CELT | Good Practice Exchange
Transcript for Clear Expectations and Course Organisation with Shelley McNulty
‘I'm Shelley McNulty. I'm a Senior Lecturer here in the Art School and I am the Programme Leader for the BA(Hons) Interior Design.
OK, so the Yearly Planner sits alongside the timetable. It is not as nuanced as the timetable in terms of it doesn't have room numbers and unit codes. It is something that sets out the year for third year. We felt that, as third year students, yes they are independent and we want them to be independent but sometimes time just rolls away with them and all of a sudden they are at a crucial point and they are stressing that they haven't done what they need to do or they don't think they have. So we felt that with the Planner we could really start to talk them in September [about] where they need to be in June. So it is always going through the year with your head up rather than getting your head down and getting lost. And it was also trying to make the year look less unitised. It really felt here in the Art School that we were working to units and ‘start and stops’. And so it was about blending all the units together and they could see how their work becomes one big practice.
The 'L6 Diet' sits alongside the planner and basically it is where we take each of the learning outcomes for each of the units and we actually tell students what that might be. And it one of those things that you think 'gosh that’s not difficult to do' and sometimes the learning outcomes are in quite 'academic speak' so we just thought 'why are be bamboozling them? Just tell them! If we are expecting them to do something, just tell them'. So it might be something in third year… they will select their own building and design an interior for that building. So one of the things that we might do is 'OK, let’s go and do some building analysis, let’s look at the building you're working with. How can you analysis that building?' And we'll talk about it amongst us with the group, various strategies that the students might use, and we relate that back to the Diet because the Diet will say 'a response to an individual brief' and you might have included in there 'site analysis, building analysis and feasibility'. And basically we just relate each of the learning outcomes to the whole year. So yeah, the two are to be read in tandem together.
We use it every week in Housing Keeping sessions. So we have a weeklyHouseKeeping and that never changes and we bring it up every week and we say 'here were are on Monday the such and such... what have we got coming ahead? Where do we need to be? What are trying to achieve?' And because there can be deadlines coming at once, it is just getting students be aware of that and try to plan their time better.
The key to the two working together is the terminology. It is not to change the works that we use because what we realised is different staff have different idiosyncrasies. They have different ways of talking about their practice and the practice. So we decided that we would all use the same words and this was a really good way of doing that. So having the Planner and the Diet we made sure the terminology was the same and so therefore the students weren't being confused when we were asking them to do something.
The key benefits for students is knowing what is expected of them. It is very clear and incredibly transparent. I think it is very fair as well that every student knows what is expect of them at what time. We have the House keeping sessions where they are really free to ask questions about anything in the planner anything that is coming ahead and it helps them be organised and actually commit to third year in the best possible way.’