Catherine delivers interactive workshop-style sessions that allow students to get to know each other and foster a sense of belonging. The sessions help students to develop the academic skills needed for effective undergraduate study, including critical thinking, effective literature searching, essay structure, referencing and presentation skills.

Teaching area

Academic skills 

Course

Academic development (AD) for Business and Economics, core Level 3 Foundation module. There are roughly 90 ethnically diverse students in this cohort, the majority UK students, taught across six teaching groups. I’ve been teaching it since 2024/25.

Description

This module is delivered as workshop-style sessions in a seminar classroom, two hours per week. I run interactive sessions that prompt participation. My slides have a consistent format, and I always provide the basic slides in advance, so the students know what to expect. 

The first slide gives an overview of the session. I then provide my contact details, including a photo of my office door, my weekly student hours and the AD drop-in hours where I offer one-to-one support. I say that students don’t need to book – they can just turn up, and there’s no such thing as a stupid question.

After this introduction, I include any information-focused slides – such as reminders of social events – so that students are likely to take them in. If they’re tagged on to the final slides of the workshop, they’re often forgotten. Then, I aim to get students discussing a low-stakes topic as a warmer activity.

First workshop

In this session, it’s really important for students to get to know each other. I give them 5–10 minutes to chat to someone they don’t know, using these prompts:

• Why have you chosen to study at the University of Sussex?
• What’s your first impression of Sussex Uni?
• Why have you chosen to study the subject you’ve chosen?
• Do you know Brighton well? Tell your partner something you like about Brighton.
• How do you think your relationship with University teachers is different to the relationship with your school teachers?

The next questions are related to Business and Economics:

• If you could start a business with unlimited funding, what would it be?
• What’s one app or website you couldn’t live without?
• What’s your favourite brand and why?
• Do you follow any entrepreneurs on social media?
• Would you rather be a CEO or a content creator?

We then do a classic mingling activity. I give everyone a worksheet and they go around their classmates trying to find at least two students who match each statement. The students write their names in the box, adding any extra information. Instruction: find someone who…

• comes from a different part of the UK/world to you
• has talked/presented in front of an audience before
• speaks another language besides English
• wants to work for a big business or tech company like Google, Apple, Meta
• is commuting to uni rather than living on campus.

This activity helps students to learn each other’s names and find some things they have in common.

Expectations

Now we move on to an overview of the module. I cover the expectations, explaining the difference between seminars and lectures, and the independent study they need to do to complete the tasks set in the seminars. I tell them exactly what they need to do each week, as outlined on Canvas, the University of Sussex Virtual Learning Environment:

• Focus (topic) for the week
• Preparation before the seminar (read through the slides beforehand)
• Learn together in class
• Weekly materials (these may be texts to read that are related to the week’s input/ handouts/exercises)
• Reflection and getting ready for next week (self-study).

Skills for assessment

The Academic Development module helps students to develop skills needed for effective undergraduate study such as:

• Critical thinking, critical reading and note-taking
• Effective literature searching
• Structuring an essay
• Referencing sources
• Presentation skills.

To develop these skills, they work on a single piece of independent research across the two terms. As of 2026, it is an essay about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The essay question is written in conjunction with AD faculty from the Business School.

The question asks students to explain CSR, analyse why it matters in modern business and society, and critically assess how genuine CSR claims are in practice. Students must use real examples to evaluate whether companies act ethically or simply engage in greenwashing.

All the materials for the module are on Canvas. To encourage students to find their way around the site, I give them a quiz to find out key information, such as the minimum acceptable attendance rate, the two core texts and the assessment deadlines.

We go through the entire process of conducting research and essay writing in the workshops, and the students have a formative assessment in Week 5 of the semester to receive feedback and feedforward to further develop their academic skills.

Outcomes

Academic skills and student support

• The module covers assessment literacy and academic skills support, which can contribute to narrowing ethnicity awarding gaps. It also supports oracy in class and fosters confidence in presenting skills.
• Most students do well in their assessments, and while some students fail the assessments in the winter and spring terms, they pass them in the resit period during the summer.
  

Fostering sense of belonging

The interactive sessions prompt participation and allow students to get to know each other from the start of the course.

Comments

Many students come to the Foundation Year via the contextual offer from Sussex, with lower A–level grades than the average requirement and paying a reduced fee for this year.

Attendance varies greatly according to the times of day. A 9am class is always poorly attended – roughly 5% or fewer. A 4pm one is usually very well-attended – at least 60%. Students have told me this is because many of them commute to the University, and it is more expensive to travel before 9am. Some are also working evening or late-night shifts and find it difficult to get to class for that time. Towards submission times, I usually get a flurry of students come to see me for my student hours and AD drop-in sessions.

While it can sometimes be challenging to sustain the engagement of this cohort, especially in a 9am or 10am class, I really enjoy getting to know the students and being able to support them to navigate University systems and develop their academic skills.