Sally Brown

This week Phil and I are at the European First Year Experience Conference in Cork. My session was on improving the first year experience by designing and using effective assessment: the slides are here.  eyfe2019-18-June-Sally-w.pptx (530 downloads)
What a marvellously inclusive and energising conference it is. All credit to Marese Bermingham and her team for excellent work putting together such an amazing large international conference.

This week Phil and I, having celebrated his 75th birthday in style, are travelling to Lincoln for one of his final gigs: we are working for the Business School for Debbie Lock on an interactive and creative day with the team there, thinking about making teaching, and in my case, small group work, more engaging. My slides are here: Lincoln-small-groups-12-June-w.pptx (559 downloads)

After which, Phil is retiring from solo work other than by very rarely accepted invitation. He has a lovely new iPod to occupy his leisure. Let’s see how that goes!

Phil and I are looking forward to working with internal and external delegates at Edge Hill University on 5th-6th June at their fab campus at Ormskirk, meeting up with lots of old friends and colleagues and having a productive learning experience as always. It looks like being a super special event this year.
I’m looking forward to running this invited session on ‘Creating a Professional Identity’: slides are here. Edge-Hill-Prof-Identities-w.pptx (531 downloads)

June and July are going  to be extra busy for us after a relatively quiet six weeks: coming up we have:

• presentations at Lincoln University (11th June, Phil’s 75th birthday!) ,
• a PhD by Publications weekend at our house,
• a much anticipated trip to Cork IT, for the European First Year Experience Conference, 17th-19th June,
• the Assessment in Higher Education Conference in Manchester, 26th-27th June ,
• then Sue Smith’s Professorial Inaugural Lecture at Leeds Beckett on 27th June,
• then off to Segovia for the Spanish Formative Assessment Network Conference, 1st-3rd July,
• then back for a Writing for Publication Residential at York for Leeds Beckett 4th-5th July ,
• then Royal Agricultural University 11th-12 July. 

After that we will deserve some holiday! Lots of resources will be available from these sessions posted week by week which I hope will be useful: all are open educational resources for free sharing.

Wednesday 22 May takes me Edinburgh Napier University to work with Prof Kay Sambell on a project co-producing resources with Nursing students, and a workshop on thinking  and planning ahead to Professorships in Learning and Teaching, the slides for which are here: Napier-professorships-22-May-w.pptx (2283 downloads)

Then it’s off to Brighton where Phil is working (but no work for me, I’ll just be keeping him company and doing some planting out in my son’s seafront garden, better take my cheque book!)

Today I’m working alongside NTF Colin Bryson at Newcastle University helping colleagues think about starting to get published in learning and teaching. We will run the event as a conversazione in which we both talk about our experiences, including pitfalls and disasters, in the hope of guiding the next generation to avoid them. No slides for this session! We are going with a semi-structured script from which we will no doubt divert in response to questions from the audience!

Spring has sprung up so it’s time to go to Cirencester again, and get out in the countryside to work with the Royal Agricultural University on inspiring teaching, and curriculum design leadership: the slides are here.  Inspirational-teaching-RAU-w.pptx (545 downloads)   RAU-Academic-leadership-ww.pptx (526 downloads) and the Word version of the colourful diagram of UKPSF: UKPSF-grid-latest-March-2019.docx (613 downloads)

Actually I personally feel very inspired after last week’s successful NTF symposium in Birmingham. There were around 90 of us, and lots of creative ideas on how to enhance student learning flying around, eminently nickable!

Months of work by the National Teaching Fellows Committee are culminating this week with our NTF/CATE Symposium 28-29th March at Birmingham City University. I’m delighted with the quality of inputs to the programme, which provides a showcase for two separate strands alongside the workshops.

Firstly Pauline Kneale, Ruth Pilkington and Jenny Winter are leading a whole day strand on day 1 on Evaluating teaching Impact, based on their HE-funded research, and secondly the flourishing Professors in Preparation scheme led by NTFs Julie Hulme, Liz Mossop, Peter Draper and me, with Debbie Locke will be helping colleagues think about how to prepare for  applications for professorship​s in learning and teaching, as part of the burgeoning Professors in Preparation (PiP) network. The PiP mentoring scheme will be launched at the symposium, and Liz and I will be leading a session on Using and Developing Mentoring Skills; the slides are here:  SlidNTF-Pip-w.pptx (517 downloads)

The last session of the symposium enabled me, Kay Sambell of​ Napier University and Linda Graham of Sunderland University to celebrate frivolity, food, fun as well as furthering the causes we believe in by Subverting the System by Enjoying Ourselves. (see photo!) There were slides, but honestly you had to be there to gain the full experience! But we are likely to publish an output from the session subsequently, because we are developing and expanding our ideas about how people can survive the vagaries of cash-strapped higher education by helping out one another through academic altruism.

The AGM for the Association of National Teaching Fellows is at 12.30 on Friday 29th in room SCT209 of the Mary Seacole Building at Birmingham City University’s Edgbaston campus and all NTFs, whether attending the symposium or not, are warmly invited to participate.

This week I am again supporting open and one-to-one work at Queen Mary University London and the slides I will be using are here:  UKPSF-recognition-slides-w4-with-new-grid-slide-March-2019.pptx (479 downloads) .
I am also using the colourful diagram Phil and I developed UKPSF-grid-latest-March-2019.docx (613 downloads) as well as a link to the really useful AdvanceHE tool that helps people work out which category of Fellowship they should be aiming for, a paper version of which Phil developed for general use  Fellowship-tool-quiz.docx (601 downloads) .

It’s a real privilege to work with colleagues who are producing reflective accounts of their professional practice, and in so doing, learning a great deal myself about current innovative practice.

I’m flying this week to Dublin to work with colleagues from  the Institutes of Technology in Ireland thinking about accreditation of those who teach and support learning in Higher Education. They are interested in exploring diverse options including establishing their own Irish approach, and I am going to help facilitate their discussions using  Phil’s and my colourful diagram (downloadable here as a Word document: ukpsf-details-on-one-sheet-w.docx (627 downloads) ), the HEA Fellowship Category Tool  designed to help colleagues  select the category of Fellowship that most  closely matches their  current practice, (see https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/form/fellowship-decision-tool?utm_campaign=Fellowship%20-%20FCT&utm_medium=web&utm_source=HEA ) and these slides:  Dublin-ATLAS-14March-2019-w.pptx (434 downloads)

I’m looking forward to meeting up with Saranne Magennis, a longstanding friend from NUI Maynooth, while i am there.

For the rest of the week I will be mainly working on final arrangements for the National Teaching Fellows/ CATE awards Symposium, run in conjunction with AdvanceHE, still bookable via the AdvanceHE website   https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/node/813​​. Any CATE award winners or NTFs not attending the Symposium, but wanting to join us for dinner at the Edgbaston Cricket Club on Thursday 28th March should contact me directly to ask about available dinner-only tickets. It looks like being a great event!