CRA workshops
At the last two CRA Annual Residential Seminars (2012 and 2013) I have run workshops where
participants chose a topic in a similar way to our students. The options were:
Learning in HE, similar/different compared to Secondary Ed
Motivation for learning
Assessment and its impact on learning
Creativity: its place in HE
Personal Development Planning
They simulated the production of a PTA which would normally happen over the course of 12 weeks
in just over an hour. They worked in pairs, unlike the students who work in small groups of four
people and also they wrote the patches together while the students would do so individually. All
work was done on paper. The first stage involved sharing what they knew about their chosen topic
(prior knowledge) and writing a first patch summarising this. They also proposed two key questions
that they would like to use in the next stage of there inquiry.
Two participants in the last workshop wrote about creativity in HE:
(It is) not restricted to the creative arts and humanities, but should be part of all programmes.
It is key to learning in HE.
It can be developed in HE.
And their questions were:
How can it be developed in HE?
How can we communicate its effectiveness as a learning tool
In the second stage, participants were invited to skim-read through a report on the experience of
students in English universities (Bekhradnia, 2012). The report contains many useful figures
regarding the amount of contact hours (scheduled teaching by subject), hours of teaching, hours
students missed, time devoted to private study, etc. This task simulated the individual study the
students in our unit would undertake in order to answer the questions chosen from a mainstream
perspective. After 10 minutes they wrote a second patch summarising what they found out in
relation to the questions.
The same two participants wrote in their second patch (choosing to address only the first question):
Low contact time in Historical and Philosophical studies, but high NSS scores!
Hence, creative use of contact times and freedom to creatively explore the curricula.
Can high level of self-directed study impact on creativity?
In the third stage, we attempted to expose the group to some critical material, in this case Ken
Robinson's (2010) TED talk 'Changing education paradigms'. Critical materials aim to disrupt the
learner's thinking by challenging taken-for-granted assumptions about a topic and the accepted
disciplinary theories and methods. This is not the same as critical thinking skills which are simple
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