool--simply a way of keeping track of what you have been reading, all in one place, and organised so you can retrieve it. If you are a non-techie person there is nothing to beat 6x4 index cards, of course, but since this is a technology oriented session, try Zotero. There is a two-part article introducing it here and here. Its major selling point (although actually it is free), is the way in which it automates collecting material; click on the button in your browser and Zotero grabs the page you're on.

Zotero also has a "groups" feature, which is a good way of sharing material and references with other people. I know you can do that through BREO, but a VLE is restricted to other people on this course, and you may want to go wider and include your mentor or other colleagues.

Speaking of which, you are part of a much wider community of people on other courses, with lots of ideas and questions for each other. Sharon Abbott, a very public-spirited lecturer in prison education, set up a network site about post-compulsory education in 2005 called PCET.net, on the basis that it was just the kind of network she felt a need for when she was doing her own Cert. Ed. Such a site relies very much on its members to create a critical mass and a buzz, and so please join it and use it; Sharon is making a big push to re-launch it at the start of a new academic year.

Part of the requirement for the course is that you keep a reflective professional journal. Why not do it via a blog? You might not be quite as outspoken as this one, but it serves as a useful example of how it can be done. You don't have to make it public, of course, or you can restrict readership to friends, fellow-students or your mentor, and you can have multiple authors if you are working collaboratively... You can set one up in five minutes or less and there are numerous free platforms out there, such as Wordpress, which is probably the most sophisticated, Blogger which is probably the best known, and Posterous Spaces, which is probably the simplest to use if you're not a geek, or want to use your mobile to post.

I use a blog to write up the "minutes" of a class, with embedded links, photos of whiteboards and even the presentations, via SlideShare. Mark pointed out that it is not always necessary to re-invent the wheel--you can search SlideShare for existing presentations on a topic, and then (often) download them and edit them for your own purposes.

C-map tools is not a particularly pretty application, but it is free and very powerful once you get to grips with it. It draws concept maps, which are not quite the same as mind-maps, but more flexible and informative. If you do want to draw mind-maps themselves, there are several free options, although many are simply trial versions. You can use concept maps (hand-drawn) as a useful in-class exercise. Introduce a topic and get the students to draw concept maps of their understanding of it; simply look over their shoulders to get an immediate impression of who has got it and who has not--the number of nodes and complexity of links is a great guide. (And tearing up efforts and starting again is usually good news!)

Consider E-draw Mind Map, which produces jazzy Buzan-style maps, or FreeMind which is much more staid but handles more complex topics and sub-topics.If you are prepared to work on-line on your mapping, and particularly if you want to collaborate, try SpiderScribe.

Incidentally, if you are looking for connections between ideas, and the topics appear in Wikipedia, you can enter the topics into C-Links in your browser, which will draw a map of the connections for you, which you can export into C-map tools. There's an example here.

Of course, while we are on Wikipedia, it is notorious in academic circles because the source material for many articles is not cited; it's a work in progress, but look at the Full Wiki site, where sources are revealed when you roll over any highlighted text, so you can cite them properly.

For presentation purposes, there is an alternative to PowerPoint--and I don't just mean the free clone at OpenOffice.org--but a much more radical approach to presentations at Prezi.


And more adventurously, see this post for some excellent contributions from fellow-students to a Study Day on how they have been using technology to support their own teaching.

And do your bit to save us all from drowning under an email tsunami.

As we went along, Mark thought of other resources:

• Sporcle is a site with many addictive on-line games, but where one can also create one's own--most obviously quizzes and tests which can be taken on-line and also scored there. Great for enlivening necessary "learning by heart" but also addictive...
  
• PollEverywhere is a site which lets you set up surveys and polls to which people can respond by text message, and will display results in real time.
   
• TED (Technology, Education, Design) is one of the glories of the web! Hundred of polished, twenty-minute or shorter, addresses on pretty well anything, by experts for intelligent lay people. Not directed purely at education, but who cares?

•  And it was through TED that Mark discovered Gapminder, a wonderful resource for the visualisation of historical and statistical data.

We ran out of time, of course! but if you have favourites, send them to us via the comments facility.

Referencing (sorry! But worth a read.)

Referencing is the great bug-bear of new students, and a serious distraction from what matters, which is content rather than form.

However. We refer to the accepted style as "Harvard" referencing. Even library guidance material does that. But that is just a label (which bemuses Harvard University, which has no connection with it.) for what is known across the pond--much more sensibly--as the "author/date" system. I'm not going to go into the details of this--it is all too easy to get sucked into them--but just to point out that it has two components:

1. How to refer to your source within the text, and
2. How to cite it within the bibliography.

#2 is the complicated bit. For those who care, the standard we adopt is "APA" (American Psychological Association). So (this is the bit which matters) they have a brilliantly helpful website:

http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2011/09/best-of-the-apa-style-blog-fall-2011-edition.html

I have reservations about the amount of energy students are called upon to divert to this nowadays, but do learn to play the game, because it saves a lot of hassle down the line!

Evidence-based Study Tips

Useful at a number of levels--for your students and even yourselves--and with links to follow up to sources.

A new network for PCE colleagues--please join.

Go look at and register with http://www.pcet.net/. It's a brilliant non-profit voluntary initiative to get us all exchanging ideas. Web 2.0/social networking for the PCE community--and of course the more you put in, the more you get out.