Interactive and Interdisciplinary Student

Work: A Facilitative Methodology to
Encourage Lifelong Learning
Jennie Blake

University of Manchester

[email protected]

Sam Illingworth

Manchester Metropolitan University

[email protected]

Abstract
In order to support and facilitate continuous learning and a growth mindset, it is
essential that students be exposed to learning opportunities that explicitly allow
them to apply and practice what they have learned. (Dweck, 2007)This paper
focuses on one such approach, taken in the My Learning Essentials skills support
programme developed at the University of Manchester. This programme rests on a
constructivist and collectivist approach that requires student engagement in the
creation of learning opportunities and thus encourages students to apply what they
have learned to a wide variety of opportunities and assessments, pushing the
response to feedback or to an identified skills gap from specific assignments to
skill progression and personal development. In addition, the facilitators of such
sessions are also freed from the role of “expert” and instead act as knowledge
builders with the rest of the group. This change removes the possibility of one
“correct” answer and the assumption of eventual perfection and instead encourages
the entire group to focus on understanding the process and progressing both within
the session and beyond. Although there are still a number of questions to be
answered, initial feedback and investigations support the assertions that students
engagement in the creation of such opportunities leads to a clearer understanding of
the efficacy of the skills involved and the power of the prior knowledge of the
community.

Keywords: Lifelong learning, facilitation, skills support, academic skills

Introduction
Frank Smith’s To Think states,
Like remembering, understanding is easy when it is not a particular
focus of attention, when we are engaged in something that is
interesting, meaningful, and natural to us, when the brain is in charge,
  

pursuing its own purposes in the light of its own experience

(2014: 36-37).
In these situations, the older ‘transmissive’ model of learning does students
a disservice, assuming that they are mere receptacles to be filled with the
expertise and curated knowledge of the instructor (Jonassen and Land,
2012). This model not only requires that the student submit to the
experience of the teacher, but also puts the trainer in the position of being
entirely responsible for the content and learning taking place (see e.g.
Marjanovic and Bandara, 2011). This model, the teacher as leader and
expert, limits the transmission of knowledge to a one-way discourse, with
the majority of the power to shape content and experience in the hands of
the lecturer/expert. Instead, constructivist and learner-centred learning puts
the focus on the learner as co-creator and lessens the demand on the teacher
to act as an expert with all possible answers and all necessary information.
The basic premise of lifelong learning is that people need to continually
enhance their understanding and expertise, beyond that which is provided
for in a formal learning environment. Whilst there are many definitions of
lifelong learning, this paper takes the approach adopted by Sharples (2000:
178), in characterising lifelong learning ‘as an extended and holistic process
of developing skills and understanding.’ In order for lifelong learning to be
effective, it is important that the responsibilities and values of the learners
are incorporated into the learning experience (Collins, 2004), with
expectations for lifelong learning favouring a type of instruction that
encourages learners as active participants (Huang, 2002). Ultimately, there
should be an increase in learner autonomy, and a movement away from the
one-way discourse (Goodyear, 2000) towards a more constructivist and
learner-centred learning environment.
The University of Manchester’s Alan Gilbert Learning Commons was
specifically designed to act as a hub for the sort of interactive learning
experience that invites the participants to contribute on an equal footing
with the trainer to the development of the final product. Deliberately
designed to encourage group work and student interaction, the building
carefully incorporates the student voice through student-created art, student
consultation on the design of the learning spaces, and a clear remit to
support the students in their learning at the University (Jones and Blake,
2013). The Learning Commons focuses on flexible learning spaces,
encouraging students to create the space they need for their own learning by
shifting furniture, consulting on new initiatives to support their learning, and
defining the rules and procedures for the building and its contents. Over
60,000 people entered the building in its first month of opening, with the
1000+ flexible study spaces in constant demand throughout the academic
year (Jones, 2013). The Learning Commons also supports a large number of
postgraduate and mature students, and is also available for use by members
of staff from across the University. To make lifelong learning an important
  

