We’ve recently caught up with Pathway 3 colleagues who have recently been promoted and asked what impact their scholarship of teaching and learning had had on the promotion process.
BILT: Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Becky: I’m a Pathway 3 academic based in the School of Electrical, Electronic, and Mechanical Engineering (EEME). I was promoted to Associate Professor in Engineering Education in 2025.
BILT: From your successful application for promotion, can you give an example of using educational scholarship or evidence to transform your teaching or assessment practice, and what impact this had?
Becky: One scholarship-informed approach that changed my practice was introducing a peer review process in a large first-year practical unit. This was motivated by my reflections on the challenges encountered while teaching students how to write effective lab reports, and was informed by existing literature about feedback and teaching writing skills. I designed a scaffolded incremental approach, and iteratively refined the process in response to regular evaluation of student experience and performance.
The peer review process has impacted thousands of students, increased engagement with feedback, and transformed feedback into a continuous dialogue between students, their peers, and academics. It has received positive BLUE feedback, and students who engaged in the process achieved better outcomes in the summative assessment. I shared this work internally through local seminars and BILT activities, and externally through conference and journal publications.
I used this example to support both the E3 (the impact on students) and E4 (grants to fund the project) criteria in my application for promotion.
BILT: What innovative approach to teaching, learning, or curriculum design have you developed, evaluated, and shared with others?
Becky: I embed active learning and a flipped classroom approach in to all of my teaching. I started doing this because it felt more intuitive, and later found the pedagogical background while engaging with literature during the CREATE scheme. Using a flipped classroom allows me to focus on active learning during lectures, so students are facilitated to apply concepts to increasingly complex authentic problems. I support students to work as collaboratively (or not!) as they want to on a range of example questions, providing 1:1 and small group support in large lecture settings by circulating around the room throughout lectures, addressing common difficulties as they arise in a responsive manner.
This approach has resulted in consistently high student satisfaction (e.g. BLUE survey overall satisfaction >97% in 2023-24), and has been widely shared by the School Education Director in guidance for the Faculty of Engineering to help colleagues update and improve their teaching delivery post-pandemic.
I used this example to support the E1 criteria in my application for promotion.
BILT: Can you describe a time when you contributed to or led an educational initiative that enhanced teaching practice within or beyond your School?
Becky: As co-Head of the Engineering Education Research Group (EERG), I have brought together colleagues across the four engineering schools to share and develop best practices, and to develop a supportive network of teaching-focused academics. I have mentored multiple colleagues, supporting them to implement award-winning innovative teaching practices, design pedagogical research projects, and successfully secure funding.
I also created a student branch of EERG and secured support to embed engineering education as a final-year project option, to facilitate closer collaborations between students and staff on pedagogical projects. This has meant more students are able to develop diverse skills by proposing and taking part in pedagogical projects that directly impact the educational experience across the School.
Following the establishment of the Faculty of Science and Engineering, I organised an away day with teaching-focused colleagues across the Faculty to identify opportunities. This allowed us to secure Faculty funding for inter-disciplinary pedagogical projects, supporting networking and dissemination of work, and employing students to work on summer internships.
I used these examples to support the E4 (leading EERG), LC2 (establishment of Student EERG and the Faculty-level group), and LC3 (mentoring colleagues) criteria in my application for promotion.
BILT: How have you built and demonstrated sustained impact through your scholarship of teaching and learning activities?
Becky: I built sustained impact through two main routes: structuring my own pedagogical projects to include evaluation and dissemination routes, and leading EERG.
Carefully planning my pedagogical research projects enables stronger evaluation and wider dissemination. Through dissemination of well-evaluated projects I have connected with others who have adopted my practices, both locally (e.g. the School Education Director incorporating my active learning practices into Faculty-wide guidance) and nationally (e.g. my lab report writing scaffold being adopted by colleagues in Swansea).
Leadership of EERG has allowed me to sustain impact by consistently providing activities to facilitate colleagues connecting and forming collaborations, and allocating resources to support colleagues with their own pedagogical projects. It has also allowed me to raise the profile of engineering education research by establishing the student branch of EERG, embedding engineering education as an undergraduate project option, and starting to make connections across the wider Faculty. It also allowed me to secure Faculty support to host the Horizons in STEM conference in 2024, which demonstrated the growth of pedagogical research within the University to an international audience.
I used these examples to evidence the E4 criteria in my application for promotion.
BILT: What advice would you give to colleagues who are planning to apply for promotion and wish to meet the E4 criteria?
Becky: My approach was to focus on the challenges I encountered in my own teaching practices, then use the literature to inform the changes I made, treating each change as a mini-research project with planned evaluation and iteration over time. Starting from the fundamentals helps to ensure that work can be funded and then disseminated more widely, which then opens up other opportunities to grow the impact, e.g. influencing the practice of others, or contributing to and leading wider initiatives. This is therefore what I would recommend for others, while noting that there are other examples of completely different routes available! I think finding the passion you have for improving things, and then doing it and sharing it in a structured way is probably the most general advice that could be given.
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