Sally Brown

This week and next week, members of the Committee of National Teaching Fellows and friends will be supporting the HEA by running a series of workshops in England, Wales and Northern Ireland on this year’s  application process for National Teaching Fellowships. With the deadlines having been so short this year, I am delighted that my NTF colleagues and host organisations have worked so hard to bring these events together in record time. Thank you everyone who has work so hard to make things happen!   I am looking forward to leading  the Newcastle gig on Friday 24th March, hosted by Steve McHanwell at Newcastle University and other events are running (or have run) in Belfast, Cardiff, Leeds (thanks Phil), Cambridge, Southampton,  Oxford and London (special thanks to  Simon Lancaster).  Sadly  Scotland is not part of the NTF scheme hence it’s only a partial UK tour! The slides we are all using, which have been endorsed by the HEA, are here:  ANTF-prospective-NTFs-2017-New-Deadlinelogo.pptx (432 downloads)

I’ve got an  exciting week this week as on Monday I am going to Lucas’s Nursery School morning cream tea for mums and grannies as role models.

Then on Tuesday, Phil and I fly to Amsterdam to work in Utrecht, keynoting at their annual teaching and learning conference on ‘internationalization’ and running a workshop for their Science Faculty on assessment. The title they gave me for the former was ‘It takes two to tango: internationalisation at the University of Utrecht’ so of course I have bought an appropriate frock (photo of me in the Hall where the Treaty of Utrecht was signed). My slides for the two sessions are here:   Utrecht-Science-Assess-march17-ww.pptx (521 downloads)   Utrecht-keynote-March2017Final-version-w.pptx (504 downloads)

Then I’m flying back on Thursday night, ready for my fourth workshop in the teaching excellence for Social Sciences (teSS)
series of workshops on writing for publication, for colleagues on teaching-focused contracts. This time it’s all about co-authoring, linking conference outputs and publications and getting past writer’s block: the slides are here:  teSS-writing-workshop-March-2017-w.pptx (419 downloads)

You can’t get much more fun than that!

Very early (for me) on the morning of Wednesday 1 March I am leading a webinar within the ascilte  e-Assessment special interest group ‘Transforming assessment’ webinar series, hosted by Geoff Crisp and Matthew Hillier  at the University of New South Wales. The slides for my session  on ‘Getting started in assessment and feedback in higher education’ are here: TA_webinar_1_mar_2017_slides.pptx (463 downloads) . It’s designed for novices in HE assessment and the people who support them. This for me is a crucial area, since every person undertaking assessment needs to be competent and confident in doing so, otherwise validity and reliability suffer.

It’s been a delight and surprise to discover that  120+ participants from around the world will be joining in in a session that is billed as a preview session for the excellent Assessment in Higher Education Conference: I look forward to making  a number of new friends and colleagues!

Here is the U-tube link to the recording of this webinar: it lasts nearly an hour, and it’s best to go to full-screen mode to see Sally’s slides well; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQn_IBkmPLw&feature=youtu.be

On Thursday 23 February I was working again with colleagues at Lincoln University helping then to draft HEA Fellowship applications.  I normally post web updates on or before  the day of the workshop, but ghastly weather meant I was preoccupied with getting home afterwards (and I did successfully thank goodness). For the workshop, I mainly used the UKPSF grid. grid-2015-11-1-2.docx (525 downloads)

For those of you who have enjoyed using my Biscuit game Biscuit-game.docx (622 downloads)  as a means of making people think about assessment criteria, you might enjoy listening to the podcast of the BBC Radio 4 programme The Philosopher’s Arms, broadcast at 8pm on Monday 20th February.

Cake or biscuit? Why Jaffa Cakes excite philosophers​​

This week, Phil and I and our sons and families  (including 4 grandchildren) are off to Center Parcs at Woburn for family delights so not much work will be done.

Normal service will resume  shortly after that with a mentoring weekend with our PhD by Publication group, then a trip to Utrecht University where I will be talking about Internationalization under the theme of ‘It takes two to tango’: I have already bought the frock so watch out for the pictures!

