This week, we’re catching up with our School Reps on what they’ve been up to and sharing exciting updates from their departments. Here we have Dominika Biel, School Rep for the School of Life Sciences, and the Environment (LSE)!
An update from Dominika
It’s been an incredibly busy few months for the LSE School – from networking events, career development to tackling student issues! As School Rep my goals are to improve communication between staff, reps, and students; widening student networks; and celebrating staff & student success. At the heart of it all has been listening to student feedback, leading discussions, and striving for change to develop the student academic experience.
To help better support students with giving feedback, I have created ‘How to give feedback’ posters which have been shared across all five departments. I’ve also produced a ‘Rep Support Toolkit’ with all info reps might need when listening, passing on or actioning student feedback. The reps have found this toolkit helpful when preparing for their Student-Staff Action Meetings. I’ve also summarised all Term 1 Student-Staff Action Meetings (SSAMs) for all departments and will be sharing them with the cohort. Most recently, I’ve organised PGT drop-in sessions to give students the opportunity to drop by, have a snack and share their experiences as a post grad in LSE.
I’ve helped organised, host and promote events such as our BioSci Alumni Careers Symposium, giving students the chance to speak and connect with RH Alumni, helping foster student networking opportunities. I’ve also supported our LSE Careers Team with designing a Careers Bootcamp, guided by student feedback. The day included sessions on networking, CV writing, further studies, AI in the workplace and more – the day was extremely engaging, thanks to the fantastic staff involved!
With the help of our fabulous reps, we’ve been a part of two successful Rep fairs, centred around speaking with LSE students and professors. Thank you to all our amazing reps who volunteered their time to helping improve our school.
Term 1 also consisted of many meetings discussing school-level feedback and discussing ways in which we can better the school. With the School Director of Education and Vice Dean of Education, we have worked on feedback relating to timetable release and Personal Tutor experiences. I developed a timetable release survey which received 300 responses detailing student experience with the current late-release timetable. The results have been passed onto the college, meanwhile we are working to provide students with as much support information and advice as possible – we hope that our work will be able to drive change beyond our school, at a university level.
Looking into Term 2, I will be working on gathering student feedback regarding Personal Tutoring. The Education-leading staff and I are actively taking actions to improve the personal tutor system; we hope to get as much feedback as possible to ensure necessary steps are taken for student satisfaction. I will also be working on developing an Engagement Toolkit for teaching staff, aimed to provide ideas about how to engage with students, fostering student-led education through interactive lectures, using activities which engage students in their learning and giving students the time to ask questions.
I am very excited about my newly launched Celebrating Student & Staff project- the entirety of the LSE body has received a nomination form, where they have the chance to celebrate a member of staff and a member of the student body. Anybody can be nominated, by anybody! It’s a fantastic way to celebrate the hard work and successes of our community.
What’s happening across the School of LSE?
LSE is currently offering 15 Moodle Champions bursaries for a project where students will be reviewing Moodle pages from across the school. In collaboration with e-learning and our bursary holders, we will produce helpful guidance for staff and following the review we will offer workshops and drop-in sessions for staff to help them make useful improvements to their Moodle pages. The reviews will be completed by the end of this terms, and guidance will be shared with staff in term 3.
On 22nd January we ran LSE Wellbeing Day. The day was co-created and run with student volunteers, and we had loads of events to help students unwind and focus on their wellbeing after the January exams. There was lots of crafting, journaling, nature walks, Pokémon Go walks, yoga and a host of other activities, culminating with a very successful quiz with lots of pizza!
We are organising lunchtime events which allow staff to showcase their teaching innovations, sharing good practice across the school. We have already seen examples from the small trial we did of this last year of excellent practice being taken up in other departments.
Samuel Fairlamb (Professor in Psychology) created a series of videos in the summer for our LSE students to help with their transition to university. From a campus tour to an overview of our support services, the videos have had many views (the campus tour video has had over 400 views).