Journal of Academic Development and Education JADE Issue 11 Summer 2019 | Page 7

They felt that Byron did not seem to be interested
in telling a clear, easily comprehensible story.
Instead, they complained, his narrative tended to
jump around, moving from one scene and set of
characters to another without explaining what the
connection (thematic or temporal) between these
scenes might be. Once the students had shared
their responses with me and the rest of the class,
I encouraged them to move on from this stage to
the next stage of Kolb’s Cycle – that of reflective
observation. My aim was to help them to turn their
initial, largely instinctual and emotional responses to
the text into more considered, intellectual ones. We
discussed their reactions, and I encouraged them
to try to think of the text not as flawed (i.e. not
doing what a text ‘should’ do) but rather as simply
contrary to their expectations. We discussed why
Byron might have wanted to tell his story in this
manner and, if telling a clear story was not his main
objective, what that objective might have been
instead. During this part of the class, we moved on
to the Kolb’s stage of abstract conceptualisation,
suggesting theories for what Byron’s motives
might have been, and what effect on the reader
he might have wanted his poem to have, given
the techniques that he employed. After this
discussion, we moved on to active experimentation,
as students moved into pairs for a close reading
exercise, and tried to apply the theories we had
come up with to a specific passage of the text itself.
As well as considering Kolb when structuring the
class, I also took into consideration the ideas put
forward in Biggs’ ‘Approaches to the Enhancement
of Tertiary Teaching’ (1989). 2 In that article, Biggs
argues that for the most successful ‘deep’ learning
to take place, the following four components must
be in place:
1) Motivational context.
It is important that students are motivated to
learn. To add to this, studies have suggested 3
that students learn best when they have a
sense of intrinsic motivation, rather than merely
extrinsic. In other words, they need to find their
studies inherently interesting and satisfying, and
understand the relevance of both learning goals and
learning processes, in order to achieve their fullest
potential.
2) Learner Activity.
Biggs suggests that students learn best when they
are active rather than passive. Surface learning
may be acquired by simply listening; deep learning
begins to occur when students begin to be actively
involved, analysing and testing out their own ideas
and theories.
3) Interaction with others.
Discussing their thoughts, both with peers and with
a tutor, requires students to clarify their ideas and
to justify and defend them to others. This, in turn,
helps them to improve their own thinking.
4) A well-structured knowledge base.
New learning should begin where previous learning
ended. New ideas need to be built upon the
foundations of established ideas in the student’s
mind, and so learning programmes should aim to
relate new knowledge to previous knowledge.
Motivation is a potentially contentious issue in
pedagogic theory. Critics have debated 4 over the
extent to which it is possible to create a sense of
intrinsic, as opposed to extrinsic, motivation in
someone else. Nevertheless, I hoped to boost the
students’ intrinsic motivation by encouraging them
at the start of the class to think of the set text as a
kind of puzzle that needed to be solved (or, at least,
investigated further). I asked them, ‘Why has Byron
written the poem in this way? What effect does he
create, and why?’ Through this, I hoped to increase
their sense of curiosity and desire to know and
understand the text more fully.
Highlight #1
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