HN Events students - having fun, being assessed, applying skills, fundraising and addressing the CfE agenda!

I was lucky enough to teach both the HN Events groups in 2010-11 and bonded with both classes very well. It was also the first time that I had worked with Caroline Patterson and June Wigfield, the brains behind the Events Programme.

My role was to teach and assess one of our HN Communication Units called Analysing and Presenting Complex Communication (APCC). This involved the students reading, analysing and evaluating a complex report (on the 2012 Summer Olympics Impact Study), writing a report (on a major event) and organising and contributing to a formal meeting to discuss their findings. These are all skills invaluable to their learning and it was imperative that meetings were held prior to delivery (please see curriculum planning meeting notes below) and to be in regular contact with both tutors throughout the semester. This worked well and both classes achieved 100% pass rates for the subject.

Some months after I had finished teaching these cohorts, they were ready to be assessed for their group project, which was part of the Events Application Unit. 

Students assembled into groups and developed their skills in negotiation, diplomacy, written and spoken communication, evaluation, analysis, financial acumen, organisation, employer and customer awareness to name but a few.

What struck me was the fact that the students really were working together and in many cases those students who were not being assessed came along to show their support to their peers. Not only were the students planning, running, advertising and reflecting on their event, they were being assessed by Caroline and June. It was impressive to see students applying a myriad of skills at the various events and they clearly saw the importance of learning and developing such skills for their future.

The events that the students successfully ran in 2011 were a race night, a Bond themed evening, a comedy show and a battle of the bands event. For 2012 events that have been agreed on are a murder mystery event held at Edinburgh Zoo, a rock concert, a stand-up comedy night and a burlesque evening. A great deal of money for charity was raised through these events.

Addressing Curriculum for Excellence – the four capacities
The purpose of the curriculum is encapsulated in the four capacities - to enable each young person to be a successful learner, a confident individual, a responsible citizen and an effective contributor. There is no doubt  that both the Communication and Events Application Units were successful in addressing all four capacities. In particular students were able to evidence their levels of enthusiasm, motivation, application of communication skills, creative thought, ambition, assessing risk, respect, making informed choices and decisions, enterprising attitude, communicating effectively in different settings.

For some visual evidence of past events, please see below. As you will see, the staff were involved in the events and had a wonderful time.

Client contact and the third lecturer

Sometimes Higher National Programmes of Study do not include HN Communication Units within their framework. However, communication skills are still crucial to the development of the learner’s vocational expertise. In the second semester of this academic session, Media and Audio Visual and Communication lecturers got together to discuss and implement some initiatives to help develop students’ communication skills within a vocational context.

Communication is clearly an important part of interpersonal interaction and, of course, teamwork is all about interpersonal interaction. Open communication is a fundamental part of effective teamwork in so far as it allows team members to understand each other’s point of view, to share ideas, to express feelings and to articulate plans.

Gail English, Carol Fyfe and Mark Hetherington met to discuss ways that would benefit their HN students and came up with a proposal that was successfully delivered.

Mark has experience of working with clients in a previous role as Course Leader for the BA (Hons) Communication Programme at Napier University. This involved students working on a variety of ‘live projects’ dealing with clients within the Communication industry. Central to the Graded Units in question, is that the students secure a project, which is linked to a ‘live’ client brief. This is then fleshed out into a proposal which alongside the client brief is central to the project. Technically, you could say in the ‘real world’ the client brief is in fact a legal document and must be treated with due respect. 

It was important that the students were realistic about the potential limitations of their project and it was reinforced that the learners should always be mindful of work needing to be completed for other aspects of their Programme of Study. It was therefore important that the students did not fall into the trap of the client making too many demands on them as students. The concept of professionalism really was the watchword for this session. Mark drew up a series of slides that would help the students recognise the importance of how to deal with a client professionally and structured his talk around the following areas:

1. Client meetings and client contact
2. Client relationship
3. The first meeting 
4. Being professional throughout the duration of the project.

Mark, Carol and Gail were keen to draw out the issue of transferring the student’s knowledge into the ‘real world’ and introducing a new lecturer for this session worked well. Mark was able to underscore the issues covered by Carol and Gail in previous classes, reinforcing the pivotal nature of positive client relationships. Some of the issues covered in the session, which was peppered with some light humour and anecdotal commentary, centred around a classroom setting where students were able to communicate their thoughts in an atmosphere conducive to expressing and allaying any potential fears, hopes, ambitions. Questions were encouraged and as a result the session doubled as a confidence builder, providing a catalyst, prodding even the most nervous learners into action!
The importance of recording and collating meaningful evidence to the relevance of listening skills were covered and feedback was uniformly positive from the learners. Students felt the session was very helpful to them, they understood the relevance of the discussion, could make connections easily with reference to applying theory to practice and that their creative input could be credited by using a meaningful recording system.

Graded unit client

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Healthy eating, communication, ICT and general well-being

Having watched Jamie Oliver's School Dinners programme, students research information about healthy eating and then create leaflets using Microsoft Publisher. When they've finished this, they devise a questionnaire which is used to gather information on the eating habits of fellow students and staff. The information is then compiled into a report that includes comments from the students based on their awareness of healthy eating issues. This activity not only helps to develop communication and ICT skills, but also clearly links with the issue of health and well-being. An example of one of the leaflets produced by the students is seen below.

Graded Unit pitches - where three heads are better than two!

Carol Fyfe and Gail English are currently team teaching the Year 2 Graded Unit for the AVT course -  a  course  unique to the Media and Audio Visual Section  at Stevenson College. Several years of hard work have gone into the fine tuning of this delivery and their last external  SQA verification declared them to be at the ‘cutting edge' of delivery and a centre of excellence for the delivery of Audio Visual Technology.