part of human life, new and stimulating physical and intellectual spaces
need to be created (Fischer, 1999), which can encourage lifelong learning to
take place, and stimulate its pursuit. The Learning Commons can be defined
as one of these spaces, allowing groups and individuals to explore
alternative ways of learning.
The Learning Commons is naturally seen as a hub for student activity. Its
central location on campus allows it to function as a support provider and to
signpost students and staff to other resources available across the
University. In addition to being open 24/7 during term time, the Learning
Commons is a bookless library site, and thus must highlight and
acknowledge the value of what the patrons bring in with them. It also
emphasises that the learning that goes on must incorporate the prior-
knowledge and input of those participating in it. This means that any
support that is provided must also be able to shape itself to its participants,
to deliver what they need when they need it. The training room that sits in
the building supports the focus on interactive and learner-centred learning,
with moveable furniture and a bank of laptops, allowing for maximum
flexibility and approaches to learning. This focus on support and flexibility,
are keys to the building and have been built into the methodology and
structure of the library’s newest skills support programme, the ‘My
Learning Essentials’ (MLE) open training programme.
My Learning Essentials focuses on skills support for the students and staff
in an interactive and innovative manner. Student consultation informed its
creation, through a separate research project conducted prior to the
completion of the Learning Commons, which focused on the use of
resources available at the University of Manchester. That research project,
titled ‘HEARing Student Voices’, highlighted the need for a centralised and
student-selecting skills support programme, one where students (and staff)
could seek out the help they needed at the time they needed it—and one that
would allow them to make the crucial steps to understanding how to
improve skills and utilise feedback (Blake et al., 2010). At the time of this
study, students described their struggles to access what resources were
available, and often found them useful only in the specific instance they
were delivered—instead of being able to incorporate what they had learned
in order to improve a broad set of skills. This made it difficult for students
to truly take advantage of the learning opportunities available to them and
discouraged further seeking of support or effort (Blake et al., 2010).
Effectively, the students were often approaching the resources previously
available with a fixed mindset, unwilling to make an attempt to learn a new
skill or seek help because of a fear of being judged and a lack of confidence
in the worth of effort. A fixed mindset, as defined by Carol Dweck, is one
that tends to create a learning experience that feels stressful and
judgemental, one where mistakes and ‘failure’ (and the learning the comes
with them) must be avoided at all costs (Dweck, 2006). This mindset stalls
  

the learning process by assuming that there is little purpose in focusing on

specific improvements, as it is unlikely to change one’s abilities, preventing
learners from seeing the next steps that could be taken to improve, or from
even seeing that improvement was possible. In addition, it encourages
learners to think of mistakes as permanent failures with little hope for
improvement.
Meaningful work not only promotes learning in the immediate
situation, but also promotes a love of learning and resilience in
the face of obstacles (Dweck, 2010).
In order for learners to be optimally motivated to learn, they must believe
that they first possess the skills and competencies to accomplish the learning
goals (McCombs, 1991). If they are stuck in this fixed mindset, they are
thus unlikely to be able to progress in their learning trajectory. Furthermore,
with this fixed mindset, it was found that learners were unable to take
feedback from one piece of work and apply it to the next, or to see how
skills practiced in one area could be of use somewhere else (Blake, Wass
and Walmsley, 2011). My Learning Essentials is designed, in part, to see if
the answer to this struggle, on the part of both students and staff, could be
addressed by explicit skills training that pushes the skills addressed from the
degree programme into the wider world and beyond a single assignment. It
is hoped that by removing the official ‘place’ for an expert in the learning
environment, and thus the assumption that no progress can be made without
such an expert, that students can be pushed into a growth mindset and begin
proactively working to improve and progress. Such an approach also aims to
encourage lifelong learning, by empowering the learner, and helping them
to develop the autonomy and growth mindset that are essential for learning
to continue to occur outside of formal settings.
Report
The MLE focuses on training that actively emphasises both the
transferable nature of the skills supported, and innovative content that
introduces students to a wide range of best practice from across the
University. A component of the impetus for the creation of the open
programme was a growing awareness of the potential inherent in developing
a skills support provision that encouraged cross-university collaboration and
incorporated strategies that highlight the transferable nature of skills in the
design. This exposes students to teaching and best practice from outside
their own discipline, whilst working to push participants from a fixed
mindset, where assessments and work is seen as siloed, and individual
judgements to a growth mindset, where skills can be improved from effort,
practice and application (Merriam and Leahy, 2005, O'Rourke et al., 2014)
Designed to work in collaboration with other support on offer, and to
bring in partners to highlight expertise and best practice, the sessions focus
on the students learning across the subjects and disciplines that they may
  

