Alternative submission format
Dr Heather McKiggan-Fee, Head of Educational Development, provides the below student-facing guidance about the alternative assessment format.
Reflective Essay or Presentation Guidance
The second summative assignment involves a reflection on your teaching practice. You have a choice of submission format:
- Write an essay of at least 1500 words and no more than 2000 words.
OR
- Record a narrated PowerPoint presentation of at least 10 minutes and no more than 15 minutes.
Drawing on your reflective log and what you have learned in ID5107, your submission must reflect on both:
- How your approach to teaching and/or marking has changed.
- For example, you might have revisited the ILOs on the module on which you were teaching and changed your teaching methods to make the ILOs more obvious to your students.
- You may have re-designed the assessment for your module or changed how you provided feedback.
- How your approach to module/lesson design has changed.
- For example, issues covered in ID5107 might have directly influenced the choices you made when designing your own module.
- You might have noticed particular challenges your students were having (with understanding, assessment, etc) and designed your own module to respond to these challenges.
In the introduction of your essay/presentation briefly explain your teaching context, e.g. the School you are in, name of the module, number of lectures/tutorials/lab groups, class size, etc. This background information is helpful for the second marker and external examiner. Your submission must make sense to someone who is not familiar with the other work you have done on this module.
You may use any referencing system (indicate your choice on the Assignment Front Sheet). The Front Sheet, bibliography/reference list, and footnotes/endnotes, do not count towards the essay word limit. If you do a narrated PowerPoint presentation, the reference list must be included on the final slides and citations at the relevant points within the talk.
Your essay/presentation must:
- Include a fully completed Assignment Front Sheet (as slides if presentation).
- Give a brief introduction to the context within which your teaching takes place.
- Demonstrate critical reflection on your teaching based on one or more specific examples of your teaching practice, including applying theory covered on the module to your own teaching.
- Work through the whole of Gibbs’ reflective cycle or other reflective models, with a focus on analysis and action planning.
- Give evidence that you have engaged with the literature and applied concepts to your own teaching practice. At least three references must be cited.
I encourage you to seek feedback on your draft, e.g. from your peer pair or other colleagues. Writing the essay is itself an opportunity for reflection and development, so it’s useful to get someone else’s perspective on how you’ve tackled issues, and how clearly you write about those issues!
Reflective Essay/Presentation (Marking Criteria)
An essay/presentation that significantly exceeds the word/time limit and/or that has extensive grammatical errors throughout cannot be marked as excellent.
The markers will be looking for evidence that: you are able to evaluate your teaching and integrate theory with practice; your teaching practice has developed because of your reading and reflection over the course of the semester; you have taken an integrated look at your learning “journey”.
An essay/presentation that simply describes your teaching (what you did), with no attempt to explain why things happened in that way and how your teaching might be improved, and that doesn’t explicitly link your teaching practice to the literature, would be noted as “Not achieved” on the relevant sections of the pro-forma and would receive a Fail grade.
An essay/presentation that makes some attempt at explaining the rationale for your approach to teaching, and/or to explain why you got particular outcomes, using only passing references to the literature is likely to be noted as “Satisfactory” and would be a bare Pass. Taking a reactionary approach to issues, eg explaining after the fact why they might have happened, but with little evidence of addressing the issues at the time, is likely to be noted as “Satisfactory” at best.
“Good” or “Excellent” evidence of reflection will require a clear explanation of the rationale behind your teaching choices, why you think you got the outcomes you did, and how you would try to improve the outcomes next time (ie demonstrating the full Gibbs’ reflective cycle). With respect to engagement with the literature, you must explain how you have applied particular concepts in practice in your own teaching.
An Excellent essay/presentation will:
- Contain all of the required information, clearly and concisely presented (with good pacing for presentation).
- Provide clear evidence of regular reflection on one’s practice.
- Demonstrate deep reflection on the associate between the course content and your practice. This will involve not just describing what was done but explaining why that approach was taken, why particular outcomes occurred, and providing an action plan for how to improve.
- Explain how you have applied theory covered on the module in your own practice.
- Cite appropriate sources relevant to the module and your reflective approach.
- Evidence critical reading beyond the assigned course materials.