This blog originally appeared in the April 2018 issue of student magazine Mosaïek, which was fully dedicated to research and writing. The current version was adapted for online publication and can also be read on the FASoS Teaching & Learning Blog. “Learning how to do research is one of the most important tasks at the university. It is also one of the most challenging.” (Murtonen & Lehtinen, ‘Learning to be a researcher’, in Academic research and researchers) Academic research and writing are at the core of university studies. Luckily, whether you are a BA student writing you first research paper or a PhD student working on your dissertation, there is a whole world out there full of articles, blogs and books with hands-on advice. For instance, a few years ago, university newspaper Observant published a great piece with ten tips for writing your BA or MA thesis. Likewise, Gerald Schneider provides advice on “how to avoid the seven deadly sins of academic writing”. And many of you will have encountered The Craft of Research during your studies at our faculty. No doubt, your tutors and supervisor usually also bombard you with all kinds of advice. Here, I would like to highlight four underestimated ways to become a better academic writer.
1. Read a lot Yes, surprise: reading is key to research and writing. You need to embed your work in a broader literature. Have other scholars written about similar topics? How do you position yourself vis-à-vis their work? What contribution does your work make? But reading also helps to get a better insight into structure and vocabulary used in the field. Reading inspires (I wish my contribution to this issue of Mosaïek was as elegant and erudite as John Harbord’s!). By reading other people’s work – academic, but also non-academic work, including blogs, novels and poetry – you also get a feel of what writing you like and how you can use it to develop your own style. 2. Cherish feedback opportunities This may sound obvious to you, but is it really? In a course that I taught recently, of the 14 students whose paper I failed, only 2 attended my feedback open office hours. Colleagues had a similar experience, hence it came as no surprise that 50% did not pass the resit. Seeking or creating feedback opportunities is key to academic research and writing. This is why your tutors and supervisors present their work at conferences. Note that feedback is not only useful when you fail, but also when you pass. As you progress through your studies, expectations increase. For instance, did you know that students sometimes fail their thesis, simply because they assume that it is just another paper? 3. Use formal requirements to your advantage Like you, I too regularly get stuck when working on my research. When I do, I do not just lie back and wait for some magic to happen. Instead, I check the formal requirements of the publisher or journal that I would like to publish my research with. When applying these requirements to my text, I often bump into mistakes or incomprehensible writing, simply because I look at the text from a different perspective. So, while APA may be a pain, use it to your advantage – and mind you: when we try to publish, we nearly always encounter different requirements, so you should actually consider yourself lucky to just have to work with APA. 4. Use PBL to the fullest I see you wondering: “What does PBL have to do with research and writing?” Well, PBL is all about research! Those annoying 7 steps actually replicate common steps of a research process: you start with a puzzle, determine what you know and what you do not know about the topic, and develop one or more research questions to guide your research. Studying different sources will help you to answer those questions and come to a conclusion. I know that this research process is not always replicated in every course – in fact, scholars have referred to an “erosion” of PBL. But you play a role in this yourself by following those steps and by asking your tutors to do so as well. To round off, you may think that this is all very useful for all the academic papers that we have you write at FASoS, but other than that, why should you bother? Well, did you know that most FASoS alumni end up in jobs where they have to judge existing research and need to engage in research and writing themselves? It is likely that you end up writing reports for art institutions, governmental bodies or companies (e.g. ). Or maybe you become a journalist, like former Arts and Culture student Marcia Luyten and former European Studies student Melle Garschagen. So, keep on practicing your research and writing skills!
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This blog is co-authored with Afke Groen and was originally published by Active Learning in Political Science on 20 September 2018. We have been following the ALPS-blog discussion on students’ participation between Amanda and Simon with great interest. The situations they discuss are very familiar.
