We’ve caught up with recently promoted Pathway 3 colleagues to hear about their approaches to scholarship of teaching and learning and what advice they would give to others planning on applying for promotion.
Short intro about who you are:
I am a Pathway 3 academic based in the School of Biological Sciences in the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences and I was promoted to Professor of Life Sciences Education in 2024.
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?
Much of my educational research and practice is informed by pedagogic literature on ‘Students as Partners’ and ‘Self-regulated learning’. At Cardiff University I led a ‘shadow module’ initiative from 2015-2020, which fostered effective student-led collaborative learning and positively impacted thousands of students. I shared our ‘Shadow module’ approach as a book chapter in ‘Flexibility and Pedagogy in Higher Education’ (2020) to support other academics to facilitate peer-led collaboration and establish effective student-led learning communities in their own contexts. Since 2020, at the University of Bristol, I have supported PASS leaders in the School of Biological Sciences to scaffold and run effective peer-led sessions to support our students to improve subject knowledge, prepare effectively for their upcoming assessments and develop student feedback literacy for self-regulated learning.
What innovative approach to teaching, learning, or curriculum design have you developed, evaluated, and shared with others?
Following an unsuccessful professorial promotion application in 2021-22, I acted on feedback from my Head of School and the Dean of FHLS who recommended I look for ways to have more impact at university level here at the University of Bristol. I acted on this feedback by taking a secondment role as a senior academic developer (2022-2024) for the curriculum enhancement programme (CEP), which involved working with a range of programmes, including Law, Maths, Innovation, Health Sciences, Policy Studies and Engineering. This university-level role involved co-designing and leading workshops with our PVC and aPVCs of Education to support programme teams to align to our strategic university objectives: new structure of the academic year, programme simplification and our new assessment strategy. I supported programme teams from different disciplines to create curriculum maps and to consider their student’s journeys through their taught programme(s). The 13 curriculum festival workshops I co-led in 2022-23 were attended by a total of 340 staff from 11 schools and impacted a minimum of 110 programmes (UG and PGT). Our CEP initiatives featured highly in our university’s 2023 TEF submission, contributing significantly to us obtaining a ‘Silver’ award overall, with ‘Gold’ for student outcomes.
Can you describe a time when you contributed to or led an educational initiative that enhanced teaching practice within or beyond your School?
From 2020-2023 I was a project partner on an educational research grant (€420,000 total; €90,000 to UoB), which supported me to work with partner organisations in Belgium, Wales, Spain, and Portugal to evaluate and enhance assessment and feedback practices in Higher Education. I co-founded the EAT-Erasmus website to host the resources we developed, including an online training course, resources/case-studies and frameworks for accrediting individual and teamexcellence in assessment and feedback practices which academics can download and adapt for free worldwide. The website had received 6965 unique hits at the time of my promotion application, which I used as evidence of impact. As part of the EAT Erasmus project, I led an international webinar series (5 international webinars from March–May 2023 attended by 264 unique individuals with 418 recording views) and five one-day in-person events in the UK, Portugal and Spain (175 participants from 25 countries). The EAT-Erasmus webinars and workshops generated invitations to run assessment events for HEIs in the UK and EU.
How have you built and demonstrated sustained impact through your scholarship of teaching and learning activities?
I demonstrated sustained impact on enhancing educational practices in Health and Life Sciences over the past 10 years, through my roles as Education Theme Lead for The Physiological Society (2016-2020) and Outreach Education and Diversity (OED) trustee for the Society for Experimental Biology (SEB; 2020-25). These successive international leadership roles empowered me to influence policy, develop new education-focused symposia to empower academics to share good practice, and to fund impactful international outreach, education, and diversity initiatives. One example of how I evidenced impact in my promotion application was the growth in capacity of our SEB educational symposia at our main annual meeting (which typically attracts c.800 scientists from over 50 countries), from a 1-day event in Montpellier in 2022 to 7 half-day sessions Edinburgh in 2023. In 2023 I wrote a proposal to SEB council to provide £10K for annual educational research grants (members £2000; non-members £200) which supports academics to evidence an ability to obtain external funding for SoTL and provides bespoke support for publishing educational research.
What advice would you give to colleagues who are planning to apply for promotion and wish to meet the E4 criteria?
Proactively develop professional learning networks beyond your school/faculty, ideally collaborating with people from other institutions within or beyond the UK. This will enable you to learn about and incorporate good practice from elsewhere, become a ‘UoB lead’ on multi-institutional collaborative projects and share your research/SoTL outputs more widely. Collate evidence of impact as you go to avoid having to collect this data retrospectively and remember that full articles in pedagogic journals are not the only valid evidence of positive impact. For example, I evidenced my sustained impact on SoTL as “28 peer-reviewed publications between 2016 and 2023: 2 journal articles, 1 book chapter, 21 conference papers and 5 professional reports”.
Leave a Reply