The third of the five sessions I am doing for the Faculty of Social Sciences at Sheffield University  supporting the scholarship of teaching-focused staff is  on Wednesday 15th February and is about  writing effective bids for small grants for teaching and learning projects. The slides are here. tESS-workshop-handouts-15-February-2017-w.docx (482 downloads) .
I am delighted to support this excellent initiative to encourage staff to write about and research their pedagogy, and it is very enjoyable to get to know a cohort of around 30 colleagues over several months and see their ‘writing-for-publication’ confidence and competence advance significantly.

I am delighted this week to be working with Phil on a dynamic workshop for the Institute of Technology at Blanchardstown in Ireland,  where we will be working with  course teams from computing and creative digital media who are coping with increased student numbers. We are starting with a quick fire  ‘Ten things that really matter about assessment” where we will each attempt to keep the other to time with ten slides in total  for 3 minutes each Blanchardstown-plenary-opening-version-5.pptx (475 downloads)  and then we are doing parallel workshops. You will find Phil’s slides on his site, but mine are here on Streamlining assessment   streamlined-assesment-Blanchardstown-w.pptx (446 downloads)  and Designing and Managing Authentic Assessment tasks   Authentic-assesment-Blanchardstown.pptx (478 downloads) .It’s great to be working alongside Phil in this my 67th birthday week!

Today I’m delighted to be co-briefing the new cohort of National Teaching Fellows at the Merchant Taylor’s hall in London with Alison Robinson-Canham of the HEA. As chair of the Association of NTFs I will be discussing with the new 55 Award winners how best to engage with the rest of this exciting community and then joining them for their celebratory dinner with Deputy Chair Pratap Rughani. Congratulations to all and also to the finalists for the CATE awards who will also learn their fates tonight!

And tomorrow I continue working with Erica Morris and Margaret Price as we continue to develop materials for the Anglia Assessment Album for Anglia Ruskin University: link here: http://www.lta.anglia.ac.uk/practice.php/LTA-Practice-Assessment-and-Feedback-Anglia-Assessment-Album-32/

On Friday 20th January, I will be working at Lincoln University, helping colleagues with their HEA applications: my main workshop resources will be the grid grid-2015-11-1-2.docx (525 downloads)  and my slides:  UKPSF-recognition-slides-2015-w.pptx (702 downloads)

My aim is to help  staff in the Business School at all levels to prepare applications to become Associate Fellows, Fellows, Senior Fellows and Principal Fellows of the Higher Education Academy, including staff who teach face-to-face and at a distance. It will be really nice to be back in Lincoln again after  a gap of several years. 

On Thursday 19 January I am meeting with Association of National Teaching Fellows colleagues to help to plan our symposium, open to NTFS colleagues and friends, on Teaching Excellence: Building Bridges, which takes place on Wednesday 10th May at Leeds Beckett University in the Rosebowl building. It serves to help our community foster excellence beyond ANTF membership. This event will enable NTFs both to showcase the excellent practice that helped us gain our awards in the first place, and to give our non-NTF colleagues opportunities to present alongside us to build evidence of their own innovative practice which could be helpful for future NTF applications.  The day will provide participatory workshops, as well as NTF-led keynotes and panels as well as a session for aspiring NTFs, helping colleagues to think through how best to make their own cases for recognition.

We will be calling for submissions for this event in March within three strands:

• Engaging students in building excellent practice in universities;
• Developing creative excellence within and beyond the classroom;
• Energising excellence in employability and skills development.

The delegate rate for this event to include coffee, tea and buffet lunch is again £80.

Please book for the May event Teaching Excellence: Building Bridges here

ANTF Symposium: Teaching Excellence – Building Bridges – https://my.heacademy.ac.uk/events/book-event/?eventid=8f3d42b7-e999-e611-b1f7-00505689cc9e

As part of a suite of workshops for Edinburgh University, I am on Thursday 18th January working with colleagues in Art and Design at the Edinburgh College of Art, specifically looking at how to improve student satisfaction in relation to assessment and feedback in art and design, which is notoriously one of the most complex subject areas of evaluation. My slides are here:  Edinburgh-NSS-and-assessmentJan-2017-AD-w.pptx (473 downloads)
As a means of asking colleagues to think about criteria and assessment issues generally, I will be using the Biscuit game  (attached: Biscuit-game.docx (576 downloads) ) which I developed for Anglia Ruskin University’s ‘Anglia  Assessment Album’, a great open resource.
It was lovely having a holiday but I am really enjoying getting back into work!