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Nick Bowskill and his PhD work:
Bowskill's Induction Through Reflection And Mentoring Process:
Student-generated PDP

By Steve Draper,   Department of Psychology,   University of Glasgow.

This page is a placeholder / link list for Nick's work.

The heart of his PhD work is an intervention consisting of sessions (at the start of a year) in which student concerns about a course or programme as a whole are elicited, shared, discussed; and possible solutions too are discussed, suggested by student mentors who have completed the course.

It is thus a student-generated approach to PDP (Personal Development Planning), which in turn is an important aspect of induction and transition. More technically, it uses (or stimulates) reflection and mentoring to do this.

My personal short rough overview

What's good about Student Generated PDP

Educational processes / themes it could be used for

  • Transition This relates to the issue of school-university transition.

  • PDP It could also be seen as addressing the aspects of PDP to do with self-management and the skills of being a student; but doing so not by experts lecturing, but rather by eliciting student concerns, and student experience.

  • Induction The start of a new institution or year or course is a particulary useful time for a student to be reviewing and perhaps modifying their motives and study habits: so this aspect of PDP should be directly addressed in induction.

  • Reflection This process might be used for those subjects where reflection is a required part of the course content e.g. teacher training.

  • Course feedback (from learners to teachers) The concerns elicited are obviously also important information for the course leaders. Their particular extra value is that here, concerns will be mentioned that are not about direct course concerns (quality of lectures or course documentation), but about money, anxiety about fellow students, etc. that affect dropout and learning attainment but are not usually asked about in standard questionnaires.

    Rough recipe

    1. Level 2 session: elicit their retrospective and prospective concerns (about the year they just completed, and the new year starting); and their ideas about solutions.
        Keep a few volunteers on to orient them for meeting level 1 students.
    2. Level 1 session: elicit their prospective concerns, and possibly thoughts on finding solutions.
    3. Joint meeting: go over the concerns, and the level 2 mentors comment on the solutions they favour for each.

    Links

    Also note:
  • Nick's old page 1   Nick's old page 2   Nick's new page 3 (underlying site)

      Print all Nick's pages in one go

  • School-university transition
  • PDP (Personal Development Planning)   1   2   diagram
  • General pages about PAL (peer assisted learning)
  • Pages about PAL at GU
  • EVS (electronic voting systems in lectures)

    Possible names / buzz words in Sept 09

    Our preferred name for this intervention, this learning design, is However Nick likes to call it "shared thinking" even though that in my view, that term doesn't describe what is being referred to.

    It is unrelated to:

  • Thinking Together

    Possible names / buzz words in Nov 09

    PDP and induction are applications of it. But how to describe "it"?

  • Group construction of common ground on group-relevant and significant matters.

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