The 'beauty' of working your way through unknown territory!

As part of a servicing team we teach on many different programmes and this year, Stephen and I were allocated the Beauty Therapy students. Of all the classes I have taught over the years, I have never taught this vocational group but as always we were up for the challenge. We consulted members of the team who had taught on this Programme of study before and they were able to provide some great materials that we thought we would use in our teaching.

In the first session for all Core Skills classes we discuss the flexibility of the curriculum and identify the things we might cover with each group. Essay writing was not top of their wishlists although they acknowledged the importance of learning such a skill. Stephen and I got together to consider what we would cover instead for summative assessment and came up with a reworking of some old materials that were produced some years before.

What we decided on was to put together a 'research and design project' and although we are both following slightly different paths the students will be working on a project that involves all four communication skills: reading, writing, speaking and listening.

The project was split into three parts: research, meeting, design.

Research - the students worked in groups to decide whether they would be designing a leaflet or a website. This would involve researching professional beauty therapy salons, examining how they advertise treatments and so on. Once tasks had been assigned and agreed upon, students were asked to consider the following: target audience for the website, purpose of the website, rating the website, improvements to the website etc using their analytical skills.

Meeting - the students took part in a meeting to share their research and make decisions as a group. They were invited to invent a company name, logo, address etc and detail what services this ficitious company would provide.

Design - as part of the marketing strategy and self-promotion the students were given the opportunity to design either:

• the company's new website
• a leafleat advertising a new treatment

The submission was assessed on layout, language accuracy, paragraph structure and overal effect.

I think Stephen and I have learned quite a lot about the industry too being involved in such a project!