Engaging in online peer-led group reflective practice through the Share Your Research Ideas project: Students’ and tutors’ reflective accounts

This paper presents the retrospective reflective accounts of three master’s alumni and their tutors who openly shared their thoughts on their experience of engaging in online peer-led group reflective practice through the ‘Share Your Research Ideas’ (SYRI) project. This project ran at the University of Manchester during the second half of the academic year 2019-2020, a time of the COVID-19 pandemic. It consisted of a series of online seminar sessions, which offered a space for students to reflect individually and in groups upon their experience of undertaking educational research. The contribution of this reflective piece is threefold, it aims to: 1) illustrate how the ‘Peer-Led Group Reflective Practice’ (PLGRP) pedagogical approach can be monitored and facilitated in an online learning environment, 2) identify the influence of such a pedagogical approach on those students who engaged in the project, 3) show how reflective conversations between tutor and students over time and the learnings obtained from them can inform and shape course design and subsequent learning experience. Thus, our goals are to document how the reflective conversations undertaken during and after the SYRI project contributed to significant student experience and life-long learning and to draw implications for future practice.