However – there is always room for improvement and  Communication will take centre stage as part of our continuing strategy of essential skills delivery  for the Graded Unit. A  Previous successful collaboration  focused in on in the need to place the client at the centre of any working brief and the on -going  professional communication associated with this. The resulting power point presentation has become an integral part of the GU delivery and we hope to recreate this success by embedding vocationally relevant strategies and tactics associated with oral presentation skills and the ‘pitch’ into the GU calendar.


The 'pitch' will be filmed – offering further opportunities for reflective practice, peer  and tutor assessment, problem solving, self-management, self awareness and improvement, joined up thinking and participative working, to name but a few.

The AV students are required to present / pitch the proposal for their Graded Unit project towards the end of November as part of the Planning Stage.

Despite the fact it is expected that  GU2 level students would automatically pay heed to oral presentation techniques  -  the enormity of the GU task somehow takes precedence  and the content of the pitch becomes the total focus.

As future Creative Industries professionals the art of the pitch may well be an integral part of their job and could mean the difference between winning or losing valuable work.

Mark will observe the presentations in 2011-12 offering constructive feedback and in 2012-13 he will deliver a workshop on oral presentation techniques. This workshop will be tailored to the Graded Unit brief and will cover areas such as:

• Addressing nerves
• How to use visuals
• Content
• Research and rehearsal
• Pitching at an appropriate level
• Discourse
• Factors that contribute to effective and ineffective presentation delivery

It is anticipated that the workshop will add value to preparation for the Graded unit and augment the essential and key skills required to become a successful  employee within the  Creative industries.

One  of the major benefits associated with an  awareness of  good presentation technique is  clearer thinking and reflective practice. These are also essential skills associated with production. Students who are ideas focused are  apt to (initially) present woolly  not fully considered proposals and oral presentation skills strategies will encourage them to focus and at the end of the day reach a usable brief much more quickly. It is also one means of complying with the reasonable assistance rule within the GU.


In this instance the learners will be imposing order and logical process naturally - sharpening their thinking and saving valuable time. This way we get two for the price of one, hopefully - a handy refresher course and a more lucid presentation of their original ideas. The refresh on Oral Presentation skills will transfer to the linked Work Experience Unit where they are looking at interview techniques , presenting their talent and skills to potential employers face to face and through their show reels in whatever medium they feel is correct for them.


The CITV 2 students also have to present re their show reel medium and content for their Graded Unit and both classes come together for Work Experience so perhaps the opportunity for the AVT second years to transfer knowledge which will help the CITV 2's with their presentation skills.


There is no doubt that this collegiate approach to teaching and assessment adds value to the learning of the students and it is worth noting that the balance of a team involves having people whose experience, skills, perspectives, interests and contributions complement one another, rather than duplicate or counteract each other. Bringing in an expert from another area of the College (or outwith a lecturing team) can be highly beneficial. Learners may not know the lecturer, so they will not have any preconceptions about the person delivering the session and may feel comfortable communicating with a ‘guest speaker’.


The slides below show the likely content of the workshop.

Effective and ineffective presentation techniques

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Energy Saving Event (27/10/11)

Energy Saving Event

Joyce's Science Access class held their Energy Saving Event in the foyer on Wednesday 27 October. They were just back from the October week’s holiday, one or two were absent, students were tired, and (human) energy was low. However, they decided the show must go on.

At 9.30, they started setting up equipment and display boards, and were ready for action by 11am. At first things were quiet, but soon we were in full swing. They announced our presence, asked other students to share their energy-saving ideas, and generally drew attention to the fact that this was Energy Saving Week. About 100 students shared their ideas but many more were aware of the event and stopped to look at the displays.

The Science students did themselves proud. They organised themselves into shifts, enjoyed talking with other students, took photographs, and were visibly growing in confidence as the event wore on.

The following week, in class, Joyce gathered all the energy-saving ideas together and chose the best. One student agreed to type up all the ideas for publicity purposes later. They then reflected, as a group, on the whole process from planning to execution. What had gone well? What hadn’t gone so well? What might we have done better? What did we learn? This became a participatory engagement exercise in itself.

Students were then in a good position to write up a report about the whole event – just as they might for a funding body. These reports will count as their formal written assessment for Communication, and Joyce can already tell from the first few that the quality is excellent.

Danish Sizzler or Scots Wha Hae!

One of the members of the team, Stephen, was recently given the opportunity to do a session with a group of visiting Danish students on… pretty much anything he wanted. They were working with the Business department and Hamish (Section Head) wanted to give them a few sessions for interest and enjoyment on Scottish culture, and asked if he would do something related to literature. Having only an hour and a half, he decided to focus on short poems and explore language and cultural identity, and spent the 90 minutes trying to convince them that Scots is a language in its own right, not a dialect of English. Stephen started by showing them the beginning of Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen – a film in which the language is so challenging that when it was shown in England they had to subtitle the first 15 minutes – and asked them why it was so difficult to understand. They came up with the usual answers – the accents are very thick, they are speaking very fast etc. Which interestingly enough is the same difficulty that a Spanish speaker has understanding Catalan – or a Danish speaker has understanding Norwegian and Swedish. Scandinavians are, for this very reason, the perfect target group for such a discussion because they have an innate understanding that closely related languages can be very similar but still distinct. And a distinct language gives a distinct culture, as they explored through discussion of Liz Lochhead’s ‘Kidspoem\Bairnsang’ and translating Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘Wheesht, wheesht’ into English. By the end, Stephen had about half of them convinced.

Scottish literature

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