Tlc authentic 121 ld

TLC
Working One to One: Authentically
Student-Centred Learning
Development
Dr Helen Webster
Newcastle University
UK
@ncl_wdc
Writing Development Centre
Explore the possibilities

@ncl_wdc
Who Are We?
• Who am I? “Learning Developer”
• Who are you?
• Common aim: how to have one to one conversations with
students about their learning, to help them succeed.

@ncl_wdc
How do we envisage these conversations?
What’s the slogan on
your T-Shirt?

@ncl_wdc
Shared Values
Emancipatory
Person-
centred
Social justice
Collaborative
Inclusive
Non-judgemental
Aspirational
Empowering
Holistic
Situated
Non-directive
Student-led
Reflective

@ncl_wdc
Study Skills Conversations
• Avoid abbreviations and contractions. Write words out in full:
• ‘dept.’ as ‘department’
• ‘e.g’. as ‘for example’
• ‘didn’t’ as ‘did not’
• ‘they’re’ as ‘they are’
• ‘isn’t’ as ‘is not’
• Avoid personal pronouns such as ‘I’/’we’ and ‘you’. Instead, sentences begin in
impersonal ways such as ‘it can be seen that…’
• Linking ideas together:
• Introducing an alternative viewpoint: conversely; in comparison; on the contrary; in fact; though; although.
(Cottrell, Study Skills Handbook)

@ncl_wdc
The ‘Study Skills’ Model
‘The study skills model sees writing and literacy as primarily an individual and
cognitive skill. This approach focusses on the surface features of language form and
presumes that students can transfer their knowledge of writing and literacy
unproblematically from one context to another’. (Lea and Street, 2006).
• Study Skills: [Remediation of] Student Deficit.
• ‘Fix it’, atomised [transferable] skills; surface language, grammar, spelling.
• Sources: behavioural and experimental psychology; programmed learning
• Student writing as technical and instrumental skill (Robinson-Pant and Street, 2012).

@ncl_wdc
Academic Socialisation Conversations
Academic writing is clear, concise, focussed, structured and backed up by
evidence. Its purpose is to aid the reader’s understanding.
Characteristics of academic writing. Academic writing is:
• Planned and focused: answers the question and demonstrates an understanding of the subject.
• Structured: is coherent, written in a logical order, and brings together related points and material.
• Evidenced: demonstrates knowledge of the subject area, supports opinions and arguments with evidence,
and is referenced accurately.
• Formal in tone and style: uses appropriate language and tenses, and is clear, concise and balanced
Leeds University https://library.leeds.ac.uk/info/14011/writing/106/academic_writing

@ncl_wdc
The Academic Socialisation Model
• Academic socialization is concerned with students’ acculturation into disciplinary and
subject-based discourses and genres. Students acquire the ways of talking, writing,
thinking and using literacy that typified members of a disciplinary or subject area
community. The academic socialization model presumes that disciplinary discourses are
relatively stable and, once students have learned and understood the ground rules of a
particular academic discourse, they are able to reproduce it unproblematically. (Lea and
Street, 2006).
• Academic socialisation: acculturation of students into academic discourse
• Inducting students into new ‘culture’; focus on orientation to learning and interpretation of learning task,
e.g. ‘deep’, ‘surface’, ‘strategic’ learning; homogeneous ‘culture’, lack of focus on institutional practices,
change and power.
• Sources: social psychology, anthropology, constructivism.
• Student writing as transparent medium of representation. (Robinson-Pant and Street, 2012).

@ncl_wdc
What’s really going on:
A contradiction?
“The Learning Developer’s role is to respond to this [student] expectation by
identifying issues, offering suggestions or solutions whilst at the same time
encouraging autonomy” (Caldwell et al, 2018).
One
(Student)
to
One
(LDer)

@ncl_wdc
Translate:
Learning Developer:
• “It might be better if you…”
• “Do you think it might be worth
trying…?”
• “I’m not sure about…”
• “I wonder if…”
• “What do you think…?”
Learning Developer:
• “This would be better.”
• “You should do this.”
• “This is wrong.”
• “I think this.”
• “Agree with me.”

