Staff development · Personal Development Tutors
PDT training set
Nine dice. A student at your door.
A version of TRIAGED for Personal Development Tutor (PDT) training. It supports continuing professional development for academic staff, who work through complex student scenarios in a structured and collaborative way. Participants consider the presenting concern, identify appropriate sources of support and discuss effective signposting, building confidence in responding to students whose needs may extend beyond the PDT role.
Nine dice, six faces each, rolled in order. Click the highlighted box to roll, or press Roll next die.
Developed at Edinburgh Napier University in collaboration with Kev Head, Dr Alex McIntyre and Pamela Calabrese.
Montgomery, A., McIntyre, A., Head, K., & Calabrese, P. (2026). TRIAGED- PDT [Dice-based CPD game].
In your role, information about a student rarely arrives all at once. It emerges over time, and sometimes it changes what you thought you knew. TRIAGED is designed to mirror that: each die brings new information, and your judgement about what the student needs has to adapt as it lands.
- Roll one die at a time, in order.
- As a group, build the result into your student using your experience as a tutor and your knowledge of the university and its support services. How might this present in a student like them, and how does it fit with what you already know? The dice give you the prompt; your knowledge and experience supply the detail.
- Before you roll again, note what this might mean for the student, where you might signpost, and why. Be ready to revise earlier judgements as new information emerges.
- When every die has been rolled, decide what you would do next, and where it goes beyond the PDT role.
In preparation
Your student
Work through it as a first conversation. What is the presenting concern, and what might sit underneath it? Where would you signpost, and at what point does this go beyond the PDT role?
Before you start
Scenarios can land close to students participants have supported, or to their own experience. Agree at the start that the group discusses the dice, not real students, and leave time at the end to talk through where to get support after a difficult conversation. There is fuller guidance on running it with a group.
The dice generate a composite student. No roll describes a real student, and no combination is meant to predict how a student will present or what they need.