Sally Brown

Today, as the penultimate working session for my academic year, I have been contributing to a session at Edge Hill University as part of the annual Solstice Conference and sessions of CPD and staff development, with guest inputs from Kay Sambell, Phil Race and Peter Hartley. Our topic was using a crystal ball to look into the future: “What’s going on with HE assessment and feedback right now?”.  The slides we used are here. Solstice-1-July-2022pm.pptx (4564 downloads) I identified 12 issues I’ve been seeing, particularly in my work with Kay over the last two years in our global virtual sessions, which have included working in Chile, Ireland, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Australia and Italy as well as in 20+ HEIs in the UK. Our thinking was substantially expanded last week at the excellent Assessment in Higher Education Conference in Manchester https://ahenetwork.org/  If you’ve never been to @aheconference, do have a look at the tweets #aheconference2022 and consider coming along to next year’s event in June.

We did our first face-to-face event on Wednesday at Huddersfield University contributing to their annual T&L conference and it was great to interact with people in a live context again. They have some fabulous new buildings since I last went there.

Next week on 5^th July, Phil and I are hosting an afternoon tea for National Teaching Fellows attending the AdvanceHE conference and some other local HE practitioners: contact me if you are local and want to see if we have a spare place so you can join us.

Meanwhile, Kay and I are already getting busy with plans for our virtual workshops: it looks as if our hot topics are likely to be assessing students in groups, designing and managing feedback so as to contribute to self-efficacy and make the process integral to learning and actively designing assessment for learning from the outset.

I hope this summer will be productive and fun: but also with plenty of time to regroup, take a breath and appreciate what we have to enjoy.

Happy New Year (although it’s another weird way beginning, what with Omicron and politics and Environmental anxieties and all! Although as I write some of the over-privileged and self-entitled of this world seem to be getting their come-uppance which seems like a good thing to me!)

I am delighted to start the new year on a positive note: Sarah Allsop from Health Sciences at Bristol university asked me to contribute to her website called the Grateful Academic, which is all about how sharing positivity and gratitude can support successful working in academia and higher education. https://www.thegratefulacademic.com/post/guest-blog-gratefully-giving-forward-by-sally-brown  I thoroughly recommend​ having a look at it and gaining some joy from the approach adopted, which aligns strongly with mine.

When she asked me to do a guest blog for the site, I was only too happy to oblige! You should get this in the link above, or you can download it directly here. The-grateful-academic-w.docx (1304 downloads)

I’m hoping that 2022 includes many more opportunities like this for us all to focus on the best bits of academia rather than the challenges and drudgery.

It’s been another tough year in the world of teaching and learning in higher education, so to cheer myself and others up, in the spirit of appreciative enquiry, I have compiled this collection of some of the positive benefits of teaching and assessment in higher education that have accrued as we’ve had to pivot fast into new ways of working.

I’m tremendously grateful to all the contributors and also to Kate Cuthbert of Nottingham Trent University who prompted me to do this as my contribution to their annual seasonal advent calendar. Pithy-positive-post-pandemic-pivot-w1.docx (1371 downloads)

To those who celebrate it, a very Happy Christmas, and a peaceful, positive, enjoyable and compassionate New Year to everyone.

It continues to be a lovely Autumn in North Tyneside, which cheers me up as it defers the worst of the winter weather! And it also cheers me up that we can here present a fourth compendium of great authentic assessment ideas in a special Hong Kong Edition from colleagues at the Education University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Baptist University at HKSAR, with whom Kay Sambell and I have been working this year (see the picture of a screenshot from our latest webinar with them in August). The diverse disciplines represented here include Language Studies, English, Education, Multiculturalism,  Finance, Chinese Medicine, Multimedia Journalism, Music, Forensic analytical chemistry, Medical Ethics and Visual Arts practice. It’s exciting to see how our ideas are translated into practice and used globally: we are really grateful to Professor Siu Cheung Kong of the Education University of Hong Kong and Dr Theresa FN Kwong of the Hong Kong Baptist University for helping us create this original and very useful set of resources. HK-Compendium-4-FINAL.docx (3687 downloads)

As the Autumn leaves fall in the UK and the nights are drawing in, universities are continuing to think about how to make assessment more authentic to engage students and make the process all about learning, building on the innovative approaches developed during Covid closures.  In our most recent guest post, Kay and I are delighted to welcome a thoughtful piece from Wendy Garnham of Sussex University in which she writes about how she and a colleague Heather Taylor are moving away from simply setting an essay and leaving students to produce it, towards their more innovative approach to essay writing that actively fosters their students’ information retrieval and reflection skills as well as deconstructing the tasks into manageable objects. Thanks Wendy and Heather for enabling us to showcase this approach.

Recently Kay Sambell I participated in a marvellous online conference run by Chris Headleand of Lincoln University on Practical Pedagogy https://chrisheadleand.com/practical-pedagogy/

I went to a session run by Gaby Tobin and Laura West-Burnham of Cardiff Metropolitan University who were talking about how, in times of Covid, there has had to be flexibility in managing changing assessment needs while still assuring quality. Kay Sambell and I were so impressed by their thinking that we asked them to write a guest post for our Covid collection which you can read here entitled “Here be dragons: The challenges of balancing quality assurance and pedagogy”. Sincere thanks to Gaby and Laura for sharing their ideas here: Balancing-quality-assurance-and-pedagogy-w.docx (1699 downloads)

NTF Dr Chris Headleand of Lincoln University rocks! Congratulations to him for organising the terrific Practical Pedagogy conference attended by hundreds of people and engaging so many of us in engaging conversations. I learned loads in the day, not least from the many contributors who helped me create my crowdsourced keynote including Mark Glynn, Theo Gilbert, Mick Healey, Ruth Healey, Phil Race, Becky Sellars, Ale Armellini, Kay Sambell, Nick Freestone, Suzanne Fergus, Peter Hartley, Mark Childs, Sue Beckingham: the basic slides I used are here: practical-pedagogy-SB-keynote-w.pptx (922 downloads)   The recordings of the whole conference will be available in due course from Dr Chris Headleand.

Next stop, the PGCE Research conference at Sunderland on Thursday where I am presenting with Prof Kay Sambell!