@ncl_wdc
A lack of congruence?
“so maybe you, it might be better if you put it at the beginning”.
This is a conventionally indirect suggestion, using a mitigator (maybe)
and conditional (might) so that the LD appears not to be telling the
student directly what to do, but instead makes a hypothetical
suggestion. Furthermore, the LD changes the pronoun ‘you’ to ‘it’ to
give the impression that the LD has no personal claim in the solution
and so that the student can eventually ‘own’ it.
(Caldwell et al, 2018, highlighting mine)

@ncl_wdc
A dilemma?
“To pretend that there is not a hierarchical relationship between tutor
and student is a fallacy, and to engineer peer tutoring techniques that
divest the tutor of power and authority is at times foolish and can even
be unethical”. (Carino, 2003).
So should we be oppressive or disingenuous?

@ncl_wdc
What we’re left with
•Identify
• Hm, let’s have a look at your
essay…
•Explain
• Ah, I see the issue, look…
•Advise
• What you need to do is…
•Examine
•Diagnose
•Prescribe

@ncl_wdc
Disempowering the student
“The tutorial is therefore guided by the LD and the student
adheres by providing continuers, agreements and minimal
responses. Challenge is rare, yet accounts are often provided
after LD evaluation to defend, save face or explain” (Caldwell,
2018).

@ncl_wdc
The Academic Literacies Model
• Academic literacies is concerned with meaning-making, identity, power and
authority, and foregrounds the institutional nature of what counts as knowledge in
any particular academic context. It […] views the processes involved in acquiring
appropriate and effective uses of literacy as more complex, dynamic, nuanced,
situated and involving both epistemological issues and social processes, including
power relations among people, institutions and social identities. (Lea and Street,
2006).
• Academic Literacies: Students’ negotiation of conflicting literary practices
• Literacies as social practices; at level of epistemologies and identities; institutions as sites
of/constituted in discourses and power; variety of communicative repertoire, switching with
regard to linguistic practices, social meanings and identities,
• Sources: New Literacy studies; critical discourse analysis, systemic functional linguistics,
cultural anthropology.
• Student Writing as constitutive and contested. (Robinson-Pant and Street, 2012).

@ncl_wdc
What would that conversation look like?
One that acknowledges:
• The place of identity and social context
• The multiplicity of perspectives and discourses
• Meaning-making and its contested nature
• The role of power and authority
• The need for negotiation

@ncl_wdc
Why look to Clinical Psychology?
“At some level, it all makes sense” (Butler, 1998)
“As no one else can know how we perceive, we are the best experts
on ourselves” (Gross, 1992)
“The single most damaging effect of psychiatric diagnosis is loss of
meaning as people’s problems are divested of their personal and
social situatedness and labelled as ‘illness’.” (Johnstone, 2017).

@ncl_wdc
What is Formulation?
A core skill, although ‘there is no universally agreed definition of
formulation’ (DCP 2011)
• ‘The tool […] the lynchpin that holds theory and practice together’ (Butler, 1998)
• ‘A crucible’ (Dudley and Kuyken, 2013)
• ‘A shared narrative or story’ (DCP, 2011)
• ‘constructed rather than discovered’ (Harper and Spellman 2006)
• “The process of co-constructing a hypothesis” (Johnstone, 2017)
• “A process of ongoing collaborative sense-making” (Harper and Moss, 2003)

@ncl_wdc
Characteristics of formulation:
Person- not Problem-centred
All formulations:
• summarise the service user’s core problems;
• suggest how the service user’s difficulties may relate to one another, by drawing on
psychological theories and principles;
• aim to explain, on the basis of psychological theory, the development and
maintenance of the service user’s difficulties, at this time and in these situations;
• indicate a plan of intervention which is based in the psychological processes and
principles already identified;
• are open to revision and re-formulation.
(Johnstone and Dallos, 2006)

@ncl_wdc
Rethinking Authority
1 (LDer)
1 (Student)
2
“The clinician brings knowledge derived from theory, research and clinical
experience, while the service user brings expertise about their own life and the
meaning and impact of their relationships and circumstances” (Johnstone, 2017)

@ncl_wdc
Whose learning?
Learning
Outcomes
Lecturers
Learning
Developer
Students

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Opening up our role
Tutor
Knowledge
Tutor Agency
Student
Agency
Student
Knowledge

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The Five Ps of LD
Presenting
“Problem”
Pertinent
factors
Perception
of task
Process
Product

@ncl_wdc
Formulation in identifying the issue
Do you hear voices that no one else can
hear?
“Yes.”