In Maastricht, learning takes place according to the principles of problem-based learning (PBL); through active participation and discussions in tutorials. In the programmes that we teach in, we can grade students’ participation with a +0.5 on top of the exam grade for exceptionally good participation or a -0.5 for insufficient participation – a system introduced following discussions about the problem of ‘free-riders’. We too see students who remain silent. We train students, encourage participation and discuss group dynamics, but students may not feel comfortable or skilled to live up to our expectations – certainly not in their first weeks at university. Indeed, in the discussion between Simon and Amanda, the “problem” seems to be students who do not talk. Teaching is about “getting students to talk” and about “[getting] them to a point where they do the readings and are willing and able to talk about them”. But to what extent is not talking a problem? Why doesn’t a student talk? And if it’s a problem, who’s problem is it? The emphasis on active participation actually represents a new way of thinking about student learning, one that may even be alien to some students. As Louisa Remedios, David Clarke and Lesleyanne Hawthorneexplain, “[t]here has been a recent shift of instructional paradigm from valuing and encouraging students to be silent so as to actively listen and learn from a more knowledgeable other (teacher), to becoming knowledgeable by speaking and elaborating on content knowledge.” The value of silence In our experience, most students who don’t talk, aren’t actually ‘free-riding’. They prepare for tutorials, have extensive notes and are clearly paying attention to what’s being discussed. In addition, PBL extends beyond the classroom, with some students feeling much more comfortable to discuss readings with fellow students when preparing for tutorials. We also witness various productive forms of “silence”. Just like Jun Jin, we see that silence is used to look at notes, think about what has been said and recall prior knowledge. As such, silence may be positive for knowledge construction and group learning. Moreover, a silent student may also be a student who is good at (active!) listening: it often requires silence to understand group discussions and dynamics. We can also strategically use silence as teachers – beyond increasing “wait time” to get someone to fill an awkward silence. Sure, there are problematic cases of silence. The ‘free-rider’ tends to be easily recognisable: she or he comes to class unprepared, does not contribute to discussions or does so in a non-productive way. Yet, other students feel scared, shy or uncomfortable to contribute to classroom discussions. So how can we tell the difference between these students and those who are ‘productively’ silent? Research shows that tutors in PBL have a good insight into students’ chances of becoming successful in their studies. We can act based on these insights. Observing silent students and talking to them is important; putting pressure on them surely will not help. Instead, a tutor’s role is to facilitate group learning and coach students to become better learners. As Simon writes: “[we] might not be at the centre of the classroom, but that doesn’t mean [we] don’t shape, contribute, encourage and support.” In short, students’ silence is not always a problem. Instead, we should appreciate silence as an inherent element in learning and find other ways in which to coach silent learners without identifying by default them as problematic learners or even ‘free-riders’. This post was originally published by the FASoS Teaching & Learning Blog on 30 May 2018. Co-authored with Mirko Reithler. Problem-based learning (PBL) is at the heart of teaching at Maastricht University and at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS). It is a student-centred approach to learning: students encounter problems that contextualise a learning process that emphasises the importance of self-directed, collaborative and constructive learning. But there is theory and there is practice. 12 years ago, Jos Moust, Henk van Berkel and Henk Schmidt published an article entitled ‘Signs of erosion: Reflections on three decades of problem-based learning at Maastricht University’. They give an excellent overview of the original premises of PBL, but also of the challenges to implement PBL. Last year, these challenges were discussed in university newspaper Observant, with interviews with Henk Schmidt (a key figure in the development of PBL in Maastricht and beyond and a guest at our faculty two years ago), Virginie Servant (a researcher at Rotterdam University) and Walter Jansen (from EdLab, the university’s education lab).
