In this post, Dr. W. Victoria Lee demonstrates that the Skills for Success Framework is often already embedded within existing courses at the University of Edinburgh. She emphasises that within her Technology & Environment 2A (TE2A) course, specific, targeted implementation of the Skills fro Success Framework wasn’t actually necessary because the skills were already there. Critically, however, the Skills for Success Framework helped to clearly articulate the clear skill-work the TE2A course was doing for students. Dr. W. Victoria Lee is Lecturer in Architecture and Environment at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA) in Edinburgh College of Art (ECA). This post is part of the Skills for Success Framework series.
When a new institution-wide framework is introduced, it can be reassuring to realise that it does not need to add another layer to an existing course, but can instead provide a language for work already underway.
That was my experience when I mapped my course, Technology & Environment 2A (TE2A), against the University of Edinburgh’s Skills for Success Framework. At this point, the course had already undergone substantial redesign and pedagogic refinements shaped by student and external examiner feedback, as well as my own reflective practice through the Edinburgh’s Teaching Award. When reading the Skills for Success Framework, I recognised that many skills were already rooted in the course, but the Framework gave me a clearer, shared language for naming those skills, signposting them to students, and helping students to articulate them beyond the course itself.
Teaching building science as part of design
TE2A is a compulsory second-year course in the undergraduate architecture degree programme. It focuses on building performance and energy alongside occupant comfort and wellbeing. It is a technical course within a degree that many students experience as more strongly rooted in the arts and humanities. Students often feel they are switching modes and languages when they move from the design studio into a building science lecture. Equations and calculations can therefore feel separate from design or even in tension with it. Yet, a good enough understanding of building science is essential if students are to design sustainable architecture and nurturing places for people.
This context shaped my approach to the course. I wanted to reduce students’ anxiety about technical material and reframe quantitative analysis as something that can support, rather than hinder, design. My aim was not to turn architecture students into engineers, but rather to help them move confidently between architectural representation and environmental evidence and to recognise that technical knowledge is not separate from design thinking, but part of it.
Upon close reading of the Skills for Success Framework, I realised that the skills within it were already embedded in what students were asked to do in TE2A. Having been developed through iterative reflective practice, the assessments for this course already required students to practise reflection, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, problem solving, data and digital literacy, adaptivity, and inclusivity. The Skills for Success mapping exercise then helped make this more visible and prompted me to signpost those dimensions more clearly in briefs and in how I present the course.
Reflective writing and skills development
One example of how the Skills for Success skills are already embedded in TE2A is the series of short reflective writing assignments within the course called News, Views, Reflections (NVR). I introduced NVR to facilitate the meaning-making process through which students can contextualise and integrate the course material in such a way that some of the core principles can travel with them into design studios. Approximately fortnightly, students respond to a recent newspaper or magazine article with a topic on the nexus of architecture, environment, and society. The students are encouraged to connect their response to TE2A lectures, studio work, material from other courses, current affairs, and their own experiences.
Reflective writing assignments are unusual in technical courses where assessment tasks often have ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers. In TE2A, however, NVRs are one of the clearest instances where the skills within Skills for Success are practised. They foster curiosity by asking students to engage with live debates rather than only textbook examples. They help develop reflection by inviting students to make sense of new information in relation to their own learning. They strengthen communication because students have to express ideas clearly and concisely. They also encourage critical thinking because students must weigh claims, question assumptions, and connect evidence to wider social and environmental contexts. Equally, NVRs create space for inclusivity and individuality by allowing students to bring different perspectives, experiences, and concerns to the same prompt.
This matters in architecture because questions of environmental performance are also questions about people: who feels comfortable in a space, whose needs are assumed, who is excluded by design norms, and how technical decisions shape access and everyday life. In this way, reflection is not an optional extra in a technical course; it is one of the ways technical knowledge becomes meaningful.
From technical analysis to design judgement
The second summative assessment in TE2A, the Precedent Project, makes a different cluster of skills within the Skills for Success Framework visible. Working in pairs, students analyse a building they have already studied in studio. Using simplified heat-balance calculations alongside graphical and quantitative methods, they evaluate its environmental performance and then propose climate adaptation strategies supported by recalculations. Here, sustainability must be demonstrated rather than simply claimed.
To do this well, students must translate a real building into an analysable case, make reasonable assumptions, interpret evidence, test interventions, and communicate their findings. In the process, they practice collaboration, problem solving, data and digital literacy, adaptivity, and communication. They also learn an important lesson about the relationship between design and evidence: technical analysis does not sit outside creative work, but helps shape and justify it.
Architecture, after all, is a human-centred synthesis of art, science, and culture. In redesigning TE2A, I deliberately broadened the course beyond the physical behaviour of buildings to include occupants’ experience and wellbeing. Students are asked not only how buildings perform, but for whom they perform, under what conditions, and with what consequences.
For me, the value of the Skills for Success Framework lies in how it helps me notice and name the learning already taking place in TE2A. For students, it provides a language for articulating the skills they are developing, so that these can be carried into other courses and future professional contexts. For educators, it offers a useful prompt to keep reflecting on and refining how those skills are embedded and made visible through teaching. In this sense, the Framework is not an extra layer added to the course, but a way of making its deeper educational value more explicit.
W. Victoria Lee
Victoria is the Lecturer in Architecture and Environment at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA) in Edinburgh College of Art (ECA). Her work examines how design, retrofit, use and maintenance shape the relationship between people and buildings in practice.
