David Tree

@beefanddairy.bsky.social

This is excellent.

The Churchill Arms. Kensington. Good Thai food.

Nice! It’s also like Improv: lots of “yes, and”-ing!

I'd just see that as a challenge!

A6 Depends which challenges you're talking about. Enormous class sizes are a problem but the challenge of falling recruitment and reduced student attendance is an opportunity to focus on those that're in the class. What a downer at the end of an excellent chat: sorry! #LTHEchat

This is all the more true as I age! I work out purely so I can clamber into the middle row of a 300 seat tiered lecture theatre....

Ha, I often tell experienced academics they should try to learn a new musical instrument every so often so they can make dreadful noises and suck and so realise that the subject which feels easy and intuitive to them will be, like their awful trumpet attempts, entirely foreign and new to others!

A3 probably group as everyone does the solo learning when they're thinking and preparing what to say in the conversation or after when they're thinking about what they've learned. I guess it may not be more efficient but I think learning requires a lot of meandering towards understanding. #LTHEChat

Oh yes, during the session or the next. I'm an awful person, I always timetable a 2 hour session where we do all sorts of problem solving and conversation) where most everyone else does 1 hour lectures) so I build in plenty of time to see where the experience takes us. It's all very jazz. #LTHEChat

A5 My favourite way to use TBL is to make the application exercise reading a research paper or going through the results of a paper and interpreting them as we go (after the i/tRAT gets them the knowledge required to do so). That's engaging them with the real world of the subject I teach #LTHEchat

A2 Oh, I've learned never to call it formative assessment. Students hate it. They're just learning activities. Any kind of number or score they get out of it needs to be discarded instantly #LTHEChat

A4 I've never tried different tasks. That's not much of an answer. Sorry! #LTHEChat But with the same task it's always instructive to see how different groups tackle it and I always learn something new about how students learn or approach a problem by comparing different attempts at the same thing.

A3 It's both. Everyone learns alone in their own head but then builds on it in conversation. Learning is almost always a dialogue of some kind so it's good to force students into it. Otherwise who knows what's going on in their heads! (Probably planning their next meal as I am!). #LTHECHat

A2. Retrieval practice, spaced repetition, scaffolded learning....BINGO! #LTHEChat

A2 it also focusses everyone on the topic in hand. And everyone knows all the hard words and acronyms... #LTHEChat

I have an internal rule (that I only occasionally break) that I'll only talk for 10-15 minutes before we do something together. Even in a lecture of 100-200 students you can get around a lot of them in a reasonably short time, as long as you don't mind mild climbing injuries.

A2 most of my teaching uses active learning so students get formative feedback several times in every teaching session. Those smaller activities build to the larger aim of the module. It's like they're doing sudoku or wordle several times a week, only about really abstruse genetics. #LTHEchat

Ooooohhhhh, "unconditional positive regard": I like that!

A1 subject knowledge, empathy, patience, some knowledge of how people learn, even more patience! #LTHEChat

a man in a car with the words this is where the fun begins above him ALT: a man in a car with the words this is where the fun begins above him

The cool #MayTheFourth thread 😎

Nice, interesting or fun Star Wars stuff posted by probably nice people.

Order 1/66

Thanks @santanuvasant.bsky.social! I feel like my stuff is like the Velvet Underground: not many people know about it but those who do are incredibly cool and influential!

Here I take a slightly provocative approach to suggest that if an assessment in a degree programme doesn't help a student to improve in their future learning then it's a pointless dead end. Feel free to argue back!

We should work out a rule-of-thumb for this. So many people are convinced it can’t work but I think both it can and we must.

A6 @sjlancaster.bsky.social you said it much more succinctly than I did! #LTHEchat

A6: they still need to be able to read and understand comples stuff, synthesise info and ideas, develop an argument/hypothesis, find ways to test ideas, analyse results and communicate them. This all goes on in their brains. How they communicate it will change but the brain-work is the same #LTHE

A5: have them read a smaller number of papers and be critical of them, using AI sparingly to understand the details, and then assess by a mix of written and in-person verification of understanding. Familiarise them with the literature, not a LLM, Wikipedia or a textbook. #LTHEchat.

A2 You can scale it up to the 100s with enough colleagues and TAs/demonstrators, you just need to remember that you're replacing marking a load of identical, dull-as-can-be 2000 word reports, writing feedback and admin with a 15 minute interaction, an conversation and an online rubric #LTHEchat

A2: I realise there's no use of AI here, tho they could have used it learn about 'scopes but ultimately they need to know how to do a thing. We apply this to lots of skills, we also do it for hypothesis and experimental design. 4-5 conversations a year with students gets them used to it! #LTHEchat

A2: many of our assessments now have an interaction like an OSCE so students show their knowledge in person rather than submitting a written report. On Friday I'll spend 4 hours with students showing me how to use a microscope properly which is a lot more fun than marking lab reports! #LTHEchat