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Formulation and co-constructing meaning
• I have really good hearing
• I talk to myself in my head
• My flat’s walls are really thin
• I live with my grandmother who’s deaf.
• I pray. I find it comforting.
• I listen to podcasts on headphones a lot
• It’s ok, I can hear that too, it’s not just you
• Sorry, I thought you were being metaphorical! No, not literally.

@ncl_wdc
Formulation in identifying the issue
“I’m not very good at writing”
• What does the problem mean to the student?
• Whose problem is it?
• Is it a problem? Is it THE problem?

@ncl_wdc
International
student
Full of cold
today
Changed
degree
“”You’re bad at
at statistics”
Broke up with
with boyfriend
Learns well
with video

@ncl_wdc
Maybe we could learn a thing or two…
“In these [study skills] approaches, the distance between tutors’
expectations and student-writers’ understanding of such expectations
is problematized as a mismatch which can be resolved if tutors state
clearly to student-writers, in written or spoken words, what is required”
(Lillis, 2001)
“The rat is always right’ (B. F. Skinner, cited in Lindsley, 1990)
Discuss…..

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The Writing Process
(Coffin, 2002)

@ncl_wdc
Problematising writing
Learning “out come”
“this [conduit] metaphor signals the following common
sense notions about language: […] that language is a
transparent medium, reflecting rather than
constructing meanings” (Lillis, 2001)

@ncl_wdc
Strategies: constructing authorial identity
Authority
• Who can you
you be?
• Who do you
you want to
be?
• Who do you
you need to
to be?
Authorial
Presence
• How can you
you say it?
• How do you
you want to
say it?
• How do you
you need to
to say it?
Authorship
• What can you
you say?
• What do you
you want to
say?
• What do you
you need to
to say?
‘Heuristic’ adapted from Lillis, 2001

@ncl_wdc
Formulation techniques
• Contracting and re-contracting –explaining your role regarding them
• Congruent: genuinely open questions and non-directive language
• Consensual: explaining why you’re asking or proposing and what you
hope it will achieve
• Juxtaposition: bringing elements together so the student can negotiate
meaning and resolution in the interstices
• Two of the 5 Ps, Past and Present, two Perspectives, two Contexts
• Inviting the student’s comment, challenge, questions, conclusions,
reflections, choices, interpretations, rejections, solutions, etc.

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Formulation techniques

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The difference between Diagnosis and
Formulation in Learning Development

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Suggestions for Practice
LD Formulation…
• may not always be appropriate or necessary
• develops learning in its own right – it is an ‘intervention’
• could be used alongside other LD activities e.g. coaching, teaching, advising
(care should be taken in contracting)
• is an iterative, ongoing process open to revision
• is non-linear
• could be light-touch or in-depth
• could be used to underpin other LD activities e.g. workshop design
• is a rich source of CPD for the Learning Developer

@ncl_wdc
Differences with Clinical Psychology
Clinical Psychology Learning Development
Distress and mental ill health are inherently problems Learning is by nature challenging and unsettling
Alleviate distress and problematic behaviours Not remedial
Treatment More learning!
Therapy Not therapy (possibly therapeutic…?)
Achievement and maintenance of wellbeing Exponential and ongoing learning
Ongoing treatment process Often one-off or short term
Assessment*, Formulation, Treatment No linear or formally staged process – mixed in
Clinician - Service User University – Learning Developer – Student

@ncl_wdc
Contact:
Dr Helen Webster
• Head of the Writing Development Centre, Newcastle University
• Email: helen.webster@ncl.ac.uk
• Twitter: @scholastic_rat
• Blog: https://rattusscholasticus.wordpress.com/

Tlc authentic 121 ld

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