engage in on a daily basis, whilst opening up the learning experience to

incorporate students in different years, areas of study and abilities. The
sessions follow a common methodology, requiring facilitative structure and
focussing on continued personal development. We seek to ‘flip’ the focus
from content, whether it is information literacy or time management, to
interactive exploration and experience. In these workshops, there may be
less time, quantitatively, spent on specific content but we anticipate, and
hope to investigate further, its potential for greater engagement and long-
term impact. This facilitative focus frees the trainer from the role of expert
and leads to the creation of innovative learning opportunities. Both
participant and trainer are required to engage in the learning, changing the
dynamic from one of the student-as-vessel-for-expertise to one that demands
an equal contribution from both parties. By structuring the workshops, and
the programme itself, to require interactivity and engagement, it taps
directly into current thought on effort and extrinsic motivation, asking
everyone to clarify and work toward progressive improvement. It creates a
place where students learn from each other and about themselves, a place
where the participants may begin from a different place of expertise, but
where everyone seeks to improve.
One of the key sets of workshops on the open training programme is the
‘Essential Research Skills’ series. These workshops focus on the skills that
are necessary to be a critical and successful researcher including: critical
thinking, communicating ideas, argument construction, and project
management. Following the remit of the MLE open training programme,
these sessions are open to all students at the University: undergraduate,
post-graduate research, and post-graduate taught, staff are also welcome to
attend. There is no distinction made between degree programmes, nor are
the sessions levelled beyond a description of the intended learning
objectives. Participants in the sessions broadly reflect the demographics
found across the University of Manchester and students from all year groups
and degree programmes take part in My Learning Essentials. Sessions are
not labelled introductory or advanced; instead, participants are asked to read
a description of the session and select those that apply to skills they are
looking to improve. This creates a group of participants that have the same
goal—improving a particular area, but multiple ways of approaching the
goal—instead of being limited to one ‘right’ way, presented by the expert at
the front of the room. As stated earlier, participants in My Learning
Essentials broadly reflect the demographics present at the University of
Manchester, the largest single-site university in the United Kingdom.
(Manchester, 2014) It is important to note that, a year into the programme,
over 95% of students who responded to the surveys requesting feedback on
their experience in the workshops commented that they were ‘at the right
level’. In addition to the responses on the level and utility of the sessions,
students have stated in the free text session of the survey that workshops
were:
  

Very enthusiastic presentation, very student- friendly and

focused
Excellent session, very informative well planned and at the
correct level - good audience engagement and support offered.
(feedback surveys, 2013)

The implication here (i.e. that when students are invited to engage and
create their own learning experiences, those experiences consistently end up
at the correct level for each student’s learning) is another area worth noting
for further study. If a student is fearful of making a mistake then adequate
learning will not take place (Roman and Kay, 2007). The facilitator-led
approach aims to empower the students and encourage engagement with
both the content and the process. It also aims to show the students that they
often have the required knowledge and skillset to achieve a goal; they just
need encouragement regarding application, or the chance to explore in a
supportive environment.
These sessions are designed to encourage the students to value their own
prior knowledge and expertise as they are asked to actively engage and learn
cooperatively with the others around them. Instead of the sessions focusing
on a trainer delivering the ‘answers’, or the ‘best’ way of achieving a goal,
the activities and discussion within the workshop emphasise that the
expertise, and the answers, are best discovered collectively and with input
from all. This design was deliberately chosen in order to help foster a
positive and focused-growth mindset on the part of the participants, with the
focus on the possibility of improvement, not the achievement of perfection.
These goals are framed with the skills presented in order to give the
participants a real life focus for improvement, to help support them during
their time at university, and to encourage further learning. In addition,
because the emphasis is on explicitly linking the skills to personal
development, this frees the trainers to present the skills via a variety of
innovative and exciting content; from a focus on drama to considering the
rich cultural resources of the city, students are exposed to new ways of
thinking, while still developing the core skills training to help them succeed.
These workshops focus on the skillset used by researchers to run
successful projects and experiments. However, these skills are facilitated not
by case studies that tell students what the skills ‘should’ look like, but
activities that explore and improve the skills themselves. As the sessions are
open to all students, there is the opportunity for inter-disciplinary
collaboration—which highlights the universal nature of the skills being
supported. This then encourages students to answer the question of ‘what
next’ - that normally impedes the take-up of feedback in many cases - by
understanding what the skills can be used for in a variety of areas and
practising them within the workshop itself (Hattie and Timperley, 2007).
  

Finally, it encourages the participants to apply what they have learnt, and
continue on their learning journey, by underlining the progress made and the
potential for continued improvement—as they no longer ‘need’ an expert to
guarantee their learning, they can now look to themselves to continue the
process.
The activities in these sessions might range from students working in
groups to create objects out of modelling clay, to drama exercises designed
to unlock their own unique and discernible voices, to brainstorming
potential solutions to climate change. These activities ask students to begin
by understanding what their confidence in an area may be and then are
followed by a second assessment, where students look at what might have
improved during the session. This second assessment is key as it both gives
the students a concrete measure of where they have improved (thus focusing
on a growth mindset) and highlights the skills learned. No longer required to
intuit what they were ‘meant’ to have gotten out of a session, the students
can now feel confident in what they have gained and where they might
improve in the future, pushing them towards seeing learning as a lifelong
process, not a modular series of assessed events.
As the students take part in the workshop and generate their own
understanding of the skills covered, they begin to take over the role of
expert in the area. As the learning is focusing on the community discovering
their own experiences, each of these workshops make sure that there is time
for the students to explicitly share their own opinions and knowledge,
thereby reinforcing the group-learning, and the ability to learn in the light of
one’s own experience. For example, when delivering a session on Time
Management, the facilitator creates a list of ‘Top Tips for Time
Management’, selected from literature on the subject. In every instance that
this session has been run, the top tips brainstormed by the group are almost
identical to the list has previously been produced. This approach lends
further credence to the notion that the participants have the required
knowledge, they just need encouragement on how to apply it.
Discussion  
This methodology is limited in a number of ways, some of which we are
currently trying to address. Although every effort is made to get students
engaged and participating, there is still often an expectation that students
attending a workshop will be told the ‘best’ way to write an academic paper,
deliver a presentation or think critically. Sometimes students are frustrated
not to have been given an answer, but instead what could quite easily be
viewed as more work—an assumption that they will need to spend a lifetime
improving a skill. We hope that, by using strategies such as asking students
to create the agenda for the session, we deliberately engage the students in a
discussion of what should occur in the sessions, asking them to build the
agenda as a group and therefore share both responsibility and understanding
  

