My Learning Essentials

This brief webinar contains some tips on putting together a successful interactive session.It was aimed at LILAC conference participants but has elements that might be of use to a number of people putting together workshops.

This PPT looks at different ways to activate the background knowledge of your participants. It is school oriented but could easily be modified to fit a number of situations and contexts. It does automatically require you to save the PPT (no review function).

Fisher and Frey are two of the "greats" when it comes to getting learners engaged. In this updated 2nd edition of the ASCD best-seller, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey dig deeper into the hows and whys of the gradual release of responsibility instructional framework. To gradually release responsibility is to equip students with what they need to be engaged and self-directed learners.

In order to support and facilitate continuous learning and a growth mindset, it is essential that students be exposed to learning opportunities that explicitly allow them to apply and practice what they have learned. (Dweck, 2007)This paper focuses on one such approach, taken in the My Learning Essentials skills support programme developed at the University of Manchester. This programme rests on a constructivist and collectivist approach that requires student engagement in the creation of learning opportunities and thus encourages students to apply what they have learned to a wide variety of opportunities and assessments, pushing the response to feedback or to an identified skills gap from specific assignments to skill progression and personal development. In addition, the facilitators of such sessions are also freed from the role of "expert" and instead act as knowledge builders with the rest of the group. This change removes the possibility of one "correct" answer and the assumption of eventual perfection and instead encourages the entire group to focus on understanding the process and progressing both within the session and beyond. Although there are still a number of questions to be answered, initial feedback and investigations support the assertions that students engagement in the creation of such opportunities leads to a clearer understanding of the efficacy of the skills involved and the power of the prior knowledge of the community.

Here is the (most current) version of our operational plan. It details much of the process behind the workshops and our peer observation process.

Here are the questions we send round 1 week after the workshops (feedback questionnaire) and those we ask immediately after the session (quick impact: titled "formerly typeform")

An extensive list of a wide variety of free applications and tools for supporting teaching and learning

A list of various free tools for creating e-learning

A sample MLE workshop plan. Please note, these are always "works in progress", so if you come up with an improvement, please let us know!

Final report on the HEA (NTF) funded research project at the University of Manchester. The project looked at how students understand their own development and the use of feedback.

The My Learning Essentials webpage

This is the (ever-growing) list of books we have in our training room. They range from books of suggested activities to books that focus on pedagogy and/or the science behind education.

This is a short video on facilitation and some of the current research going on via the My Learning Essentials programme. Put together by a colleague at MMU who works closely with us on some workshops.

"The Taxonomy of Significant Learning"--a snapshot of some of what goes on during "learning"

MLE has been included in the Association of College & Research Libraries' Information Literacy Best Practices project. The project aims to articulate and promote elements of exemplary student support programmes. MLE was recognised as exemplary in the categories of collaboration and pedagogy.

My Learning Essentials was featured as PRIMO's site of the month in September 2014. This interview includes some background information about the creation and ongoing development of the MLE programme

Information about the all-day workshop we're running for the CILIP information literacy group. With enough interest from beyond the group, we may be able to run another event for a wider audience

Webinar about My Learning Essentials for the CRA