Back to main page: http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/qee/vg/pmwiki.php

Small Group Teaching in Humanities, Social Sciences, Education and Law

Self-directed learning task for Year 2: PGCAP (New Lecturer and Teacher Programme)

Activity 1

Identify and read an article or a book chapter related to small group teaching (perhaps tutorial or seminar teaching) that you found useful in your own context.

The resource can be from the generic learning and teaching literature or from your Higher Education subject centre or from a discipline specific learning and teaching journal e.g. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, International Journal of Education and Religion, Accounting Education, Journal of Legal Education, International Review of Economics Education)

Please write answers to the following questions…

• What was useful to you in the article/book chapter?
• How does it help to inform you about small group teaching in your discipline?
• Has it or will it influence how you design and teach in your small group contexts? (If yes. Why? If no, why?)

Activity 2

Small group teaching is often seen as one of the best ways of engaging students in the subject and establishing an environment in which they can really begin to understand how to think like a historian, a lawyer, a social scientist, or an educator.

Recently, there has been discussion in educational literature to suggest that each discipline has its own threshold concepts. These concepts require the students to change the way they understand a subject, shift the way they ‘read’ the subject. Such concepts are also necessary for the students to understand the subject in the way the discipline requires and once the students have ‘passed the threshold’ they rarely return to thinking about and reading the subject in the way they had before.

Please read the following article (link in the Year 2 moodle):

Meyer, J. & Land, R.(2005)Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge (2): Epistemological considerations and a conceptual framework for teaching and learning. Higher Education, 49: 373-388.

And then answer the following questions:

1. What do you think are the threshold concepts in your disciplines?

2. How does the small group teaching you do encourage the students to:

• engage with ways of thinking / reading in the discipline;
• develop their understanding enough to pass through the threshold concepts you have identified?

3. How would you go about checking that your small group teaching environments are fostering such understandings? (ie how would you evaluate the effectiveness of your small group teaching?)

For example, when we talk about learning in small groups we quite often frame it as or often emphasize learning in and through conversation’. But what does this mean to us and to our students? Try to answer question 2 by articulating the sorts of conversations with you and between the students that are most likely to foster ‘shifts in understanding’ and describe how you design your small group teaching to encourage this.

Please write your answers up formally and submit to Vicky Gunn within 4 weeks of the taught session occurring.

A few notes on Typical Problems

Recent discipline-specific articles Below are links of a 'slow work in progress' to identify useful articles relevant to discipline-specific approaches to small group teaching. If you find ones you think are worth adding, please email me with the reference and I'll copy them in.

Humanities, Social Sciences, Education, Law, Accountancy & Business

Sciences, Statistics and Mathematics

Engineering

Clinical Sciences

Some reflections from psycho-dynamic group theory