of what will occur. With agenda building as a common experience, we are

at least aligning their expectations with the intent of the sessions. This
common agenda building is also crucial in helping to develop autonomy,
and ultimately to encourage further learning.
However, it can still be difficult to deliver facilitative, activity-focused
workshops when previous systems have developed an inherent demand in
the participants for more focused and didactic support. In addition to the
struggles of the students, this facilitative and flexible model can be difficult
for the trainers. Much of the authority that comes with being the expert in
the room is absent in the facilitative model, and the demands on a trainer
can be greater when facilitating than when delivering a more standard
lecture presentation. Both participants and trainers must engage at a
different level when dealing with the activities and the learning objectives.
In addition, although the demands that the trainer be a content expert are
lessened, they must still deliver a session where the content has been looked
at by an expert and deliver activities that fit in with that content and the
learning objectives, something that is not always within the comfort zone of
skills support.
Finally, the model followed in the open training programme is limited in
terms of the number of students that can be addressed in face-to-face
sessions. With nearly 40,000 students at the University, MLE could not
deliver sufficient workshops to allow for access to all of them. However,
because we have decided to follow a blended model, those workshops
which are in highest demand are converted into online resources, allowing
students to access them from anywhere on campus whenever they need the
support. These online resources are not replications of what goes on in the
workshops, but instead again focus on delivering the skills support using the
interactive and creative possibilities of the medium. This pairing of face-to-
face and online sessions allows the MLE to deliver skills support at the
point of need while still maintaining the small groups and facilitative model
that are key to the skills offer. This facilitative model does not focus on
sending students away experts in a content area, a skillset, or a method.
Instead it focuses on identifying areas for improvement and the steps that
are necessary in order to achieve that goal, demanding student engagement
instead of highlighting trainer expertise. It also aims to empower the student
to find out more about the subject area, either through personal study or
continual professional development.
The Essential Research Skills, along with all of the resources, emphasises
learning in a supportive and creative environment, one where students are
valued for the expertise they bring, and in which a community is formed
pursuing a common goal. Thus, we are not only supporting the participants
needs in skills support but also in developing a community of learners to
draw upon and learn from, democratising the process and allowing for
further transparency in what is possible for learners. In order to ensure that
  

students are comfortable with this model, the trainer deliberately follows a
facilitative structure, encouraging students to contribute to the final
strategies and skills developed and to recognise their own abilities and
potential for improvement. With this model, the student’s awareness of the
potential and transferable nature of the skills comes from being a part of
their identification. This model is one that, from initial surveys and
conversations, shows much promise in being one answer to the questions
students face, and universities must answer, around getting the most out of
educational opportunities at university and learning skills for the future. The
facilitative methodology takes positive steps towards student independent,
not isolated, learning and creating engaged and self-starting participants.
Because they are active participants in the activities of the workshop and
helping to design the strategies that support their skills, students attending
the workshops are better able to identify both where they need to improve
and, crucially, the steps required in order to achieve that improvement.
From the experiences of the MLE programme, there are three clear pieces
of good practice that we offer as recommendations for encouraging lifelong
learning in student-centred learning environments:
1. Allow the participants to help construct the taught programme.
Having a set of learning objectives is good for an initial
structure, but it is important to be flexible enough to respond to
the needs of the group, and to demonstrate that learning can be
an organic process, which they can tailor to their individual
needs.
2. Ensure that the participants are presented with opportunities to
assume the role of the ‘expert’. For example, encourage the
sharing of anecdotal evidence of best practice.
3. Guide the participants in their understanding that sometimes
there is no one singular ‘best’ answer, and that temporary
‘failure’ is a necessary step in searching for the solution that is
most suited to their own individual needs.
These types of student-centred learning experiences offer the participants
a wonderful opportunity to explore in an interactive and interdisciplinary
environment. Providing the students with a physical space in a relatively
informal setting, as well as encouraging a growth mindset and stimulating
intellectual curiosity, will ultimately provide them with the skills and
motivation to continue their journey beyond higher education and into
further lifelong learning opportunities.  
 

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