Project lead: Annie Noble

Project summary: On the Teaching and Learning for Health Professionals Programme, we have predominantly written assignments for our summative assessments and our students are required to demonstrate reflective learning and critical engagement with literature. We are mindful that our students are required to join an unfamiliar discourse in education and at master’s level and we often find the student’s reflective ’voice’ in the written assignments is weak. Currently, students are taught how to reflect in their face to face study day, but this has proved an ineffective strategy when reflective writing needs to be translated in to their academic writing.

The Patchwork Text is a deliberate attempt to introduce a more accessible and practical way of writing reflectively. The concept of patchwork text are small pieces of reflective writing students complete, from the beginning of the programme, interspersed throughout different units and culminates with a final reflective piece of writing focussing on their development and learning as an educator. In total there are 8 patchwork texts that students will complete.

There is opportunity for students to share their patchwork writing with their peers, gain feedback and learn from each other. Students are required to complete a reflective e-portfolio to collate their writings, peer feedback as well as tutor feedback from their assignments. We hope this ultimately engages students fully in writing reflectively and promote insight in their learning journey as a developing teacher.

This mixed methods research project will analyse the a range of students discourse that develops across the patchwork texts and map that to the final summative assignments to see if the element of reflection improves as students’ progress through the programme. Ultimately deciding if the use of patchwork text is an effective strategy for building students academic literacy in writing reflectively.

Project resources: Crafting out student's reflective voice: how to improve the art of writing reflectively -blog

Project lead: Sarah Baille and Rachel Christopher (Bristol Veterinary School)

Project team: Alison Catterall, Louisa Mitchard, Lucy Squires, Sam Brown, (all Bristol Veterinary School)

Project summary: The veterinary clinical skills lab (CSL) at Langford provides the venue for many taught practical classes and also has an open access policy to ensure students have opportunities to practise when required. The CSL has been commended as an exceptional learning environment by accreditors and is considered one of the best veterinary examples in the world. The CSL team continually work to improve the learning experience by gathering feedback from students and recent graduates and developing and evaluating new models.

The practicals in the CSL are hands-on and the skills are learned primarily through ‘doing’. However, at the start of practicals instructors are currently needing to dedicate time to cover basic preparation and introduce or reactivate core knowledge. Clearly, this time could be better spent demonstrating the skills, observing and assisting students and providing feedback. The flipped classroom offers a potential solution as some of the content previously delivered in the practical would become ‘homework' to enable students to prepare in advance i.e. before the face-to-face practical classes. The instructors would then be able to dedicate more time to teaching the skills. Flipped classroom is increasingly embedded in higher education and used for practicals in other contexts within the university (e.g. eBiolabs) but has limited formal uptake for veterinary clinical skills.

The CSL team will find ways to incorporate a flipped approach, initially running a pilot through the BILT project and then using the exemplars developed and lessons learned to embed the approach more widely in the curriculum. The project team will work in partnership with students according to the ‘co-design, co-creation and co-delivery’ theme.

Project lead: Emma Love (Bristol Veterinary School)

Project team: Chloe Anderson, Lindsey Gould, Mike Millar, Julie Dickson (all Bristol Veterinary School)

Project summary: The Accelerated Graduate Entry BVSc programme (AGEP) is a, four-year veterinary degree, exclusively for graduates, which complements and feeds into the existing five-year BVSc degree. The first cohort (40 students) started in September 2019.

The programme has a newly designed curriculum for the first two years which embraces pedagogic practices to support student-led collaborative active learning. The learning outcomes for this period will primarily be met using case-based learning (CBL) in small tutor-facilitated groups. These will be aligned with interactive seminars, practical classes and assessments, which will include peer-learning, self- and peer-assessment methods.

Members of the team behind the AGEP have worked with current students in a consultative capacity through the BILT-funded project ‘Supporting Graduate Learners: Optimising the environment for case-based learning in veterinary education’. The engagement of the students in this project was superb and they were keen for their voice to influence curriculum development as well as the design of the physical and virtual learning environment. The project will enable a move from consultation to partnership whereby students become co-researchers in the evaluation of the new AGEP curriculum. This experience would give them ownership of the learning experience and agency over the curriculum.

This project would draw on the principles of student engagement, engaged learning and co-production. Building upon existing learning, the aim is to ensure that a robust and effective strategy is used for evaluation and development of the AGEP curriculum and that mechanisms are established to involve students as equitable partners in this process. This represents a new approach to curriculum development for the School and a model which could translate across other areas.

Project lead: Frankie MacMillan and Steve Fitzjohn (School of Physiology, Pharmacology and Neuroscience)

Project summary: We are very aware of the perception of our students that they don’t feel part of the academic community. They also fail to engage with personal development including making use of personal development plans. We are mindful that some students, particularly those from low participation groups, find it hard to make friendship groups and report that they feel they don’t fit in. We are also aware that some students fail to see the importance of engaging fully in a ‘professional manner’ from the start of their degrees and that that may impact on their ability to gain work experience, placements or internships.

We aim to build on the Programme Enhancement Activities (PEA), to increase the engagement of students from the start of first year through to final year in activities that are related to but not directly part of their programme of study.  The aim is to smooth transition to University, include students in the learning community and engage them with activities related to but not directly core to their programme of study.

These activities link directly with the University education strategy by encouraging uptake of personal development plans (PDP), promoting wellbeing in students by increasing opportunities to form friendships with peers and by promoting students to engage with personal tutoring and meet regularly with their tutor.