Why is this discussion important? Simple: Maastricht University prides itself on using PBL, yet at the same time many of the core ideas of this approach to teaching and learning have come under pressure. We have both been involved in several PBL-related initiatives, from the Leading in Learning project ‘Updating PBL at FASoS’ to the EdLab project on PBL and research skills, and of course the University Teaching Qualification. Based on our experience, and taking into account the aforementioned article, we believe that there are at least three key PBL challenges that we should discuss at FASoS:
These are just three points that we feel that should and can be tackled. We would like to start this discussion by inviting you to join in. Do you agree with our diagnosis? Maybe you have some solutions to offer? Or maybe you have additional points that you would like to address? So, react to this blog, by commenting below or by drafting your own post. This post was originally published on the FASoS Teaching & Learning Blog on 19 March 2018. Co-authored with colleague Sven Schaepkens. FASoS teaching staff sometimes informally meet to share experience. One such event took place on 7 November 2017. A group of new and experienced staff watched the UM DVD Problem based learning: Tips from experienced tutors, as well as the (in)famous FASoS PBL video. There is a lot going on in the latter that defies what PBL should be like, but there were some surprised faces when the following was raised.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sven (S): I’m surprised to see that the whiteboard is used during the post-discussion. This must be an exceptional case. Isn’t the whiteboard primarily a tool for the pre-discussion? Patrick (P): You don’t use the whiteboard during the post-discussion? S: I believe that the ideal moment to use the whiteboard is during pre-discussions, because the post-discussion facilitates something else. As a philosophy teacher, I have become acquainted with the Socratic method, which, in my view, aligns well with the spirit of PBL, especially during the post-discussion. The Socratic method assumes that groups acquire a shared understanding of an issue by repeating and summarising each other’s answers. The group members calibrate their understanding by letting various comments circulate in this ‘echo chamber’ and by asking additional questions aimed at clarification. P: I too encourage students to keep on asking and answering questions to further their learning. Yet, I want them to keep track of their discussions on the whiteboard, so that we can go back to points raised before. Why does the Socratic method exclude the use of the whiteboard? S: Don’t get me wrong: good whiteboarding is helpful to structure a brainstorm, and students are truly capable of effective whiteboard use. They support the discussion by making schemes, drawing time lines, grouping certain concepts together, and highlighting relations and similarities. When all of the above more or less happens, I´m a happy tutor! P: That’s indeed what good whiteboarding is about. But even the far from ideal jotting down of terms serves as a – very basic – means of support for the group process. Why can’t this be supportive to the post-discussion too? S: Generally, whiteboarding stalls the PBL process. Where the Socratic dialogue has an inherently open nature, students in tutorials seem to desire closure: “Did we answer the learning objective? What am I supposed to know for the exam?” They use the whiteboard for attaining closure. What’s on the whiteboard is the ‘the proper answer’, and we can all stop talking, cease thinking, and move to the next learning goal. P: I have experienced this too. That’s why I encourage discussion leaders to keep on asking questions; why I keep on asking questions. But having those concepts on the whiteboard also allows us to draw links between them and, quite often, address contradictions. Without the whiteboard students may do so in their own notes, but then the closure happens there. I’d rather have them focus on the discussion than on their notes. I believe that the use of the whiteboard allows this and, hence, actually fosters openness. S: I don’t think that students attain closure through their own notes when they don’t use the whiteboard. The individual notes can be a form of personal closure, but that’s different from mutual understanding at group level. The notes on the whiteboard are there for all to see and latch onto, whereas personal notes that aim at closure need to be verbalised in the group´s echo chamber. This verbal exercise moving from private to group closure is for me the goal in post-discussions. P: During EU Politics I regularly take my groups outside, the weather generally being really nice during period 5. They always struggle without the whiteboard. This applies to all group members, including the person who takes notes to share through the electronic learning environment. They still focus on the ‘right’ answer and even more do than before. S: But this observation supports my intuition: Careful listening by summarising and asking questions is not practiced enough! The whiteboard is perceived as a safety net. Will a group member engage in the same way when things will eventually appear on the whiteboard, opposed to the situation where it all depends on one’s own listening and verbalisation skills? P: I don’t agree that the whiteboard is just a safety net. Instead, I agree with Terry Barrett and Sarah Moore, who, in a chapter in an interesting volume on PBL, argue that using the whiteboard is key in shaping the “shared learning environment” required to foster “dialogic knowledge”. (…) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We still haven’t reached a conclusion… But maybe you can help? Please let us know your thoughts by dropping your comments below! There is also the big elephant in the room: maybe the general erosion of PBL needs to be addressed, rather than whether or not to use the whiteboard? |
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