Take Aways from AILTA2018

All Ireland Conference on Learning, Teaching and Assessment in Further and Higher Education

My day at AILTA started off wonderfully with a stroll to the venue through the autumn leaves on Griffith Avenue. I'd never been to Marino institute of Education before and was very impressed with the setting for this great conference.

In this blog post I couldn't possibly hope to cover even a small amount of the topics touched upon in today's conference. I'll just gather some reflections from talks that were particularly relevant to my own interests and practice.

There were a few key themes that struck me during the day. Firstly, as would be expected, there was a great emphasis on taking an evidence informed approach to your practice. Secondly, the idea of listening to student stories came up at several talks and discussions. Thirdly there was a lot of discussion around the difference between digital assessment vs. technology enhanced assessment. Fourthly, there were several mentions of over-assessment. The idea that students might be over-assessed seems to be an opinion that is gaining momentum at the moment and possibly become a bit of a "buzz". It's one I'm personally a bit afraid of because I really believe there is still a huge underuse of assessment as and for learning in the broader education community. I fear that people who are at the early stages of learning about the benefits of assessment might be put off by all this talk of over-assessment.

Supporting and Evidencing Student Transitions

Professor Roni Bamber from Queen Margaret University gave the first keynote of the day. I really enjoyed professor Bamber's talk and her relaxed and light style of presentation was great. For me the key takeaway from this talk was the idea there is not just one transition stage,  one student, one  transition element, one transition journey. We need to consider the needs of diverse groups of students at several different key times of transition, not just the transition "in" but also "through" and "out".  We heard about the idea of longitudinal induction and how it is pointless to continue heaping loads of information on students in the first week of college when we know that the information is not timely and that students can't possibly take it all in. I think it was all summed up very well with the quote "induction needs to be a process, not an event".

Building Supports That Help Learning in Further and Higher Education

Dr. Ciaran O' Mathuna presented work from his phD research. He spoke about Narrative research he conducted into how to support mature learners. Dr. O Mathuna described with great enthusiasm the joys and sadness of listening to people give their own stories of their life experiences and their feelings about going back to education. We also heard of some very practical difficulties that these students faced e.g. no catering facilities for night students and how this may have made them feel undervalued by their institution. Things that these students felt were helpful to them included physical access to academic staff and the choices they were given in relation to modules and assessments.

TEAM, Rubrics and Journal Club

For the 12.40 session I went to stream B. There was a great buzz in the room. All the talks were really interesting and the ensuing discussions were somehow really lively and open. Cathy Hannigan made us all do some work and made me reactivate the secondary school science teacher in me which has been lying dormant for quite a while. Cathy demonstrated very nicely the use of a rubric in correcting science lab write ups by asking us all to grade one with and without a rubric to guide us. The third speaker (I'm really sorry but I'm not sure whether it was Anne or Christine who presented) gave a great introduction to the idea of a journal club. The discussions after the talk revolved around the idea that it's so important to make expectations and standards explicit to students. There was also great debate around the use of marks to incentivise student participation and whether or not that was necessary or advisable. The other concept that emerged was that of transferability and that all the speakers in this stream were discussing student skills that should be transferable to other modules and later life.

Designing Content Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) Modules: an Evidence Based Approach

Jennifer Bruen spoke about the design of a CLIL module where the focus is equally on the content and the language of instruction. She laid out the following 6 principles of best practice of CLIL.

1. Language Support
2. Opportunities for production ( the need to give opportunities to produce written and spoken content in the target language).
3. Opportunities for collaborative group work and peer support.
4. relaxed and participatory classroom atmosphere.
5. Use the language of instruction ( only use English in certain set types of situation e.g. explaining a grammar point).
6. Draw upon linguistic repertoires present (I loved this idea of using the language knowledge of the diverse students in the class).

Jennifer made the excellent point that given the language diversity within most classrooms at the moment perhaps we should all be thinking about these six principles. This certainly rang very true for me, teaching as I do within Griffith College, because we have a very large international student community.

The more you know, the more you want to know

I learned a lot during the course of Tuesday's conference. However, of course, I am also left with more questions that I need to reflect upon and learn more about. Some of these include

• How can I help students I encounter transition through their course, how can I contribute some longitudinal induction?
• I need to think more about listening to and evidencing student stories and using that to inform my practice.
• I need to read up on Mezirow's Transformative Learning Theory and also andragogy.
• I need to follow up with Michael Keane about his talk. I got a fit of coughing near the end of his talk and missed the conclusions. The topic was very relevant to me as a maths teacher and I'd like to know what suggestions were made for how to support the students missing mathematical knowledge.
• Lightboard, oh yeah, bring it on! Looks perfect for making maths micro learning videos.