Glyn Williams
The course that I have largely been teaching is a planning and international development Master’s.
The international development MA started off with 12 students and so the core modules for this course became shared with other programmes, which have massive numbers. Modules that were originally designed for teaching something like 15 or 20 students are now taught to 80 or so and it has made me think about group work and how we use groups in different ways.
Some of my default teaching on the PGT needs more structure. Before, I might have given people three challenging readings, and a set of formative questions to go away and think about for a seminar, a seminar where I introduce some of the underlying ideas, or one set of possible challenges that the readings we’re going to address, and then collectively, we talk it through. The numbers mean it would need more structure anyway, but now there’s also the fact that many of the students have not necessarily made a conscious decision to engage with the content, and so I’ve got to try and engage them with the content a little bit more.
The original cohort was international development and urban space and planning, who were really committed to that as a future career. But now they’re mainly urban designers or real estate students that are coming from different disciplines, taking this as an optional unit. This is something a bit different, because they’ve made a choice here, but it’s not core to their identities, and so I feel that I’ve got to really make an effort to say: well, this is why learning about Johannesburg is really important, even if what you’re going to do is go and practice real estate questions or urban design questions in China. I feel that I’ve got to make those links and sell the content a little bit more than I used to, I’ve got to engage them and put some effort in, and put some energy into the room in order for that to come across.
It tends to be more structured, and I’m trying to worry less about content and think more about process. So rather than think about if they really understood, or spotted something specific in an article, I’m trying to make some of the material more accessible. I’m just about to redeliver this module for the first time online. So this is stuff that I’ve got to think very clearly about and delivery in the COVID era now.
Normally I give much shorter presentations within workshops and we had a two hour workshop space which was really nice. So basically: huge classrooms, students working in groups, and trying to get a bit of content with questions, then activity, bringing them back. So the two hours would have probably had half a dozen bits of to-ing and fro-ing.
Last year we had a couple of postgraduate PhD demonstrators in the room as well, just to try and facilitate and to go around the rooms, trying to get people to work in small groups and hand responsibility to them in terms of doing individual reading and then pooling that knowledge, but whilst still giving them plenty of scaffolding for that. So if any one of those individual activities fell down, bringing points back together in plenary would mean that if they were making the effort, they were interested in the questions.
Those two hour workshops are structured so that they would be able to look again at the PowerPoint slides because there will be bits that they were getting through plenary that might need to go back to and fill in the gaps, or they could see where they needed to follow up with things in that group of 12. That’s challenging, it’s quite tiring teaching but when it works it’s really rewarding.
In the departmental introduction session, we establish that it is okay to ask questions, and where the students are more empowered, more brave, and actually do raise a question I just always throw that back as I go around the groups. I hope that if there’s a couple of questions raised about x, y, and z there must be half a dozen other people in the room that also need to know it or are worried about it.
It’s hard in the big group to engender that atmosphere of learning from each other, both within small group activities and then moving that back to plenary and sharing it and saying, this is not a competitive classroom, if everybody ends up with a distinction I’m really happy with that, it probably won’t happen but you’re not competing with each other. This is an opportunity to learn and they don’t always buy it or they don’t always buy into it but you do your best and hope that you begin to carry the students in that direction.
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