UNSW Phase 1 Medicine has 250-300 students per cohort and is structured around Scenario Group Sessions (SGS). Part of my teaching involves facilitating these SGS with a specific group of 12-15 students each time. Overall, the Medicine program is centred around the achievements of eight desired capabilities by graduation. As such, all learning activities for each of the three phases of the program are anchored to one or more of these capabilities.

After reflecting on my facilitation of a group in the Society & Health course (MFAC1527) in T1 in 2020, I could see that it was not always obvious to the students what Graduate Capability was the focus of any particular activity or learning outcome. Hence, when I facilitated another SGS group in the Ageing & Endings B course (MFAC1526, T3 2020), I revisited my learning during my Graduate Certificate in University Learning & Teaching (GCULT) about different frameworks for categorising educational goals. After researching the educational literature further, I made a priority of aligning each learning outcome with a learning activity and the appropriate Graduate Capabilities, using verbs to describe the cognitive processes by which the student would gain knowledge in-line with Bloom’s revised Taxonomy. This not only clarifies the learning outcomes for the students, but also for me as a teacher. It helps me to plan the SGS appropriately and give clearer instructions and emphasis to activities.

I then spent 5 minutes at the beginning of each session discussing this. This approach, which motivated my students to engage with learning by understanding the intended goals, outcomes and benefits led to that group rating the overall satisfaction of the quality of my teaching at 5.82/6, (100% agreement; 92% response rate), well above the School average of 5.47/6.

Importantly, students specifically mentioned my inclusion of the Graduate Capabilities in my teaching: ‘Went the extra mile in helping us link SG sessions to graduate capabilities which we appreciate.’; ‘Going above and beyond with teaching SG! Especially writing up all the grad caps for each session’. Based on the feedback, I continued with this approach in 2021 and 2022 when I taught the Phase 1 Society & Health course (MFAC1527, T1). Again, feedback was very positive (e.g. ‘clearly set out the learning objectives for each SG session’), with the overall satisfaction of the quality of my teaching rating 6/6 (100% agreement) and 5.92/6 (100% agreement), respectively.

I shared my approach with convenors and fellow facilitators during a weekly meeting in 2021, with everyone agreeing it was an excellent strategy, and one of the facilitators immediately asking if they could adopt this approach in their own class. I am currently using this strategy in the Ageing and Endings A course (T3, 2023).

A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: a revision of Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives (2001). Editors: Lorin W. Anderson, David Krathwohl; Contributors: Peter W. Airasian et al.