Supportive

INCLUSIVE AND SUPPORTIVE: Learning and teaching delivery is inclusive and participatory. It reflects the diversity of student strengths and needs, and actively supports student mental health and wellbeing.

The current circumstances are particularly challenging to students’ mental health and wellbeing. In the current circumstances, staff are encouraged to be particularly proactive in fostering supportive connections for students: with themselves, between students, and within proactively supportive learning communities.

The personal tutoring relationship is the foundation for this supportive approach, and even more important to consider in the current circumstances. The new Personal Tutoring model provides a consistent approach for staff to follow to ensure students can make the most of this essential support for their learning. The Learning Well framework provides further resources and activities to embed support for students’ wellbeing, within the tutoring system and in the curriculum more widely.

With a particular focus on the role of connection and a sense of belonging as the foundation for psychological security, the Learning Well approach promotes supportive connections as essential resources for both successful study and a flourishing life. Based on the well-established, neuroscientific Compassionate Mind model of Professor Paul Gilbert1, the framework has been developed at the Student Wellbeing Service over several years as the basis for teaching students a mindset and set of strategies equipping them to better manage the emotional and psychological challenges of learning (and life).

The foundation of the framework is the promotion of emotional literacy centering on better understanding of the role of emotions and emotion regulation in successful learning, which in turn:

  • Recognises the specific emotional challenges of learning (eg. the inherent anxiety attendant to inevitable uncertainty and risk of failure) and of student life (eg the emotional impact of transitions)

  • Supports the development of learning mindsets to help with managing these challenges - a compassionate mindset providing the psychological underpinning for growth, belonging, and purpose mindsets

  • Focuses particularly on the role of connection and a sense of belonging as the foundation for psychological security and resilience

  • Promotes a values-based approach to motivation and the achievement of goals

  • Develops practical individual and social strategies and practices to support emotion regulation, with application to specific learning challenges such as transitions, working in groups, assessment, feedback and equality and diversity competence.

To support the delivery of Learning Well materials within the blended learning curriculum, the two key recommendations for applying the approach in the blended learning context are:

  1. Encourage each student to map their supportive connections and resources
    The key Learning Well activity is for students to personalise and continue to update a map of personal, pastoral and academic support networks. The mapping document is owned by the student and serves as the basis for partnership between the student and their personal tutor or other support staff in identifying strengths, needs and relevant sources of support. This should be undertaken with a particular focus on support within the blended learning context.

  1. Assign each student to a ‘key group’ for mutual peer support
    Each student should be assigned to a key group of around 8 (maximum of 12) students, ideally as part of a personal tutoring group and at least one core unit with weekly small group/seminar teaching. With scaffolded weekly interactions, this key group is actively promoted as a source of mutual peer support and a key building block of the student’s learning community and support network. The group should not primarily be used for group assessments (unless the assessment is of things like teamwork and supportive discussion), and instead serves as an opportunity to learn strategies and practices to support effective groupwork and community-building.

The Learning Well materials can then be delivered within this key learning group, reinforcing and strengthening support through the personal tutoring system while providing a foundation for developing wider communities of learning.