CHANGE: Academic student engagement

Take a look at what students learn on Placements

Why?

Going from Placement back into University, WIE students notice an important difference in engagement between themselves and of others. The productivity and learning that has been achieved during and after a placement can be associated with the level of engagement generated by the work environment and practices. We want to take inspiration from placement experiences to benefit student engagement as early as possible.

What?

Develop a framework to support academic engagement skills and behaviours for students to grow from 1^st to final year in an environment with clearly identified expectations. Academic engagement takes many forms and learning is enhanced when more approaches are leveraged. We identify the following elements as part of academic engagement:

Challenge, Question, Discuss, Explore

Enacting these attributes will be motivated internally and externally.

How?

• Communicating expectations from day 1
• Personal Development Portfolio work with Tutor:
  • Evaluating student’s positioning in regards of the attributes
  • Setting a path to improvement
  • Monitoring improvement
  • Rewarding achievement
• Ensuring teaching methods facilitate engagement
  • Expectations interpreted in terms of Students and teachers separately

Results?

• Cycle of engagement
  • Students learn more
  • Students become comfortable with two-way communication
  • Feedback mechanism improved
  • Feedback improves teaching mechanisms

Resources?

We have produced a set of ‘University Expectations’, which are a set of behaviours that we think both students and staff alike should use to guide their behaviour at University. This is centred around our main ‘change’ – to improve engagement at Exeter.

To supplement this, we have created a University Development Portfolio. The idea is that students will sit down with their Personal Tutor at the start of the first academic term and create a set of objectives that they want to achieve during the year. This will be guided by the University Behaviours on engagement etc. and will also be approved by the Personal Tutor. As well as this, we expect that the Development Portfolio will be completely tailorable to each individual student dependent on their academic record, personality type and perhaps even future aspirations.

The graphic below shows how the behaviour fit inside the University Values and the Business School’s Mission.

 

For further information, please contact
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