LR Assessment

Learning Required

Its time now to think about how to present your application to the panel. Your assessment is likely to have two major components, your presentation and your submission portfolio.

Using Learning Outcomes to structure your submission

Understanding the learning outcomes of the papers you are seeking assessment for will help you work out how to structure your portfolio. They can be used as the framework for your submission. Remember your learning journey has been through your practice, so your presentation is not going to look or sound the same as a learner who has been taught these papers. Have confidence in your integrated understandings about your context. Experience is a powerful learning space.

The learning outcomes for the two papers can be found here. (insert hyperlink) Keep these learning outcomes close to you as an important reference.

Structuring your application for assessment

Now that you have thought about your learning over the years it is time to decide how to structure your presentation and in what format it will occur. The format is covered more fully here.

It is important to organise your thoughts clearly at this point. You are needing to determine a structure, but to give yourself time to do this. It is often an iterative process and it is always linked to the ongoing nature of your reflective process. Organise your thoughts clearly and ensure their linkages make sense. Be orderly in this work, but allow for ideas that were once separate to suddenly have a connection.

Be careful not to be overly descriptive and miss the focus of your learning. The analysis of learning is one of the most important parts of your application for assessment. Remember it is not just what you have learnt but, more importantly you must provide some analysis and discuss how you have applied and reflected your understandings in practice. Analysing your learning involves asking yourself what the significance of your learning is for a range of affected groups such as learners and colleagues and the institution you work for.

Activity

Gather all you have thought about within this paper. Use the key points found through the previous module as a base for determining a possible structure. Keep in mind the learning outcomes from the papers you are choosing to be assessed against. Here are some questions that will help you to decide how you might present the nature of your teaching and learning beliefs, understandings and skills: • What is the context of your work? • What impacts on your teaching and learning work? What dimensions must you be mindful of and why are these important? • What is it you bring to your teaching and learning role? • What theory and practice base do you call upon? What is the knowledge that underpins your practice and what are the implications both positive and challenging to using this knowledge? • How did you gain these understandings? • In what ways has this knowledge been used within your teaching and learning work? • What was the impact of these understandings on your practice development? • Are the understandings fit for purpose in your professional context? • How did you used this knowledge to strengthen or inform your approach to your work? • What has been the impact of this knowledge being used, on yourself, your learners, your colleagues? • If you were starting again would you come to your practice in the same way, with the same learning, or would you have done something differently? • What experiences have contributed (and how) to your understandings and beliefs? • What was the contribution of others to your understandings and beliefs? • What ethical understandings and practices inform the way you work? • How did your learning impact on your own professional identity?

Now that you have identified the key messages of your presentation you can move to consider how best to structure your presentation to show the depth and extent of your understandings that you bring to your practice.

Give some time to this. It is another aspect of preparation that may need to be iterative. Seek to communicate with others, particularly your facilitator. Book at least one session with your facilitator to get feedback. Consider the feedback you have been given. It may be difficult to accept because by now you have invested considerable personal energy, but your facilitator brings a perspective of an outsider and that can be hugely helpful in helping you ensure the key messages are able to be understood by the assessors.

Activity

Structure one area in full and get feedback from your facilitator. Use this feedback to clarify and strengthen your application. Proceed to structure your full presentation, ensuring the learning outcomes of the papers are being attended to

Determine how you will present to the assessors. How will you hold the key points in the order you wish to make them? Will you use a tool like powerpoint ? Will you write a major document? Will you have artifacts that you wish to introduce at various points? An agenda for the presentation is usually very helpful for assessors, particularly if each section has a reminder of what the purpose is.

Evidence

Evidence must be used in a way that clearly links to what you are presenting and to your learning. Thinks carefully about what evidence to use and ensure you have approval to use it Think about how you will use to use evidence to illustrate your knowledge/skills and demonstrate the extent to which you can analyse your own learning. Think broadly about the type of evidence you will use.

The ability to select and evaluate evidence and bring this forward coherently is an important dimension of your application.

The evidence must be:

• valid – connected to your learning

• authentic – you must have contributed to its development

• current – this ensures that it is connected to your most current understandings, unless it you see it as a seminal piece of evidence that sets the scene clearly

sufficient- for the purpose of the assessment

• reliable – you could show how this evidence has informed other aspects of your work, to show that the learning you have gained can inform other dimensions of your practice

Activity

Evidence Identify and collate the evidence you wish to bring Annotate the purpose for the evidence, make clear how this connects to your learning

Your assessment presentation

You may find it helpful to ask yourself the following questions and make notes as you shape your presentation to the assessors:

• Why did I wish to take the module?

• What did the process of identifying my learning involve?

• What were key learning moments in your career that you identified as areas to • make claims in and why?

• Have I discovered anything about myself or my work role from my claim?

• Has the module changed the way I approach or think about my work? Have I discovered new areas of learning that I and/or my employer have not previously recognised or fully used – or has the process confirmed what I already knew?

• How easy/difficult was it to identify learning and provide evidence of it?

• Has the identification of AOLs made me think about areas I wish to focus on in the future?

• Has the development of the portfolio and my reflection on it influenced/altered how I view myself, my work role(s) and/or my career aspirations?

Activity

Finalise your presentation seek feedback from your facilitator discuss the nature and agenda of your presentation submit your presentation for assessment as per instructions.

Your presentation is your own reflection on what you have learnt from the module.Consequently, there is no right or wrong way of structuring it. However, it may help you to decide by knowing what the assessor will want to see:

• the development of a reasoned train of thought (typically answering the questions

‘how’, ‘why’ and ‘with what consequences’)?

• sufficient analysis to suggest that you have seriously reflected upon the learning process involved in compiling your application for assessment

• the effectiveness of your communication.