Meeting for Departmental Language Support Coordinators and Teachers, 18 March 2011

Attendance

7 Departmental Language Coordinators (DLCs)

6 Departmental Language Tutors (DLTs)

Discussion: Innovations that worked or didn’t work

A number of classroom issues emerged which teachers will be following up in our teacher development programme. In addition, there were many helpful ways of organisation and communication with departments, such as:

  • Attending induction sessions in departments with students in intro week – DLT learns about departmental expectations and students know who the DLT is
  • Getting access to MOLE for various modules or receiving assignment briefs
  • Ensuring that students receive information about classes, room changes etc – many thanks to coordinators and secretaries!
  • Finding ways to target language support classes – by level/module/need – without this, it is hard to make the classes appeal to everyone

Issues to work on together included:

  • Attendance, both maintaining it and monitoring it
  • Timetabling – how often? when? Friday afternoon isn’t good and neither is Wednesday afternoon
  • Making sure teachers hand over information when there are changes in staffing

Student feedback after semester 1

Alice Lawrence highlighted comments in generally positive feedback from students: highly recommended, brilliant, helpful, excellent but there were some negative points:

  • Fewer than half of the students know who their DLC is.
  • Main reasons for not attending regularly included: too busy, too tired, inconvenient time, timetable clash, but not that the support was inappropriate. One interesting comment was that a student didn’t attend regularly feeling that classmates were too passive, leaving others to do all the work in class.
  • One student reported conflicting information: that the support was compulsory for everyone and that it was just for international students.

In conclusion, Alice recommended:

  • Closer collaboration between ELTC and departments to ensure that support is tailored to student needs
  • ELTC teachers should develop more appropriate teaching materials; this would require closer collaboration with DLCs
  • Departments should ensure that students know who the DL~C is and where they can seek support
  • Appropriate timetabling of language support sessions

What can we do to make your job easier?

In this part of the meeting teachers and coordinators came up with suggestions about how the ELTC could make their job easier. These included:

For DLCs:

Chase up non-attending students

Upload attendance directly to SAM system or central university records (CIS??)*

Offer a certificate for attendance – something tangible to take away from classes*

Need to pool teaching materials

More feedback on what has gone on in weekly DLS

Familiarity with how processes work – communication

For ELTC provided departmental WAS sessions an online booking system for students to sign up would be good [this already happens in the School of Architecture using uSpace]

Web pages giving guidelines on “good practice” for DLCs

For DLTs:

Identifying weaker students ->Use their existing modules ->Find out more about existing modules

Folder for materials to share among teachers, eg Engineering Department

Regularindividual meeting to check progress/problems tutor experienced

Provide certificate of attendance to students (similar to ELS)*

Allocate more time for teachers to prepare materials

Encourage departments to weed out students

Let DLCs know kind of info teachers need, eg about compulsory modules

Prepare overall/general mid-term/semester feedback from students especially for long-term classes

Innovations in DLS

Alice gave information about new developments in response to DLCs’ suggestions:

  • We report student feedback so that we can make improvements together
  • We have brought this meeting forward in response to comments in 2010
  • We are trying to measure the impact of DLS, which is difficult given the new language and skills students are acquiring whether or not they attend language classes. Do DLCs have any evidence? Can you supply any data?
  • Following discussion last year about equitable distribution of support, there will be discussion this year with Faculty Directors of Learning and Teaching (FDLTs). This will make HoDs more aware of DLS and the role/responsibilities of DLCs.
  • New online systems for bidding and registration of students – we will send explanatory materials but might also provide demo/training session if requested
  • Web pages for DLCs delayed by new CMS, but suggestions welcome for what you’d like to see there

DLCs were reminded about the Transition programme for ELTC students about to progress to departments – this involves visits to meet a member of staff and get some reading materials, to be scheduled after Easter break, before exams.

After the meeting we learnt about the new Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR) which might include attendance at language support classes and the possibility of a portfolio of work to be compiled during the course. This might include learning journals, written work and PowerPoint print-outs from presentations. Alice will be in touch about this.