Students teaching teachers? For many, such a proposal would seem counterintuitive; for others, it would be downright anxiety inducing. But the truth is that we all learn from one another all the time, and the idea of learning from our students is something we should embrace. Doing so would help overcome two barriers to development: the funding challenge in the further education sector that can make training hard to afford, and the sheer lack of time available for continuing professional development because of the burden of other commitments.
The benefits of staff-student partnership don’t flow only in the direction of staff, though. Students can also gain a great deal from them. We know this because of the recent Education and Training Foundation (ETF) Outstanding Teaching Learning and Assessment (OTLA) pilot projects, which tested the potential of staff-student partnerships to enhance teachers’ ability to use technology to benefit teaching, learning and assessment.
These action-research projects - overseen for the ETF by the Strategic Development Network - were led by Basingstoke College of Technology, Bishop Auckland College, City Lit and Heart of Worcestershire College. They included 14 further education colleges, four adult community learning organisations and two independent learning providers, engaging more than 200 staff and students.
The pilots responded to the identification as a priority in the ETF’s 2018 Training Needs Analysis report on using digital and new technologies more effectively in teaching and learning, and were based on a proposition that students’ technological know-how could be shared with teachers to improve teaching and learning in their classrooms.
The projects asked three questions:
To answer those questions, a five-phase process was followed.
1. Decide on the model
Each of the lead organisations designed the model of staff-student partnership they would pilot. Each was challenged to ask itself questions about aspects such as the existing infrastructure available to support partnerships, what flexibility may be needed, optimum timescales and what accreditation could be achieved by staff and students. Every college is different and so an imposed model simply would not work.
Across the range of providers, different partnership models were also tested; one student to one member of staff, a pair of students to a member of staff, and a full class of students to staff. Benefits were identified for each of the models, although multiple students working together appeared to lead to greater motivation and problem solving.
2. Find participants
Next, staff members, and then students, were recruited to participate. Providers used a variety of tactics to secure the participation of appropriate staff, including meeting staff members who had participated in previous digital initiatives, sending e-flyers and raising the opportunity at general meetings. To recruit students, a clear role profile and person specification were key, with individuals’ current levels of digital literacy, interpersonal skills and commitment to the partnership model all seen as particularly important attributes.
3. Identify incentives
Incentives were an important aspect of recruitment and many were considered across the pilots, ranging from the potential for accreditation or recognition to the opportunity to encourage students to support one another’s study for staff, and from CV building to vouchers for students.
4. Induction
When the recruitment had happened, an induction process took place to ensure that all concerned were clear about the activity expected, the anticipated outputs and the ongoing support available to participants. In practice, this meant detailed briefings, skills assessments and introductions to the ETF’s Professional Standards and its Enhance Digital Teaching Platform.
5. Putting it into action
Next came the action phase, with suitable tools for use in classrooms identified using criteria such as their trustworthiness, ease of set-up and use, sustainability and access. Students were asked to research options that they felt responded to a need identified by staff, pooling their ideas and discussing them. They subsequently presented their proposed solutions to staff and worked with them to plan how the technology would be applied in the classroom. Students were then on hand when staff introduced the technology, ready to assist and support where necessary.
With the project taking place across a range of settings and with teachers of various subjects, several tools were trialled. In one project, a private Facebook page was created to replace Moodle, which was more regularly used by the institution. It was used to share resources, discuss work and ask questions, with the advantage of the widespread pre-adoption of the Facebook platform by students and its notification feature working well to engage them.
Another used Quizziz, which provides timed tests and results boards showing how participants are performing against peers, and was found to make students more alert to their coursework and more engagement with learning.
Elsewhere, Instagram was used for sharing notes from lessons, ClickView was used to share video content securely to overcome barriers with security settings and ensure all students could access resources at home and at college, and the Snapchat app was employed to share information among students on a course on which learners are often in different settings and need to stay in touch. The list goes on and on.
For those of us who recognise the high levels of technical sophistication that many students have, it will come as no surprise that they proved to be effective agents of innovation. During the pilots, many teachers enjoyed introductions to tools and methods that have proved effective in enhancing the experience of their learners. Most students, in my experience, are fearless in their experimentation with new tools, and the invitation and incentivisation to share their knowledge provided a rich harvest.
Less obviously foreseeable, perhaps, were the very positive effects that were seen around student engagement and motivation - not just with the students who’d partnered with teachers but also with the wider learner body. Those directly involved gained confidence, having seen the ideas they generated being implemented and having an acknowledged role as a partner in developing the learning of their groups, while their classmates enjoyed the innovations introduced by their peers. There was also a notable response to the culture change prompted by the projects, with a morphing from teacher-student relationships to communities of learning taking place.
Many institutions claim that students are at the heart of everything they do; these projects made that idea an irrefutable reality.
The point of these pilots was to gather evidence about what works and what may be replicable in other institutions, and the full findings have been published in a practical toolkit that we have made available on the ETF’s Excellence Gateway website. It can be accessed and downloaded free of charge. I encourage you to investigate this resource and make use of it.
Those who do will see that it identifies some key lessons. First, the projects tended to work better in cases where the students and staff had an existing relationship - something reflected in the model working better with level 3 students than their level 2 counterparts.
It also worked better in colleges, a fact that can be attributed to the high level of contact between tutors and students in such settings. It would be interesting to see whether the role of face-to-face contact in relationship building could be replaced by Skype sessions, a mechanism better suited to some non-college providers.
Crucially, for the model to work, the support of senior management from the outset was a prerequisite. The backing of senior colleagues provides an assurance to all involved and was made a condition of participation in these projects.
Finally, clarity from the outset was vital. There needed to be clear objectives so that all concerned knew what they were aiming for.
Ultimately, the success or otherwise of these pilots is about much more than the outcomes at the participating provider organisations. It’s about the findings and tools that we have created from their being taken up and utilised elsewhere, and it’s about a longer-term legacy. The short timescale in which the pilots were conducted - a single academic term - meant it was impossible to judge their sustainability.
If you intend to replicate this project in your own institution, I advocate thinking about that legacy not just in terms of developing teachers’ digital skills because, as these pilots have demonstrated, it’s about much, much more. Try it and see. Before you know it, we’ll have student digital champions in institutions up and down the country - and you don’t need any technical ability at all to imagine the difference that could make.
Vikki Liogier is head of learning technologies at the Education and Training Foundation
This article originally appeared in the 20/27 December 2019 issue under the headline “Let your students take the lead on technology”
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