Sally Brown

In slightly snowy Dublin today, for the International Conference on Engaging Pedagogy, at the National College of Ireland. Here are my slides ICEP Dublin 16th December (665 downloads)

Had an excellent meeting of the NTFS Assimilate Masters level assessment project steering group last Friday. We are getting some very interesting data from  our Q sort analysis undertaken by Tim Deignan. We will be presenting outcomes at the SEDA conference  on 17th May 2012 at Chester. For people interested in presenting a paper at our own end of project conference  in Leeds in September, here’s the conference proposal form: Workshop Proposal form (588 downloads) . Phil and I are looking forward to speaking at the International Conference on Engaging Pedagogy, at the National College of Ireland in Dublin, on the 16th December.

I’m looking forward to going to the SEDA conference in Birmingham to learn more about Technology Enhanced learning and to meet with colleagues and friends. For the next couple of weeks I’ll be working on my NTFS project on Masters Level learning  Assimilate (http://assimilate.teams.leedsmet.ac.uk/).

After a positive and purposeful day’s work with colleagues on Thursday at Liverpool John Moores University, I had a gruesome journey home involving train cancellations, a fire at Manchester Piccadilly station, chaos and poor customer services, but at least I got home just before midnight. Here are the slides we used.   Liverpool Thursday (1321 downloads)

I am currently working with a Faculty at Liverpool John Moores University, helping colleagues prepare their learning, teaching and assessment priorities  for the year to align with the universities’ draft strategic plan. Here are the slides I used, Liverpool workshops (676 downloads) together with some useful references from the literature on managing change in universities. Here are some  useful quotes (reference details are in the slides0.

George Lueddeke says “Too often new approaches are introduced by executive fiat or though a centralist management strategy, or, at worst through ad hoc and hurried planning interventions in response to years of benign neglect. It seems a rarity indeed for academics to genuinely feel that they are part of a meaningful, participatory decision-making process that values their experience or even their instinct for seeing potential pitfalls.”

Lee Harvey adds “Little progress is likely within the current external quality monitoring regime unless there is a radical shift to an integrated process of trust that prioritises improvement of learning” (Harvey, 2005, p.274).

And Geoff Scott proposes: “A fundamental factor in reshaping culture is how well the senior management consistently model good practice” (Scott, 2004, p.5).

I’ve had an excellent morning with around 140 Scottish teachers and educationalists at the EIS/Aberdeen University Partnership event today at Aberdeen University. It was inspiring to see how many enthusiastic people turned out on a Saturday morning to talk about assessment. Here are the slides I used, in PowerPoint 2007 in a zipped folder EIS Aberdeen (727 downloads) .

I am progressively populating my website with new material and would welcome any comments on it: let me know what you think. For the moment please use my old email s.brown@leedsmet.ac.uk, but I will in due course be moving to using the one on the right hand side of each page on this site.

This is  my new website, which I am currently building, and on it you will be able to find out about what I do, what I enjoy and where I am at the moment.

This week I’m largely based at home in Newcastle, but I’ve been in London at the Institute for Education on Tuesday 1st November on an excellent Masters Level teaching and assessment event, which will support the work of my NTFS Masters Level Assessment Project (see elsewhere on this site).

You can already see some of the content of the site, using the links at the right hand side of each page.

On Friday 4th November I will be doing a workshop on Masters Level Assessment for Aberdeen University, prior to giving the keynote at the EIS/University of Aberdeen partnership CPD event at Aberdeen University on the morning of Saturday 5th November.

Next week I’ll be in Leeds and Liverpool. I’m looking forward to meeting friends and colleagues at the SEDA Conference in Birmingham on the 17th/18th November.